|^(rU080pfrkaI Classics im (Smgli&jr ^tntom 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS 
 
 HOBBES 
 
 *S* OF THR 
 
 'university: 
 

 The Volumes published of this Series contain 
 
 1. DESCARTES, 
 
 2. BUTLER, . 
 
 3. BERKELEY, 
 
 4. FICHTE, 
 
 5. KANT, 
 
 6. HAMILTON, 
 
 7. HEGEL, . 
 
 8. LEIBNIZ, . 
 
 9. VICO, 
 
 10. HOBBES, . 
 
 By Professor Mahaffy, Dublin. 
 
 By the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A. 
 
 . By Professor Frasee, Edinburgh. 
 
 Adamson, Owens College, Manchester. 
 
 By Professor Wallace, Oxford. 
 
 By Professor Veitch, Glasgow. 
 
 . By Professor Edward Caird, Glasgow. 
 
 By John Theodore Merz. 
 
 By Professor Flint, Edinburgh. 
 
 By Professor Croom Robertson, London. 
 
 In preparation 
 
 HUME, By the Editor. 
 
 BACON, By Professor Nichol, Glasgow. 
 
 SPINOZA, . . By the Very Rev. Principal Caird, Glasgow. 
 
'<S* 0" THR ^ 
 
 TJNIV3HSITY' 
 
HOBBES. 
 
w 
 
 \AT 
 
 H B B E S 
 
 GEOEGE CEOOM EOBEETSON 
 
 QROTE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC IN 
 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE. LONDON 
 
 'Ay* O" THB 
 
 ivehsity; 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 MDCCCLXXXVI 
 
-Rt 
 
 
 &c 6 U& 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Small as this volume is, untoward circumstances have 
 prevented its completion till long after the first third of 
 it was already in print. The delay is only too likely 
 to have affected the unity of treatment; still, the 
 original design has been adhered to in the main. That 
 design was, even within such narrow compass, (1) to 
 bring together all the previously known or now dis- 
 coverable facts of Ilobbes's life ; and (2) to give some 
 kind of fairly balanced representation of the whole 
 range of his thought, instead of dwelling only upon 
 those humanistic portions of it by which he has 
 commonly been judged. /Readers will not proceed far 
 before they apprehend the reason why the account 
 of the " System " has here been imbedded in the 
 "Life," in departure from the usual order of ex-^A 
 position in books of the kind. More than of almost 
 any other philosopher, it can be said of Hobbes that 
 the key to a right understanding of his thought is 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 to be found in his personal circumstances and the 
 events of his time.y- 
 
 I desire to offer most grateful thanks to His Grace 
 the Duke of Devonshire, not only for permitting me 
 to have free access to the Hobbes MSS. at Hardwick, 
 but also for his signal generosity in intrusting the more 
 important of them to me in London, when it was found 
 that they could not be conveniently studied on the spot. 
 This favour was first granted, a long time back, at the 
 instance of the late Mr Grote; but lately it has been 
 renewed, as regards the most valuable of the MSS. (the 
 copy of ' The Elements of Law, Natural and Politique,' 
 with Hobbes's autographic dedication and corrections), 
 upon the expression of a simple request. I have been 
 thus enabled to discover not a few facts of importance 
 concerning one whose connection with three generations 
 of the Cavendish family reflected equal credit upon it 
 and upon him. 
 
 My thanks are due also to the Council of the Royal 
 Society moved by my friend Mr Francis Galton for 
 so readily allowing one of the two portraits of Hobbes 
 in possession of the Society to be photographed for the 
 frontispiece of the volume. Though the history of this 
 portrait appears not to be traceable, it unmistakably 
 represents the man whose name it bears, and at an 
 age much earlier than any of the other portraits (all 
 good) that have previously been reproduced. Unfor- 
 tunately, the painting has become very dark, and the 
 necessary distinctness has not been obtained in the 
 
Preface. vii 
 
 photograph without some sacrifice of the shades marked 
 in the original. The result is nevertheless very credit- 
 able and of exceeding interest. 
 
 A few narrative sentences chiefly in chap, vii., and 
 making about a page or two altogether do not differ 
 materially, when at all, from some that stand in the 
 article on Hobbes contributed by me to the last edition 
 of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica' in 1880. There 
 seemed no advantage in seeking to give them a dif- 
 ferent turn, when precisely the same meaning had to 
 be conveyed, in their case at no greater length ; 
 and I have to thank the publishers of the 'Encyclo- 
 paedia' for according the use of them. (Perhaps I 
 may be permitted here to note that, in the 'Encyclo- 
 paedia' article, Hampden's trial for ship-money is 
 erroneously set down as begun in February, instead 
 of November; and for the footnote on Bishop Laney 
 at p. 36a I would now substitute what stands at 
 bottom of p. 202 below.) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 YOUTH OXFORD (1588-1608), . 
 
 1 
 
 II. 
 
 THE SCHOLAR (1608-28), . . . . 
 
 11 
 
 III. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER (1628-37), . 
 
 26 
 
 IV. 
 
 PHILOSOPHIC PLANS (1637), 
 
 40 
 
 V. 
 
 THE REVOLUTION (1637-51), .... 
 
 48 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE SYSTEM, 
 
 74 
 
 VII. 
 
 CONFLICT (1651-78), 
 
 160 
 
 VIII. 
 
 LAST YEARS (1658-79), ..... 
 
 186 
 
 IX. 
 
 ANTI-HOBBES, . . . . 
 
 207 
 
 X. 
 
 INFLUENCE, 
 
 223 
 
 
 INDEX, 
 
 237 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 HOBBES, 
 
 CHAPTEK t 
 
 YOUTH OXFORD (1588-1608). 
 
 Three names of English thinkers stand out before all 
 others in the seventeenth century Bacon, Hobbes, and 
 Locke. Bacon died in 1626; Locke did not come for- 
 ward with his 'Essay' till 1690. Nearly the whole 
 interval is spanned by the activity of Hobbes. Ap- 
 proaching his fortieth year when Bacon died, he was 
 then just embarking on his philosophical career. He 
 was still at work more than fifty years later, and his 
 writings had not all appeared (after his death in 1679) 
 till 1688. Nor did he cease to exercise men's thoughts 
 long after Locke had given them a new direction. 
 
 In the spring of 1588 the Spanish Armada stood 
 ready in port to set sail, and the air in England was 
 thick with the rumours of coming ilk What panic 
 there was even in quiet rural nooks, may be judged 
 
 p. x. A 
 
2 Hdbbes. 
 
 from the fact recorded that the vicar's wife at West- 
 port, adjoining (now forming part of) Malmesbury, in 
 North Wilts, gave premature birth, in sheer fright, to 
 her second son, Thomas, on Good Friday the 5 th of 
 ApriL She brought forth himself and a twin brother 
 Fear, he said long afterwards, when he chose to fancy 
 that to this accident of his birth might be traced his 
 hatred of his country's foes, his passion for peace and 
 social calm^J 
 
 Nothing more is known of his mother, except that 
 she came of a race of yeomen. Her husband, Thomas 
 Hobbes, vicar of Charlton and Westport, had a charac- 
 ter and a fate that are best told in the words of Aubrey. 
 "The father was one of the ignorant Sir Johns of 
 Queen Elizabeth's time ; could only read the prayers of 
 the Church and the homilies, and valued not learning, 
 not knowing the sweetness of it. He was a choleric 
 man ; and a parson (who, I think, succeeded him at 
 Westport) provoked him on purpose at the church-door. 
 
 1 ' Vita carmine expressa,' Ixxxvi. There are three original accounts 
 of Hobbes's life, first published together in 1681, two years after his 
 death, by R. B. (Richard Blackbourne, M.D., a friend of Hobbes's 
 admirer, John Aubrey not, as sometimes supposed, Ralph Bath- 
 urst), with Cowley's Ode and complimentary verses by Aubrey and 
 Bathurst, all reprinted in the Introduction to vol. i. of Molesworth's 
 collection of the 'Opera Latina': (1) 'T. H. Malmesb. Vita' (pp. 
 xiii-xxi), written in Latin by Hobbes himself, or (as also reported) 
 by T. Rymer, at his dictation; (2) ' Vitae Hobbianse Auctarium' (pp. 
 xxii-lxxx), including lists of Hobbes's friends, works, opponents, 
 &c, written in Latin by Blackbourne on the basis of Aubrey's Eng- 
 lish notes ; (3) ' T. H. Malmesb. Vita carmine expressa ' (pp. Ixxxi- 
 xcix), written in elegiac couplets by Hobbes at the age of eighty-four 
 (first published by itself in 1679-80). The 'Life of Mr T. H. of 
 Malmesburie,' printed in 'Letters, &c, and Lives of Eminent Men,' 
 in 1813, from Aubrey's papers in the Bodleian Library and Ashmo- 
 lean Museum (ii. 593-637), gives interesting particulars not found in 
 
Kindred. 3 
 
 So Vicar Hobbes stroke him, and was forced to fly 
 for it; and in obscurity, beyond London, died." 1 It is 
 not said when the catastrophe befell ; but the fugitive's 
 children, two boys and a girl, found a second father 
 in his brother, a flourishing glover in Malmesbury, and 
 alderman there. The elder boy, Edmund by name, not 
 unlike his brother in face, and almost as long-lived, 
 but in intellect " only a good plain understanding coun- 
 tryman," was bred up to the glove-trade. A son of 
 his, also resembling the philosopher " about the eye," 
 and by him very kindly treated, drank and was "an 
 ill husband" : he died shortly after his father in 1670, 
 leaving five children, all remembered in their grand- 
 uncle's will, money being left to bind them apprentices, 
 and the like. 2 It was a plain English stock (as the 
 name Hobbes, Hobbs, or Hobs, implies), that now 
 chanced to throw off among its obscure scions one who 
 was destined to leave a broad mark in the history of the 
 English mind. 
 
 the 'Auctarium,' while many supplementary references to his hero 
 are found scattered through the other ' Lives.' Still others are to be 
 found in Aubrey's 'Topographical Collections' ('Wiltshire,' Ed. 
 Jackson, 1862 ; containing a sketch " of the humble cottage in which 
 Hobbes was born, . . . taken down some years ago"). 
 
 1 have also, by the kindness of the Duke of Devonshire, been per- 
 mitted to consult at leisure all the papers belonging to Hobbes that 
 still remain at Hardwick Hall, where he died : these, as mentioned 
 from time to time below, have yielded new facts of importance, and 
 have cleared up several obscure points. Other extraneous sources of 
 information will be referred to by the way. 
 
 Hobbes's Works have been made accessible by Sir W. Molesworth's 
 collected edition in 16 vols. (1839-45): 'English Works,' 11 vols. 
 (the last, Index and Plates) ; ' Opera Latina ' (with Index), 5 vols. 
 These will be cited respectively as E. and L. 
 
 i Topog. Coll,' p. 264 n. 
 
 2 'Life of Mr T. H.,' passim. 
 
4 Hobbes. 
 
 Though hastily ushered into the world, the child does 
 not seem to have suffered in constitution. At the age 
 of four he was put to school at Westport Church. 
 At six, he says, he was learning Latin and Greek. 
 Advanced to the Malmesbury school at eight, he was 
 taught again, later on, at Westport, in a private school 
 kept by a young man, Eobert Latimer, fresh from the 
 university and " a good Grecian " " the first," says Au- 
 brey, " that came into our parts since the Eeformation." 
 Latimer " delighted in his scholar T. H.'s company, and 
 used to instruct him, and two or three ingeniose youths 
 more, in the evening till nine o'clock." The boy made 
 ! such progress that he was able to translate the ' Medea ' 
 I of Euripides into Latin iambics before he was fourteen. 
 Though he was playful enough, there was remarked in 
 him a strong contemplative habit : "he would get him 
 into a corner, and learn his lesson by heart presently." 
 "His hair was black, and the boys, his schoolfellows, 
 were wont to call him ' Crow.'" 1 
 
 About the age of fifteen, apparently in January or 
 February 160|, he passed to Oxford, at his uncle's 
 charges, and was entered at Magdalen Hall. There he 
 remained, for whatever reason, five years, instead of the 
 four then prescribed, before taking the degree of bachelor. 
 They were years of much disorder and excitement, as 
 we gather from Wood's 'Annals,' and the impression 
 they left on him appeared long afterwards in his vehe- 
 ment denunciations of the academic system. Sixty 
 years later he remembered Oxford as a place where the 
 young " were debauched to drunkenness, wantonness, 
 gaming, and other vices," so that he could almost for- 
 i 'Life,' pp. 599, 600. 
 
Ecclesiastical Strife at Oxford. 5 
 
 give the Commission of 1648 its Puritan and Parliamen- 
 tary origin for the good work it did in purging the 
 spot. 1 The universities generally seemed to him mere 
 hotbeds of political sedition, instituted by Rome in, 
 the Middle Ages to support Papal encroachment on the 
 civil power, and still preserving, in whatever changed 
 conditions of modern national life, their old ecclesiastical 
 spirit. Some of the incidents and circumstances recorded 
 by Wood (in one place or another 2 ) are worthy of note, 
 in default of more direct information concerning Hobbes's 
 student- years. 
 
 An ecclesiastical conflict, growing ever more and more 
 political, kept Oxford excited during all those years. 
 In 1604 (the year of the Millenary Petition and Hamp- 
 ton Court Conference), the Reforming or Puritan party 
 in the university is noted as having been particularly 
 active, " multiplying preachings " on whatever occasion, 
 and generally making itself felt in ways perhaps little 
 to the taste of the undergraduate mind. In 1605, after 
 the attempt of Guy Fawkes, Puritan and anti-Puritan 
 could join for a little to persecute the Papists; but, 
 only next year, a shock was sent through the Puritan 
 section by the public sermons of an active bachelor of 
 divinity, "William Laud by name, savouring of Popish 
 doctrine ; and the scandal was renewed in 1608, when 
 Hobbes was leaving. One year after his departure, " a 
 young forward bachelor" was brought to his knees for 
 daring to maintain " that it was lawful for a subject, 
 in cause of religion, to forsake his prince, and take up 
 
 i E., vi. 347. 
 
 2 ' Hist, and Antiqq. Oxf.' (Gutch), including ' Annals ' ; also 
 'Athenae Ox.' (Bliss). 
 
6 Hobbes. 
 
 arms against him" a thesis hitherto familiar only to 
 Papists (in opposition), but now beginning to find expres- 
 sion among Puritans also, and fated to be carried far 
 in the coming years. More than elsewhere, at Magda- 
 len Hall Hobbes might thus early be led to mark the 
 rising Puritan spirit. The house had grown up, first 
 as a grammar-school, then as a dependent hall, under the 
 shadow of the great foundation of Magdalen College, 
 which its old Puritan president, Dr Humphrey, had 
 " stocked with such a generation of Nonconformists 
 as could not be rooted out for many years after his 
 decease " (in 1589). Constituted as a separate hall, 
 with Dr John Hussee as principal, in the year before 
 Hobbes's entry, it received from the college during his 
 stay a second head in Dr John Wilkinson, of whom 
 it is recorded that he ruled strongly in the interests of 
 the Puritan party in the university, and had under 
 him (some years later) as many as three hundred in- 
 mates of the hall, among them more than forty masters 
 of arts, "all mostly inclining to Calvinism." Conditions 
 like these cannot have been without effect on the des- 
 tined foe of the Puritan Eevolution. 
 
 In the matter of discipline, the ' Annals ' bear out 
 Hobbes's recollection to the fulL At a time when older 
 men were contending for the introduction of new habits 
 of rigour into the Church, the greatest licence prevailed 
 among the students. Years before Hobbes's time, chan- 
 cellors on their advent, and often besides, had been 
 fulminating reproofs; but any improvement that ever 
 followed never lasted long. In 1606 the evil was at 
 a height. The previous year had been marked by a 
 royal visit, when the new king from Scotland was saluted 
 
Decay of Discipline and Studies. 7 
 
 at Christchurch " with great acclamations and shoutings 
 of the scholars" (in number now about 2254), "besides 
 laics innumerable," and for some days Oxford was given 
 up to ceremonial and feasting. The Court went its way, 
 and the students were left the worse for its example. 
 In an official lament, the authorities bewailed the days 
 of decency and order gone, when sack used to be taken 
 as cordial only, and sold by apothecaries : now nothing 
 was more common than smoking and " that damned sin 
 drunkenness." Strict rules were framed and penalties 
 imposed, but with little effect. , Hobbes lived at the 
 university in a period of disorder to the end. The year 
 1607 was noted for its excesses; and once more, in 
 1608, a new chancellor had to open with words of 
 solemn rebuke. 
 
 As might be expected, there was, according to the 
 1 Annals,' as little order in the studies as in the general 
 discipline of the university. Chancellor's orders and 
 reproofs, sent down in quick succession in those years, 
 have, besides the moral laxity, for their never-failing 
 burden the neglect of the academic exercises. In 1601 
 the disputations called Parvisii or Generals, for under- 
 graduates proceeding bachelors, had to be revived, the 
 " glorious exercise " having fallen into a bad way since 
 if last had been quickened into life. Within five years 
 it could again be described as " either quite collapsed 
 or neglected," and there was need of an express order 
 that no one should be allowed to proceed bachelor till 
 he could swear he had performed that exercise. Yet, 
 only two years later, it was in no better case than before. 
 When the commonest routine of the old scholastic system 
 could not be maintained for two years together, we may 
 
8 Holies. 
 
 judge what power was left in Oxford at that time to 
 train a clear and sharp intellect like Hobbes's. 
 
 Aubrey 1 speaks of him as rising early on summer 
 mornings to snare jackdaws, and otherwise says : " He 
 did not care much for logic, yet he learnt it, and thought 
 himself a good disputant; he took great delight there 
 to go to the bookbinders' and stationers' shops, and lie 
 gaping on maps." With more circumstance, his own 
 quaint verses in old age 2 tell how, on entering the hall, 
 he was placed in the lowest class of logic, and followed 
 with attention the beardless praelector gravely expounding 
 Barlara Celarent Slowly he took in this doctrine of 
 moods and figures, and then he threw it aside, being 
 allowed or, we may suppose, being determined to 
 prove things in a way of his own. Advanced to physics, 
 he next learnt from the master that all things were 
 made up of matter and form as parts, that species of 
 things floating through the air conveyed forms to the 
 eye and sounds to the ear, that effects in nature were 
 due to sympathy and antipathy with much else of the 
 like sort all beyond his grasp. Wherefore he turned 
 to things more congenial, took up his old books again, 
 fed his mind on maps and charts of earth and sky, 
 tracked the sun in his path, followed Drake and Caven- 
 dish as they girdled the main, and gazed with delight 
 upon pictured haunts of men and wonders of unknown 
 lands. 
 
 All which may be taken to mean that he was idle 
 as a student, and had a stronger interest in men and 
 things than in the modicum of scholastic doctrine doled 
 
 i 'Life,' p. 600. 
 
 2 ' Vit. carm. exp.' (L., i. p. Ixxxvi). 
 
Philosophical Unconcern. 9 
 
 out by his teachers. It does not mean, as might be 
 supposed, that he had already an insight into the 
 weakness of the School-philosophy. When, long after-, 
 wards, he is vehemently denouncing Scholasticism, and 
 helping to complete its overthrow, he shows little real 
 acquaintance with the object of his scorn ; l and least 
 of all is there reason to think of him as turning away 
 from the traditional doctrine with a conscious purpose 
 now. There is no sign that, like Descartes about the 
 same age, he was weighed down with the burden of 
 thought. Oxford gave him no preparation for the work 
 of his life, but neither does he seem to have passed out 
 from under the academic system with anything of that 
 high dissatisfaction which other leaders of thought in 
 the coming time were then carrying with them into 
 the world. It is therefore unnecessary to dwell longer 
 upon this first stage of his experience. As far as can 
 now be made out, it may be doubted whether, as an 
 undergraduate, he would be introduced at all to the 
 study (in scholastic paraphrase) of the Aristotelian phy- 
 sics and metaphysics, and whether he was not refer- 
 ring back to these early days the impressions of a much 
 later time j but the point is of no importance. He was 
 neither lost to Scholasticism nor gained to anything else 
 at the university. It was upon the broader field of 
 
 1 He occasionally quotes Suarez, and had evidently looked into the 
 works of this last great representative (d. 1617) of Scholasticism ; he 
 may also have turned over the pages of Peter the Lombard and John 
 Duns Scotus before saying (E., vi. 214) that any one not knowing 
 their design of advancing the Papal authority would judge them "to 
 have been two of the most egregious blockheads in the world, so 
 obscure and senseless are their writings ; " Thomas Aquinas is just 
 mentioned. In general, he only says more forcibly what every one 
 was then saying of the Schoolmen. 
 
10 Holies. 
 
 the world, and slowly, that his mind was roused to in- 
 dependent activity. He was just completing his twen- 
 tieth year when he took his bachelor's degree, on the 
 5th of February 160 J. Twenty years more were to 
 pass before we see him even beginning his work of 
 philosophy. 
 
CHAPTEK IL 
 
 THE SCHOLAR (1608-28). 
 
 The next twenty years are a distinct period of Hobbes's 
 life, regarded either from without or within. From 
 1628 he is seen on the way to become a philosopher, 
 with widening vision and in the end overmastering 
 purpose. Till then he appears as a man of scholarly 
 habit, in circumstances of quiet leisure that enable 
 him to indulge it actively or otherwise as he will. 
 
 After taking his degree, Hobbes, later in the same 
 year (1608), entered into relations with a great family 
 that once and again were loosened but never were broken 
 till his death, after more than seventy years. William 
 Cavendish, second son of the famous "Bess of Hard- 
 wick" by the second of her four marriages, newly 
 created Baron of Hardwick, and some years later (1618) 
 made Earl of Devonshire, was then seeking a tutor, 
 or rather companion, for his eldest son, and had Hobbes 
 recommended to him by the principal of Magdalen Hall. 
 Young Cavendish was about the same age as Hobbes, 
 and was already married, in April of this year, at the 
 instance of King James, who made the match and 
 dowered the bride, to the daughter of the Scottish Lord 
 
12 Holies. 
 
 Bruce of Kinloss, a child of twelve. The unequal pair 
 had, of course, no establishment for some years to come, 
 while the husband had still the grand tour to make, 
 not setting out upon it till 1610. In the interval, 
 Hobbes waited on him, and apparently much less of work 
 than sport went on. Aubrey, who begins by saying 
 that, though Hobbes was chosen for his youth, rather 
 than " a grave doctor," yet it was with a view to study, 
 goes on to speak of him as a " page " who " rode a-hunt- 
 ing and hawking " with his master. He kept the young - 
 man's privy purse, and what this duty (now or later) 
 involved is disclosed in another of Aubrey's scraps. 
 "His lord, who was a waster, sent him up and down 
 to borrow money and to get gentlemen to be bound for 
 him, being ashamed to speak himself;" whereby Hobbes 
 " took cold, being wet in his feet, and trod both his 
 shoes aside the same way," becoming indeed " unhealthy 
 and of an ill complexion (yellowish)." It is added that 
 " by this way of life he had almost forgot his Latin." x 
 The father, however, was not dissatisfied, but sent 
 the young men, who had become fast friends, abroad 
 together. 
 
 Four times in all Hobbes travelled or lived, spend- 
 ing little short of twenty years, on the Continent, and 
 every time except the last we shall see him there receive 
 a distinct mental impulse. The first journey, which lay 
 through France, Germany, and Italy, was begun in the 
 year when France and Europe were thrown into con- 
 sternation by the deed of Ravaillac ; and so readily does 
 the fanatic's name slip from his pen even half a century 
 later, that we may well suppose the future apostle of 
 i ' Life,' pp. 602, 619. 
 
First Journey Abroad. 13 
 
 the inviolability of the sovereign to have been moved 
 by what he may have heard or seen of the tragic event 
 and its consequences at the time. 1 A moderate know- 
 ledge of French and Italian picked up by the way was 
 his first gain. For the rest, though already he had 
 eyes to mark how the currents of thought were set- 
 ting, his Oxford training had left him quite unable to 
 comprehend the true forward movement of the time, 
 turned wholly in the direction of physical science. The 
 year before, Kepler, in great poverty at Prague, had 
 published his 'Astronomia Nova,' embodying his first 
 and second laws. Prague and Kepler lay far out of 
 the way, but on the very line of the grand tour was 
 Galileo, just returned to his native Tuscany after a 
 briiiiant professorate at Padua, flushed with many 
 triumphs over nature the last of them the discovery 
 of Jupiter's satellites by means of his new telescope. 
 Galileo's acquaintance Hobbes did make as soon as 
 he could profit by it ; but that was s not for five-and- 
 twenty years to come. At this time, if he heard 
 anything of the wonderful physical discoveries, they 
 could to him be wonders only. He 'had learnt some 
 philosophy, however ; was knowing, if not very confident, 
 in Barbara Celarent; and, though not clear about quid- 
 dities and separate essences, should have been open 
 to impressions on that side. On that side there was 
 nothing stirring by which he could be impressed. Des- 
 cartes was still at school with the Jesuits of La Fleche, 
 and, were he set free, had all his long doubts to struggle 
 through before he could work out his principle of 
 certainty, and with the enunciation of it open the era 
 IE., iv. 294; vi. 126. L., ii. 116. 
 
14 Hobbes. 
 
 of modern philosophy. With Descartes, also, Hobbes 
 was to come into contact, but not till after many years, 
 when each had his own way of thinking fixed, and 
 nothing but quick repulsion was any longer possible 
 between them. In the dearth of original thinking, and 
 in the actual state of opinion, there was indeed, at the 
 time, but one impression that a mind like his, trained 
 as it had been, was likely to take on, and this was 
 a feeling of aversion to all philosophy. 
 
 On every hand he found the philosophical doctrine 
 he had learned at the university spoken of in a tone of 
 utter contempt. The fact was that, ever since Scholas- 
 ticism, more than a hundred and fifty years before, had 
 ceased to have in it any principle of further growth, the 
 best heads, when not turned to entirely different pursuits, 
 had been engaged on little else than attempts to throw 
 discredit upon it and. its authorities. Among the effects 
 of the revival of letters, one of the ^first had been to 
 bring forward Plato against Aristotle; and, working 
 upon him and the Neo-Platonists, a number of thinkers 
 had appeared in the sixteenth century with theosophic 
 and pantheistic views, in sharpest contrast to the spirit 
 of scholastic thought. The world of nature, also, which 
 the Schoolmen had looked upon askance when they did 
 not wholly drop it out of sight, had begun to draw at- 
 tention from others than alchemists and magicians. A 
 succession of hardy speculators in Italy had even aimed 
 at constructing a pure philosophy of nature ; and one of 
 them, Giordano Bruno, besides steering straight against 
 scholastic principles in the attempt to explain the 
 universe out of itself, had eagerly worked in with his 
 system the astronomical theories of Copernicus, against 
 
Revolt from. Scholasticism. 15 
 
 which both Church and School stood deeply committed. 
 Though a doctrine like Bruno's could have no perma- 
 nence in itself, the restless activity of such a man was 
 a most powerful disintegrant in the body of received 
 opinions : for a single convert that he made, he sapped 
 in a hundred minds their faith in the old philosophy ; 
 wherefore the Church had burned him only ten years 
 before this time. : When the seventeenth century opened, 
 Scholasticism retained but little of its former hold on 
 the human mind. ) Its influence was gone with men of 
 the world, among whom there had grown up silently an 
 educated opinion, reflected in such pages as Montaigne's, 
 with nothing of the tone of the schools. It prevailed 
 no more among the great and growing class of the 
 learned, who could now range through the treasure- 
 house of ancient lore ; more eager, if they were philo- 
 sophically inclined, to seek out, in the new-born feeling 
 of revolt, any name and any system that could be set up 
 against the Aristotle of Albert and Thomas, than minded 
 to discover the truer and greater Aristotle himself, 
 Least of all did it weigh with the votaries of physical 
 science, full of the promise of the future. It still held 
 its ground only within the universities, its own crea- 
 tion, where a modicum of its conclusions remained 
 the sole instruction proffered to the young, and its 
 traditional exercises the sole mental training; or in 
 so far as bustling Jesuit theologians, self - constituted 
 heirs and champions of the past, took its methods 
 as the weapons of their reactionary warfare. A nat- 
 ural consequence was that, in society and in all the 
 centres of mental progress, the worn-out system was 
 hardly more discredited than was the habit of formal 
 
16 Hobbes. 
 
 thinking so long confined within the scholastic lines. 
 It was the habit of the time to make light of all 
 philosophy. 
 
 Introduced to a world where he saw the result but 
 could not know how it had come to pass, Hobbes was in 
 just the state of mind to yield to the prevailing current 
 of opinion. Indifferent to his Oxford learning, if not 
 suspicious of its value, he had but to see it openly 
 contemned to cast it away as worthless ; nor had he 
 as yet any such impulse to independent thought as 
 helped Descartes, in the like case, to distinguish be- 
 tween Scholasticism and philosophy, and begin speculat- 
 ing anew upon deeper lines of his own. His training 
 had left him wholly unfit to descry the novel promise of 
 physical science, which should henceforth vie with phil- 
 osophy in its claims on the inquisitive spirit of men. 
 He had only ambition enough to wish to be seen at work, 
 like others, upon something else than the vain occupa- 
 tion of abstract thinking. His knowledge of Latin and 
 Greek was no longer what it had been, but it was still 
 possible for him to become a scholar and enter by the 
 way of classical learning into a knowledge of men and 
 things. It was the age of Scaliger and Casaubon as 
 well as of Galileo. Hobbes came back from his first 
 sojourn abroad it is not said in what year determined 
 to make himself a scholar. 
 
 What he did in pursuit of this aim is told us, in one 
 or other place, by himself, and the short record sums up 
 all that is known directly of his life till the time of 
 middle age. Having abundant leisure and easy access to 
 books, in the service (as secretary) of a master than whom 
 " there was not any ... in whose house a man should 
 
Classical Studies. 17 
 
 less need the university," l he went carefully through the 
 classical poets and historians, reading critically with the 
 help of the best commentators ; at the same time bent 
 it is the solitary evidence that he had the thought of 
 serious work before him on acquiring a good Latin style, 
 clear and easy to read because fitting words to thoughts. 
 Poets of every kind attracted him ; among historians, 
 before all others Thucydides. Of Plato and Aristotle 
 there is no mention ; having turned his back upon the 
 traditional philosophy because he saw it despised, he 
 was not likely to be won to a life of speculation by the 
 great Greek thinkers at the time when they were least 
 understood and esteemed. A reader and man of erudite 
 tastes, he retained something of the character to the 
 end ; for though, in his later years, he would say that if 
 he had read as much as other men he should have been 
 as ignorant as other men, 2 this meant only that in time 
 he came also to think much. The name of scholar is not 
 misapplied to one who began his literary career with 
 a translation of Thucydides and closed it with a trans- 
 lation of Homer. 
 
 The Translation of Thucydides was published in 1628- 
 29 when he had completed his fortieth year, and is proof 
 of the serious purpose with which he took to scholarly 
 pursuits. It proves no less, as we shall presently see 
 that by that time the political instinct was strongly astir 
 within him. Pirst, however, there is need to define his 
 relations, at this period of life, with some of those who 
 figure in Aubrey's long list of his friends. 
 
 Poremost stands Bacon, who is said to have taken 
 delight in his company, and to have employed him in 
 
 1 E., viii. p. iv. 2 < Life,' p. 621. 
 
 P X. B 
 
18 JTobbes. 
 
 translating into Latin some of his works, finding none 
 able so readily to understand the thoughts in them. 
 The fact that there should have been any personal 
 relations between the two men is interesting in itself ; 
 and so natural is the disposition to trace a continuity 
 in the evolution of philosophic thought, that it is no 
 wonder the connection has had much significance at- 
 tached to it. Was this not the very time when Bacon 
 stood out before Europe the herald, if not the leader, of 
 the great scientific movement of modern days, and to his 
 own land set an example of sober practical thinking 
 which the English mind has never since forgotten 1 If 
 Hobbes, in the last years of Bacon's life, was gradually 
 working his way through scholarly studies to the posi- 
 tion of a philosophical thinker, under whose influence 
 but Bacon's could the development proceed? From 
 whom but the first of English modern philosophers 
 should the second, being in actual contact with him, 
 learn to think with the freedom of a modern, and the 
 practical purpose of an Englishman] 
 
 111 the last resort, Aubrey, whose general statement in 
 the 'Yit. Auct.' has been already quoted, appears to^ be 
 responsible for the whole story. He relates elsewhere 1 
 that Hobbes " was beloved by his lordship, who was 
 wont to have him walk with him in his delicate groves 
 when he did meditate ; and when a notion darted into 
 his head, Mr Hobbes was presently to write it down, 
 and his lordship was wont to say that he did it better 
 than any one else about him ; for that many times when 
 he read their notes, he scarce understood what they 
 writ, because they understood it not clearly themselves." 
 1 'Lives,' ii. 222. 
 
Relations with Bacon. 19 
 
 Again : l " The Lord Chancellor Bacon loved to converse 
 with him. He assisted his lordship in translating 
 several of his essays into Latin ; one I well remember is 
 that of the ' Greatness of Cities ' [' Of the True Great- 
 ness of Kingdoms and Estates '] ; the rest I have forgot. 
 His lordship was a very contemplative person, and was 
 wont to contemplate in his delicious walks at Goram-^ 
 bery [Gorhambury, in Herts], and dictate to Mr Bushell 
 or some other of his gentlemen that attended him with 
 ink and paper presently to set down his thoughts. His 
 lordship would often say that he better liked Mr 
 Hobbes taking his thoughts," &c, as before. So much 
 may be taken as unquestionable. Next, it is very prob- 
 able that the introduction took place through Hobbes's 
 young master, who can be proved to have been a friend 
 of Bacon's. 2 And finally, from the tenor of the testi- 
 mony regarding all concerned, it may be presumed that 
 the intimacy coincided in time with the closing years of 
 Bacon's life, especially from 1621 to 1626, when, shorn 
 of his official dignities, he gave himself up to writing 
 and scientific pursuits at his country-seat. 3 
 
 It is clear, then, that Hobbes was in the habit of con- 
 sorting with Bacon, and was known to him as a man of 
 scholarly attainments and notoriously quick apprehen- 
 sion. But is there any ground for supposing that he 
 showed a special enthusiasm for Bacon's aims, or stood 
 
 1 'Life,' p. 602. 
 
 2 A sermon, entitled 'The Holie Citie,' preached in 1619 at York 
 House before the Chancellor, was dedicated to Lord Cavendish as 
 being in league with " that noble Advancement of Learning [Bacon], 
 for whose service it was first moulded ; " and there is further evidence 
 in Hawley's ' Life of Bacon.' 
 
 3 It was from Hobbes that Aubrey had the well-known story of 
 Bacon's death (' Lives,' ii. 227). 
 
20 Hobhes. 
 
 at all in the relation of a disciple 1 There is no such 
 ground. He was no longer a youth, as some have fancied, 
 when Bacon descried his superior powers : the time of 
 juvenile ardour was already past. Least of all is an 
 eminent German critic l warranted in asserting that he 
 took in hand Bacon's half-finished work, and, setting 
 himself to explain on naturalistic principles the moral 
 world, as Bacon had explained the physical world, ac- 
 complished a task that Bacon had indicated but had 
 either not the power or not the will to attempt. To say 
 that Hobbes treated moral and social phenomena as a 
 naturalist is correct enough; but that he did so with 
 any reference to Bacon cannot be allowed. There are two 
 ways of looking at Hobbes's moral and political specu- 
 lations, and with either the supposition is inconsistent. 
 If they are regarded as part of a complete philosophical 
 system of his own, it is implied that he did far more 
 than solve a particular problem left by a master. On 
 the other hand, if they are viewed as the chief work of 
 his life, and only fringed by the rest of his philosophy, 
 that is to assert that he wrote to stem the great political 
 revolution of the century certainly not to stop a " gap " 
 in Bacon. That he was not at all affected by his inter- 
 course with a quickening spirit like Bacon's is, of course, 
 impossible. But it would hardly be a greater mistake to 
 attempt to trace an influence in a few detached points of 
 agreement between the two, than to argue in the opposite 
 sense from points of deep and notorious disagreement, or 
 even to doubt the fact of their intercourse because 
 Hobbes himself gives no hint of it. 2 What is important 
 
 1 Kuno Fischer, Francis' Bacon' (transl. by Oxenford), p. 416. 
 
 2 Hobbes, in minor works on physical subjects, makes two passing 
 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury. 21 
 
 to note is, that in these earlier years Hobbes was not 
 wholly taken np with ancient writers and grammarians, 
 but must have had his mind turned to questions of 
 philosophy as conceived by the great pioneer of modern 
 thought in England. The real philosophical impulse 
 came upon him, however, not from Bacon and not as yet. 
 When it did come he took a line very different from 
 Bacon's. 
 
 Next on the list of his friends is the name of Edward 
 Herbert, afterwards (in 1631) created Baron of Cherbury, 
 whose friendship also he doubtless owed to his master. 
 Their intimacy at this period could be only by snatches, 
 Herbert being generally on the wing, travelling or fight- 
 ing, till 1616, and thereafter fixed abroad as English 
 envoy at Paris, where he remained a number of years, and 
 brought out his philosophical treatise ' De Yeritate ' in 
 1624. After this date Hobbes's growing interest in 
 philosophy soon to become eager might lead him 
 to this ingenious exposition of the view of human 
 knowledge most opposed to his own ; but not here, we 
 may well suppose, nor in a common devotion to classical 
 studies, lay their bond of union. This must be sought 
 rather in the strong bent of both towards rationalistic 
 criticism in religion. If the historians of the deistic 
 movement are justified in tracing back its first origin to 
 
 references to Bacon's writings (L., iv. 316; E., vii. 112), but never 
 mentions Bacon as he mentions Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and others 
 ('De Corpore,' ep. ded.), among the founders before himself of the 
 new natural philosophy. Induction has no place in his doctrine of 
 scientific method, and the word, when he uses it three or four times 
 throughout all his works, and these, again, minor ones has never the 
 least echo of Bacon's meaning. For Experiment in physics, it will 
 be seen he had nothing but scorn. 
 
22 Holies. 
 
 Herbert, they rightly place Hobbes next in the succes- 
 sion. Yet here also their points of view are very dif- 
 ferent; for while Herbert, in accordance with the 
 principles of his philosophy, compares the different his- 
 torical religions to find the heart of all the creeds, and 
 lay bare in each , the few simple truths that make the 
 common innate faith of mankind, Hobbes is content to 
 accept the Christian religion as revealed and established, 
 and only aims at reducing the number of points essen- 
 tial to salvation, in order to remove factitious causes of 
 danger to the State from the strife of sectaries. 
 
 Other of Hobbes's friends Ben Jonson and Sir Robert 
 Ayton the poet it suffices merely to mention in connec- 
 tion with the outcome of his scholarly studies. Jonson, 
 chief potentate in the world of letters, could not fail to 
 be seen at a place of literary resort like Devonshire 
 House, as he was seen also at Bacon's; and Ayton, 
 standing, though he was a Scotsman, only second to 
 the laureate as an authority in all matters of style, was 
 nearly related to Hobbes's mistress. The Translation of 
 Thucydides was not sent to press, in 1628, 1 till it had 
 been submitted to the judgment of both. 
 
 For Thucydides, Hobbes's early preference amounted 
 to a positive affection. In no other writer did he find 
 all the highest qualities of the historian combined to 
 the same degree, and especially the power of making 
 the story of the past suggest its lessons, without digress- 
 ing "to read a lecture, moral or political." Others, he 
 
 1 This is the date of publication given in ' Vit. Auct. ' I have seen 
 no copy dated earlier than 1629. The Translation was reissued in 
 1634, with the originally undated dedication dated as if then newly 
 written. It fills vols, viii., ix. of E. 
 
Translation of Thucydiclcs. 23 
 
 fancied, would be of the same mind, if they could read 
 the work in a careful translation, and therefore in his 
 spare hours he did his best in this way. But, the 
 labour ended, he found his desire to publish gone. He 
 saw that for the most part " men came to the reading of 
 history with an affection much like that of the people 
 of Rome, who came to the spectacle of the gladiators 
 with more delight to behold their blood than their skill 
 in fencing;" loving "to read of great armies, bloody 
 battles, and many thousands slain at once," more than 
 they minded the art whereby the affairs of armies and 
 cities were conducted to their ends. Doubting also~ 
 whether he should get readers to wade through the un- 
 familiar scenes of the book, he for a long time kept 
 it back. At last, however, he made up his mind to 
 be content with the " few and better sort," and sent it 
 forth, providing maps and an index, with great labour, 
 to make the story plainer. 
 
 Such was his account of the work at the time ; 1 and 
 not till long afterwards did he declare that, having learnt 
 from Thucydides how much wiser one man is than a ^ 
 mass of men, he wished his fellow - citizens to take ' 
 warning from the story of the Athenian democracy. 2 It 
 may seem an afterthought thus to profess that at his 
 first coming forth he began his long protest against the 
 political spirit of his time ; yet an afterthought it hardly 
 can be. If in 1628 Hobbes was not an anxious spec- 1 
 tator of the position of public affairs, he must have 
 become strangely transformed in the next twelve years. 
 Charles but three years on the throne, and already at 
 
 1 E., viii. pp. vii-xi (' To the Readers '). 
 
 2 ' Vit. carm. exp.' (L., i. p. lxxxviii). 
 
24: Holies. 
 
 his third Parliament ; his demands for supplies met by 
 the Petition of Right; Buckingham impeached before 
 being slain; the loyal High -Church party struck at 
 through the censure of Roger Manwaring for the ser- 
 mons on Religion and Allegiance ; the old strife over 
 forms between Prelatists and Puritans deepening rapidly 
 into a far bitterer strife over doctrines between Arminians 
 and Calvinists, over theories of civil government between 
 royalists and republicans or democrats; everything 
 betokened that a deadly struggle in the State was at 
 hand. The catastrophe, to be more complete when it 
 came, was staved off for a time ; but the man who later, 
 upon the eve of the conflict, was the first to discern its 
 real issues, cannot be supposed to publish his version of 
 the impressive Greek history in utter unconsciousness of 
 them now. Nor, indeed, are significant hints wholly 
 wanting. It is noted, in an introductory account of the 
 life and work of Thucydides, that he likes democracy 
 least of all, and is favourable to government by one, 
 be it by Pisistratus (save that he was a usurper) or 
 by Pericles; Cleon is "a most violent sycophant," 
 and "thereby a most acceptable speaker amongst the 
 people." For Cleon might safely be written there the 
 name of Eliot or of Pym. 
 
 If it may be presumed that even from his university 
 days Hobbes had acquired a dislike and distrust of rest- 
 less Puritan ways, much more is it likely that during 
 the years of easy studious life, among the best society 
 of the capital, he had not failed to watch the growing 
 purposes of the Reforming party in Church and State. 
 A natural bent towards political study, and a disposition 
 to take the side of settled and visible authority, are both 
 
At the Age of Forty. 25 
 
 disclosed in the first work of his pen disclosed withal 
 so plainly, that, should there now be roused in him the 
 ambition to become, with his native vigour of thought 
 and trained powers of expression, an original investigator 
 and teacher, it might be predicted that a political pur- 
 pose would be uppermost in his mind. We begin, in 
 fact, to have a glimpse of the real Hobbes of the seven- 
 teenth century. \The Translation of Thucydides need not 
 detain us any longer. It shows him to have succeeded 
 in forming his style and become a competent scholar ; 
 but at the same time the critical inexactness of the 
 work, as judged by any strict rule, only makes clear that 
 his business is not translating but already political in- 
 struction, which he might afterwards attempt by other 
 means. / 
 
 The period of leisurely study at an end, he is to be 
 conceived, at the age of forty, a well-informed and even 
 a learned man j with views in politics anxiously held ; 
 in philosophy with a deepening though as yet merely 
 general interest many of his observations on human 
 nature made, perhaps some of his most characteristic 
 opinions formed, but all lying unstrung in his mind. 
 
26 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER (1628-37). 
 
 To the period of scholarly acquisition and easy self- 
 culture, quickened only by the earnestness of purpose 
 with which the Translation of Thucydides was under- 
 taken, and at last, in the midst of a great political crisis, 
 sent forth, there succeeds in the life of Hobbes a time of 
 new and fruitful ideas, soon of busy thought, and, in the 
 end, of determination to original labour. 
 
 It was not, however, as closing one stage of his mental 
 history and leading on to another, but as marked by the 
 saddest of all his personal experiences, that the year 
 1628 became most memorable to himself. In the month 
 of June he saw his master and friend hurried off by 
 disease in the prime of life, after only two years' tenure 
 of the earldom. How deep was his grief appears in 
 the noble and tender words written at the head of the 
 1 Thucydides ' before the year was out ; and even at the 
 distance of half a century his rough verses grow pathetic 
 when they touch upon his early bereavement. The 
 twenty years of companionship were, he says, by far the 
 sweetest of all his life, and to the end they would come 
 back upon him in dreams. 1 
 
 1 Here may be mentioned the five hundred and odd Latin hexame- 
 
Second Journey Abroad. '27 
 
 In the Devonshire household everything was changed. 
 Left with three children, the heir only ten years old, the 
 widowed countess had to set herself straightway to the 
 task of bringing into order the family affairs, deranged 
 by the lavish expenditure of her husband ; and though 
 some of her dispositions were little to her son's liking 
 when he came of age, 1 she achieved her end with 
 notorious tact and resolution. The services of Hobbes 
 were at first dispensed with. It was not that he did not 
 enjoy the countess's good opinion, for he went on living 
 in the house for some months, and after some time was 
 recalled to train the son as he had never had the oppor- 
 tunity of training the father. But in the interval he 
 was left to shift for himself, and, smarting under a 
 certain sense of neglect, he was not sorry to have his 
 thoughts diverted from his loss by a change of scene. 
 He therefore took a new engagement in 1629, to accom- 
 pany abroad as travelling tutor the son of Sir Gervase 
 Clifton, of an old Notts family. 
 
 Of his second visit to the Continent, there is hardly 
 more to be said directly than of the first. New subjects 
 began to occupy his mind, but nothing is told of the 
 
 ter verses, s De Mirabilibus Pecci' (L., v. 324-40), which, though first 
 printed in 1636, were written before 1628, within the two years when 
 Hobbes's master was earl. They give a lively account of an excur- 
 sion from Chatsworth round the Seven Wonders of the Derbyshire 
 Peak. An English version, by another hand, added to a later edition 
 in 1678, is given also in the collected folio edition of ' The Moral and 
 Political Works ' (1750). 
 
 1 This appears from an extremely interesting ' Narrative of y e Pro- 
 ceedings both Publique and Private concerning y e Inheritance,' &c, 
 of the young earl, preserved among the Hardwick MSS., of date 
 April 12, 1639. It is signed repeatedly by Hobbes and the earl, and 
 evidently is the work of Hobbes. 
 
28 Hoboes. 
 
 people he met or the manner of his life. He must have 
 been supposed, from the accounts, to spend the whole 
 time eighteen months in Paris, if there had not been 
 preserved an undated letter to his pupil's father, inti- 
 mating that they meant to reach Venice in October by 
 whatever route the war between the French and Span- 
 iards (War of the Succession of Mantua, year 1630) 
 might leave open. 1 In politics he had the opportunity 
 
 of watching the action of Eichelieu, bent on making 
 
 the King of France an absolute monarch, and labouring 
 successfully at the task; now being tried also in Eng- 
 land but there destined to fail so utterly. In science 
 and philosophy, if he had been able to make com- 
 parison upon old observations, he would have found 
 the external aspect of things little changed since he had 
 been abroad before. Physical science, under Galileo and 
 others, had been steadily progressing; philosophy was 
 describing the old rounds. With repetition here and 
 progress there, the feeling against philosophy had, if 
 possible, become stronger. It was still some years before 
 Descartes was to speak out, nor was it known as yet 
 beyond a private circle that something unheard of 
 might be expected from him. 
 
 The invitation to take charge of the young earl's 
 education reached Hobbes early in the year 1631. He 
 was then back in Paris, and by this time deep in new 
 studies, from which he was loath to be distracted ; but 
 as the charge promised to afford him sufficient leisure, 
 he did not decline it, and returning to England he found 
 an apt and docile scholar, who grew into a friend and 
 the protector of his old age. In the course of instruc- 
 i E , vii. 451. 
 
Third Journey Abroad. 29 
 
 tion which he proceeded to give, he sought to imbue 
 the youth " with all such opinions as should incline him 
 to be a good Christian, a good subject, and a good son j " l 
 taking him in some seven or eight years over rhetoric, 
 logic, astronomy, and the principles of law, with other 
 subjects. 2 Most probably their life till the middle of 
 1634, when they went abroad, was in the country; and 
 to a later period should be referred Hobbes's intercourse 
 with various members of that notable group of poli- 
 ticians in which Lord Falkland, from 1633, was the 
 central figure. The years were fraught with interest to 
 a political observer of his stamp, but as yet the future 
 was veiled ; and, little as he had sympathy with Laud's 
 fretful ways, " squabblings about free-will and stand- 
 ing upon punctilios concerning the service-book and its 
 rubrics," 3 the hush imposed on the tumult of popular 
 opinions during the reign of 'Thorough' may for the 
 time have lulled even his anxiety. Abroad, for the third 
 time, he had his mind otherwise engrossed. 
 
 They travelled, he and his pupil, with a consider- 
 able party, at an easy pace through France and Italy, 
 taking in Alpine scenery by the way, but chiefly visit- 
 ing the towns and making stay in the great centres. 
 The route lay through Paris to Italy, and back through 
 Paris again. A letter remains, written from Paris in 
 October 1634, when he is fresh from England. 4 He 
 
 1 MS. 'Narrative/ &c, at Hardwick Hall. 
 
 2 The free English abstract of Aristotle's ' Rhetoric,' first published 
 in 1681 as ' The Whole Art of Rhetoric ' (E., vi. 423-510), corresponds 
 with a Latin version dictated to his young pupil. The boy's dicta- 
 tion-book, interspersed with headings, examples, &c, in Hobbess 
 hand, remains among the Hardwick papers. 
 
 3 E., vi. 255. 4 E., vii. 452. 
 
30 Hobbes. 
 
 sends word of Kichelieu's preparing to take part in the 
 Thirty Years' War; replies to the query of his un- 
 named correspondent why a man does not remember 
 I his own face so well as the face of a friend seen long 
 ago that, as all memory depends upon strength of im- 
 pression on the sense, the sight of a friend's face for two 
 hours together counts for more than the mere glimpses 
 a man takes of his own face in a glass in a year's time ; 
 does not think he has any new truths to send, but (with 
 the air of an authority) professes himself ready to answer 
 any more questions. The next sure date is of another 
 letter, from Florence in April 1636. 1 They are there on 
 the return -journey from Eome, hoping to be back in 
 Paris by the end of June; he is glad to have got so 
 much home-news from his " worthy friend, Mr Glen ; " 
 longs " infinitely " to see Peter Heylin's ' History of the 
 Sabbath' (just published, in 1636, as part of Laud's 
 plan to countermine the Puritans), which, with Mr Glen, 
 he fears "will put such thoughts into the heads of vulgar 
 people as will confer little to their good life ; " is looking 
 forward to get Selden's 'Mare Clausum' in Paris, "hav- 
 ing already a great opinion of it " (with English pride 
 in such an assertion, against Grotius, the Dutch, and 
 Europe, of the national birthright to the sea). Back in 
 Paris, he remained there eight months, and so returned 
 to England in the spring of 1637. 
 
 From the time when he was thus back in Paris, 
 about the middle of 1636, Hobbes, as he claims with 
 a touch of pride, began to be counted among philoso- 
 phers. 2 To this, then, the second and third journeys 
 together had brought him. One mental advance can 
 1 E., vii. 454. - 'Vit. carm. exp.' (L., i. p. xc). 
 
Begins to Study Euclid. 31 
 
 be quite definitely assigned to the second ; and if the 
 time of his taking another step forward is less cer- 
 tain, at latest before the end of the third journey he 
 had the sense of being well abreast of his scientific 
 contemporaries and the ambition to be seen at work J 
 in the van. 
 
 In the course of the journey from 1629 to 1631 he 
 first began to look into the ' Elements ' of Euclid : such 
 is his own simple confession. 1 Aubrey is equally naive x 
 and more particular : 2 " He was forty years old before he 
 looked on geometry, which happened accidentally : being 
 
 in a gentleman's library in , Euclid's Elements ' 
 
 lay open, and it was the 47th Prop. Lib. I. So he reads 
 the proposition. 'By G ,' says he, 'this is im- 
 possible ! ' So he reads the demonstration, which re- 
 ferred him back to another, which he also read, et sic 
 deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced 
 of that truth. This made him in love with geometry." 3 
 Of himself he adds that it was the manner of the 
 reasoning, still more than the matter, that fastened his 
 attention, and made him a diligent student of Euclid ^s* 
 from that day forth. 
 
 The results of this accident, if accident it was, will 
 only too surely call for notice later on. For the pre- 
 sent it is to be observed that Hobbes is a man past . 
 forty, learned, thoughtful and acute, before he casts 
 eyes upon a proposition of Euclid, and learns the force 
 of mathematical demonstration. How could that be? 
 More easily than we are apt to imagine. He might 
 
 i Vita ' (L., i. p. xiv). 2 ' Life,' p. 604. 
 
 3 The story is confirmed by a passage (p. 154) in the original edition 
 of 'Exam, et Emend. Math. Hod.' (1660), omitted in the later edition 
 (1668), from which Molesworth reprints in L., iv. 
 
32 - Holies. 
 
 have been a far more eager follower of Bacon than 
 there is any reason to suppose he was, and yet not 
 have heard of Euclid's name or gathered an intelligible 
 notion of the value of mathematics. At the univer- 
 sity he was in still less danger of being prematurely 
 informed. When he was at Oxford, geometry made no 
 part of any student's training, and was matter of concern to 
 none except perhaps a small circle round Sir Henry Savile 
 of Merton. A public lectureship on mathematics had only 
 been instituted by Wolsey, when his downfall came 
 and whelmed it with all his other foundations in ruin ; 
 nor was it one of those restored later by the more grudg- 
 ing hand of Wolsey 's master. 1 It was in fear "lest 
 the mathematic studies should utterly sink into oblivion " 
 that at last, in 1619, years after Hobbes had left Oxford, 
 Savile instituted his professorships of geometry and 
 astronomy. Upon the foundation of these chairs, Wood 
 relates that " not a few of the then foolish gentry " kept 
 back their sons from the university, not to have them 
 " smutted with the black art," most people regarding 
 mathematics as " spells," and its professors as " limbs of 
 the deviL" 2 In similar phrase Hobbes himself complains, 
 as late as the middle of the century, that the univer- 
 sities had only just given over thinking geometry to 
 be " art diabolical" 3 There is thus nothing incredible in 
 the story of his first lighting upon Euclid, and it must 
 be well borne in mind to form any true conception of 
 his mental development, past and future. With all 
 his knowledge of books and men, all his learning and 
 ripeness of judgment in politics or otherwise, he was 
 
 i 'Hist and Antiqq. Oxf.,' ii. 2. 836-40. 
 a Ibid., ii. 1. 331-35. 3 E., iii. 671. 
 
Motion in Nature. 33 
 
 only, at this stage, beginning to have a glimpse of 
 the strict procednre of science. He knew less mathe- 
 matics after the age of forty than Descartes was taught 
 at school ; and never all his life and with all his perti- 
 nacious labour was he able to work as far into the science 
 as Descartes had gone before the age of twenty. 
 
 Upon the third journey, another new subject has 
 possession of his mind. Day and night he is haunted by 
 the idea of Motion in nature. Whether he sails, drives, 
 or rides, there motion is for ever meeting his eye, engag- 
 ing his thought, and offering itself as the clue to the 
 mystery of the varied universe. 1 The point not clear is, 
 when he first seriously conceived that there was a mys- 
 tery to solve, and that he might solve it. That for some 
 time back he had had a general interest in questions of 
 philosophy may be supposed : he could not have been 
 about Bacon without acquiring some such interest, while 
 his sudden passion for scientific demonstration and his 
 attention to mental facts (disclosed in the letter above 
 quoted) imply at least so much. "We are even told by 
 himself how the general interest was turned into personal 
 concern and active pursuit. 2 ,' One day, when he was in a 
 company of learned men, and mention was made of sensa- 
 tion, he heard some one ask, with a kind of contempt, 
 what sense was. No answer being forthcoming, he was 
 struck that men who prided themselves on their superior 
 wisdom should not understand the nature of their own 
 senses, and from that time he often pondered the matter. 
 Then it came into his head that, if bodies and their in- 
 ternal parts were at perfect rest, or were moved always 
 
 1 'Vit. carm. exp.' (L., i. p. lxxxix). 
 
 2 'Vita'(L., i. p. xx). 
 
 P. X. c 
 
34 Holies. 
 
 in the same way, there could he no distinction of any- 
 thing, and consequently no sense. The cause of all things 
 ^y must therefore, he presumed, he sought for in diversity 
 of movements ; and starting from this as a first principle, 
 he was driven togeometry for insight into the nature and 
 modes of motionj Unfortunately no place or date is given 
 for this occurrence, or can he exactly determined. Hohhes 
 might have heen drawn into such a line of thought hy 
 Bacon's mechanical theory of the qualities of matter 
 many years (ten or fifteen at least) hefore the time of his 
 third journey, hut everything in the story itself and in 
 his history up till now hears against that supposition. 
 The mention of geometry, for example, so far from 
 justifying any inference to a date hefore 1629, is, when 
 taken along with the fact of his actual introduction to 
 Euclid, almost decisive the other way : he must have 
 known something of geometry to understand its uses. 
 Moreover, two of the "biographical narratives would 
 represent him as not taking the new mental step till 
 ahroad for the third time. 1 Conclusive, however, as all 
 this may he against the supposition of an interest in the 
 mechanical explanation of nature reaching hack into the 
 earlier period of his life, there is nothing in the last 
 statement which should exclude a third account, accord- 
 ing to which he now hegan to study the doctrine of 
 motion more seriously, heing interested in it hefore; 2 
 and as he claims more than once in his works that he 
 had arrived at a theory of light and sound as far hack 
 as 1630, 3 we seem driven to assign the company-scene 
 and the later inspiration to the second journey rather 
 
 1 'Vita;' 'Vit. carm. exp.' 2 ' Vit. Auct.' (L., i. p. xxviii). 
 
 3 Lv. 303; E., viii. 468. 
 
The Scientific Spirit roused. 35 
 
 than to the third or to the years between them. The 
 .scene probably did occur no long time after the scien- 
 tific spirit was roused within him by the sight of 
 Euclid. It was but another mental awakening after 
 the first ; though, being less easily followed up by 
 private study, especially till some advance were previ- 
 ously made in geometry, it may well have led to little 
 result till the new journey abroad set him again in con- 
 tact with active scientific workers. 1 
 
 At all events, upon the third journey, the time at last 
 had come when he could appreciate the great scientific 
 
 1 The complexion of the case is somewhat altered by a tract to 
 which Herr F. Tonnies has first called attention (' Vierteljahrssch. fur 
 wiss. Phil.,' iii. 4. 463), in the volume of Harleian MS., 6796 (Brit. 
 Mus. ), which is bound with the title " Philosophical Tracts, collected 
 by Thomas Hobbes." This Tract, No. 26, doubtless in 'Hobbes's 
 handwriting, but otherwise giving no account of itself, presents a 
 theory of Sense and other mental processes (especially Appetite) 
 that has much in common with his later thought, but at the same 
 time involves a form of that scholastic doctrine of sensible species 
 which he afterwards rejected so vehemently. Supposing it Hobbes's 
 own work, the question arises when it can have been written. If he 
 had really, as he claims in 1646 (E., vii. 468), arrived at his thorough- 
 going mechanical theory of Sense about the year 1630, the tract 
 must be thrown back to some earlier time ; but it is impossible then 
 to understand the mathematical form in which the exposition is cast, 
 since he knew nothing of geometry before 1629. It is much more pro- 
 bable that the tract represents his view when he was first feeling his 
 way in the years after 1629, and that his memory in 1646 was not 
 very exact ; indeed, the other reference to 1630 (L., v. 303) is made 
 in terms that may possibly apply to this very composition. In any 
 case, the tract marks a very curious stage in Hobbes's intellectual 
 development. The indications of his later way of thinking are too 
 marked to leave open the other supposition that it is not an original 
 piece but a transcription like some others in the volume (papers by 
 Galileo, Descartes, &c.) It may be added, that the volume includes 
 many tracts that are neither "philosophical" nor such as can have 
 been " collected " by Hobbes. 
 
36 Holies. 
 
 discoveries of that generation, and understand the men 
 that had made them. The patriarch Galileo had the 
 first claim upon his homage, as the discoverer of the 
 laws of motion, and now it was freely paid. Already 
 past seventy, the great Tuscan, though he had still a few 
 years of life before him, was bending under the weight 
 of affliction. "Working always, he had kept silence, 
 under the warning of the Church, for many years, till 
 in 1632 he ventured again to speak in his famous 'Dia- 
 logue'; when the Inquisition dragged him to Rome, and 
 after extorting the recantation sent him back, at the end 
 of 1633, to his villa at Arcetri, near Florence, still a 
 prisoner of the Holy Office. There, upon the loss of his 
 daughter in 1634, a painful infirmity, and, in a year or 
 two, total blindness, came to embitter further his last 
 days. It was before this supreme calamity befell him 
 that Hobbes must have seen him at Florence in April 
 1636, if not in the previous year. Admitted to close 
 intimacy with the aged discoverer, he conceived and al- 
 ways retained the profoundest respect for the man " that 
 first opened the gate of natural philosophy universal." x 
 
 Eound Galileo was grouped a host of active disciples, 
 and in other towns, especially in Pisa, his native place, 
 were men ardently pushing forward the new physical 
 science, or seeking to make wider philosophical applica- 
 tion of its principles, like Hobbes himself. With one of 
 the most distinguished of these last, Berigardus, pro- 
 fessor of philosophy at Pisa, it can be proved that he 
 entered into special relations. 2 But it is to Paris that he 
 
 1 E. , i. p. viii. 
 
 2 Hamilton gives the main facts (Reid's 'Works,' 890 b. n., 898 b. 
 n., 991 a.), but errs in supposing that Hobbes was specially beholden 
 to Berigardus's ' Circulus Pisanus ' which did not appear till 1643. 
 
Pbre Mer serine. 37 
 
 must be followed before he can be seen fairly launched 
 upon his henceforth characteristic line of thought and 
 inquiry. There, with his ideas well matured by medita- 
 tion and converse in Italy, he was at once received into 
 the busy scientific circle held together by the genial 
 influence of the Pere Mersenne. Born in the same year 
 as Hobbes, Marin Mersenne was . at La Fleche a senior 
 student during part of the time when Descartes was there 
 a precocious boy. Having passed to the Sorbonne and 
 taken the habit of the Minimi of the Franciscan order in 
 1611, he met DesCartes again in Paris, and helped to win 
 the youth back to study from the gay life of the capital. 
 Then he was sent away by his provincial to give instruc- 
 tion in philosophy at Severs, and it was not till 1619 that 
 he returned to Paris, to live as conventual in a monas- 
 tery near the Place Eoyale. Prom that time, without 
 prejudice to his reputation for strictest orthodoxy, he . 
 gradually assumed his later character of eager physical 
 inquirer and godfather to every new discovery in Paris. 
 Though bound to Descartes by ties of the most un- 
 changing fidelity, and acting as his " plenipotentiary " in 
 Paris no sinecure post when the philosopher went to 
 seek out solitude in Holland, he was, none the less, all 
 the time, in perfect good faith, the friend and confidant 
 of Descartes' scientific foes. A straightforward, simple- 
 minded man, ready to enter with the most kindly interest 
 into every project that bore the faintest promise of scien- 
 tific fruit, he was, for a long term of years, in the re- 
 public of intellect like the heart in the body. Besides 
 taking his own share of work, he apportioned tasks to his 
 friends all round, and had his word of encouragement 
 always ready when there was need. If he saw a dis- 
 
38 Holies., 
 
 coverer shy or backward in giving his ideas to the world, 
 he would incorporate them in some book of his own, 
 carefully making known whose they were, and thus, by 
 exciting curiosity in them, force on their publication. 
 Such was the man who now gave to Hobbes the most 
 friendly welcome, and introduced him to the coterie of 
 scientific men actively at work in Paris. All that he 
 had thought out in the course of his journey or before 
 was now made the subject of daily discussion ; and, in 
 prospect of a novel extension of physics, Mersenne had 
 nothing but approval to bestow. It was then that 
 Hobbes passed into the ranks of the "philosophers." 
 He was touching his fiftieth year. 
 
 He returned home in 1637 with his head full of phi- 
 losophical projects, or rather one great project to con- 
 struct a universal system of philosophy. ) Though the 
 scientific spirit had awoke late within him, the early 
 ambition that had made him a scholar when he might have 
 been an idler, was there to spur it into ardent exercise ; 
 and if the scholarly studies left him not too well pre- 
 pared for some parts of his new work of inquiry, there 
 was at least the old political anxiety to determine his 
 whole speculative endeavour to an effective practical 
 issue. It is not doubtful that by this time he had formed 
 in his mind that general scheme of knowledge to which 
 his chief philosophical treatises are accommodated. The 
 scheme in itself is not the least of his achievements. 
 It happens, however, even in the systematic treatises, 
 to be overlaid or complicated by reason mainly of the 
 political events that more than inverted his plans of 
 publication ; while in other works by which he is better 
 known works extorted from him by the same pressure 
 
Project of a System of Philosophy. 39 
 
 of external circumstances it is not made prominent. 
 The more necessary is it now, at this true crisis of his 
 life, when at last he has become a philosopher and 
 before his thought has acquired a passionate political 
 bias, to see what it is that as a philosopher he designs 
 to achieve. So we shall best understand what in 
 the troubled years before him he was able actually to 
 accomplish. 
 
40 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 PHILOSOPHIC PLANS (1637). 
 
 The year 1637, which saw Hobbes finally embarked on 
 the construction of a general philosophical .system, was 
 otherwise remarkable in the history of human thought. 
 Then appeared that ' Discourse on Method ' which gave 
 the first revelation of the ideas that had been fermenting 
 for some twenty years in Descartes' brain. From the 
 year 1629, at the age of thirty- three, Descartes had with- 
 drawn into seclusion in Holland to give himself wholly 
 to the working-out of his new thoughts in science and 
 philosophy. In 1633 he had completed an exposition of 
 his physical system, when the news of Galileo's fate came, 
 to touch him on the side of his love of peace and con- 
 scientious or assumed respect for ecclesiastical authority. 
 He kept back the work ('Du Monde '), and not till 1637 
 was the world admitted to any part of his secret. With 
 beautiful simplicity he then told the story of his youth- 
 ful scepticism, deepening till it reached despair ; of his 
 final resolve to break with the past, and by a new method 
 work out a system of certain knowledge ; of years then 
 spent in gathering experience and essaying his powers, 
 before he would dare to enter seriously upon the task. 
 
The Neio or Mechanical Philosophy. 41 
 
 An indication of his universal method and its chief 
 philosophical consequences followed by three treatises 
 showing its application to special scientific inquiries in 
 geometry, optics, and meteorology completed the dis- 
 closure. While Hobbes had been slowly learning the 
 meaning of science, and not till the age of fifty had 
 his thoughts at command for beginning original work, 
 Descartes at forty had the thought of a life behind him, 
 and was able to prescribe the lines of philosophical 
 speculation for generations to come. 
 
 Before Descartes' prime, however, and without his 
 aid, there had sprung up, in the first generation of the 
 seventeenth century, the modern science of physics, 
 then passing under the name of the New or Mechanical 
 Philosophy. Earlier philosophy both the genuine 
 Aristotelian doctrine and whatever passed as such at 
 the different stages of medieval thought had always 
 included an explanation of the physical world, and 
 withal one so comprehensive that by its side the 
 positive experimental discoveries of such a scientific 
 genius as Archimedes were little regarded when they 
 were not, as in the later ages, wholly unknown. 
 When, then, after an interval of portentous length 
 more than sixteen centuries the work of Archi- 
 medes was resumed, and soon a new physical theory 
 of indefinite extension began to be disclosed, it nat- 
 urally claimed the same high title of universal doc- 
 trine as the old philosophy. That laws of m otion 
 experimentally established were the true principles of 
 all physical occurrence and were to be applied to the 
 explanation of nature under the still more general prin- 
 ciples of mathematics, was the great and fruitful idea 
 
42 Hobbes. 
 
 of Galileo whence sprang the whole of modern physics. 
 The new doctrine took the name of Philosophy the 
 more readily, because it had been discovered after the 
 revival of letters that, however it might be with Aris- 
 totle and Plato, other Greek philosophers, earlier and 
 later, like Democritus and Epicurus, had based their 
 whole theory of the world and man upon a physical 
 consideration of moving atoms. It was in the spirit of 
 such mechanical philosophy or physical science that 
 Hobbes now began to think. We may compare his 
 thought with Descartes', but the impulse came to him 
 from the physical reasonings of Galileo. 
 
 So far as the physical world itself was concerned, 
 Galileo's idea, which had already, in the first years of 
 the seventeenth century, been taken up by many scien- 
 tific workers, was fully accepted by Descartes. Through 
 Galileo, or independently, Descartes was convinced that 
 all physical facts and processes were to be interpreted 
 as purely mechanical as local arrangements and re- 
 arrangements of moving matter. Descartes, however, 
 as the world was now at last learning, did not conceive 
 of any physical doctrine but as part of a far wider and 
 more deeply grounded system of general knowledge; 
 reverting in this to the traditional conception of phi- 
 losophy. And thus was it also with Hobbes, who, in 
 a fashion of his own, could be content with nothing 
 I less than a universal system of human conceiving. But 
 while Descartes, starting from the subjective point of 
 view, made it his first care to understand the relation 
 of nature to mind, and so began the more strictly 
 philosophical movement of modern times, Hobbes, im- 
 mersed in objective consideration, is to be called a 
 
Advance wpon other Thinkers. 43 
 
 philosopher chiefly because of the comprehensiveness of 
 his scientific survey, and its practical direction to the 
 guidance of human conduct. 
 
 " Whenever it may hav e dawned upon him , the 
 thought that sensation and all menta l states thereon 
 depending are explicable as peculiar motions in the 
 human body, determined by motions in other bodies, 
 Took Hoboes at once beyond the field of investigation 
 to which the so-called mechanical philosophers, in 
 the first instance at least, confined themselves. It 
 did not take him beyond Descartes, who, within the 
 sweep of his philosophical thinking, was also led to 
 conceive of sensation and its consequences in terms 
 of motion. But because Hobbes thought that the con- 
 sequences of sensation involved all possible mental 
 occurrence, and, beyond this, whatever could be shown 
 to depend on the mental constitution of man, espe- 
 cially the social relation among men, he was drawn 
 into an entirely different line of general consideration. 
 For him the philosophic task consisted in no ultimate 
 rendering of being from the side of thought, but in the 
 orderly interpretation of Nature and Society upon plain 
 phenomenal principles/ Phenomenally regarded and 
 otherwise it could not, in the view of Hobbes, be re- 
 garded as object of science the world consisted of 
 natural bodies (inanimate and animate) and of political 
 bodies, organised aggregates of living men.J To explain 
 all natural phenomena, including the mental manifesta- 
 tions of animals and men, and all social phenomena 
 depending on the mental nature of men, and to do 
 this with unity of method from universal principles, 
 was in his view to fulfil at once the whole demand of 
 
 \\ 
 
44 Hohbes. 
 
 what might be called indifferently Science or Philo- 
 sophy. Natural Philosophy and Moral or, as he gen- 
 erally preferred to consider it and call it, Civil 
 Philosophy remained for him, as it had generally been 
 before him, the primary division of the whole ground 
 to be covered by one and the same thinker. Only, he 
 recognised no other way of working into the nature of 
 things than that upon which the new physical inquirers 
 had entered, in revolt from the metaphysical principles 
 of Aristotle and the Schoolmen; while such insight, 
 and no other, it seemed to him, might avail to direct 
 aright the action of men. 
 
 With such a view of moral application to be made of 
 natural science, Hobbes shows the spirit of the philoso- 
 pher no less in the depth of the foundations he first lays 
 for the knowledge of nature. Though he only incident- 
 ally touches the deepest question of all, as to the rela- 
 tions of being to thought, and was not, like- Descartes, 
 at a standstill so long as that remained unsolved, he was 
 not prepared, like the modern " man of science," to 
 take up straightway with nature in the purely objective 
 attitude of common life. Before any statement of the 
 principles of magnitude and motion to be used in ex- 
 planation of the world of nature, he held it necessary to 
 have an express discussion of the most general concep- 
 tions o f scie nce ; and such discussion, which, after 
 Aristotle, he called First Philosophy, he, again with 
 Aristotle, would preface by Logic as a doctrine of reason- 
 ing and method. Indeed he had only to conceive and 
 carry out such a scheme of natural philosophy with 
 sufficient thoroughness to accomplish more, at this 
 turning-point in the intellectual history of the race, than 
 
Body Man Citizen. 4 5 
 
 even Descartes essayed. But the performance came 
 short, while still remaining sufficiently remarkable to 
 give him a permanent distinction. 
 
 Hobbes himself, indeed, was so little disposed to 
 magnify the importance of what we may call the philo- 
 sophical foundations of his science of nature, or, from 
 the other point of view, the foundations of his whole 
 philosophical system, that he found one title, " On Body," 
 sufficient to cover all the more general preliminaries, as 
 well as his mathematical and physical doctrines. [His 
 use of the word " Body " instead of " Nature " for the 
 first division of his system is, iNgtoat, of chief interest 
 as marking what is undoubtedly its most important 
 feature. Body is, with Hobbes, not opposed like Nature 
 to Society, but is the first term of a series leading up 
 to Society or the State through Man. Man, since his 
 nature contains the ground of civil institutions, stands 
 out from among all other natural bodies. ( The State is 
 not simply to be viewed in its existent form as body 
 politic, but rather as it comes into being the product of 
 human wit for the satisfaction of human wants. ' Thus, 
 between Nature and Society the bridge is Man ; and 
 hence the profounder disposition of the whole work of 
 the philosopher as a progression from Body (which re- 
 mains natural) through Man to Citizen. , It was from this 
 point of view that Hobbes now planneu)three system- 
 atic treatises ' De Corpore,' ' De Homimy ' De Cive,' . 
 to be worked out in orderly successionofFo other man 
 of that time rose to such an idea of progressive scientific 
 explanation, and we hardly find it again so distinctly 
 conceived and seriously carried out till we come to 
 Comte and other thinkers in the present century!! The 
 
46 Holies. 
 
 idea does not more distinguish Hobbes from the class of 
 metaphysical philosophers than it makes it impossible to 
 connect him with that school of psychological thinkers, 
 beginning with Locke, that has shed special lustre on the 
 English name. <QKobbes stands apart in his country and 
 his time, a philosopher of large constructive ambition, 
 yet one who confined his thought to the world of 
 experience and was moved by the most directly practical 
 purpose./ If the words seem no less applicable to his 
 predecessor Bacon, a difference still remains. Hobbes 
 was no mere surveyor and planner for others, but an 
 actual builder upon an original scheme of his own. 
 
 Among systematic thinkers of comparable range, he 
 succeeded more nearly than most in leaving not unsaid 
 all that appears to have been in his mind; yet this 
 was not because he was able, in the maturity of his 
 slowly developed powers, to work out steadily the plan 
 which, at least as a plan, he had now fairly before him. 
 Never did human purpose become more the sport of 
 outer events. How the execution was carried through 
 with perfect irregularity, involved no slight modifica- 
 tion of his thought at critical points, included new un- 
 dertakings, one of them the main achievement of his 
 life, and all because of the Eevolution that intervened 
 it belongs to the history of the next twenty years to tell. 
 It is impossible, supposing it in any way profitable, to 
 guess what course Hobbes's activity might have taken 
 in all the many years of intellectual vigour still before 
 him, if he had been left undisturbed to work out in 
 shorter time the orderly sequence of his ideas as it now 
 had taken shape within his mind. The Eevolution did 
 intervene, and the actual effect on his work and his life 
 
The Revolution intervenes. 47 
 
 is what has here to be traced. Time after time he had 
 to put the 'De Corpore' aside, in order to set forth 
 his political doctrine, or rather to create a theory to meet 
 the stupendous national crisis; and when at last, fourteen 
 years later, he found it possible to put together the fun- 
 damental treatise of his philosophic system, he could no 
 longer expect the author of ' Leviathan ' was far from 
 being in the mood to crave indulgence for his attempt 
 to grapple with the great generalities of human thought. 
 
 university; 
 
48 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE REVOLUTION (1637-51). 
 
 Hobbes came home from his third journey abroad in 
 1637, about the time when Charles and Laud, hard 
 driven for supplies, took courage from an opinion of the 
 judges to impose a general exaction of ship-money, and 
 were met by Hampden's refusal to pay the twenty shil- 
 lings demanded from him. I "Mark the oppression; a 
 Parliament-man of 500 a-year land-taxed at 20s. ! " is 
 Hobbes's later sneer ^Jand at the time a philosopher, 
 newly returned, with his mind running on the principles 
 of motion, and anxious for nothing so much as to have 
 quiet in and around him when working out his ideas, 
 might not see the case in any other light ; but amongst 
 the people, who had been smarting under the yoke for 
 eight years, and were not philosophers, the excitement 
 during the protracted trial that ensued was intense, and 
 the king and the archbishop were little at their ease. 
 
 In time (April 1638) they were comforted by the 
 
 decision of Westminster Hall, giving them leave to 
 
 exact ship-money, or, for that matter,* anything they 
 
 pleased, till the patience of the people should end ; but 
 
 i E., vi. 209. 
 
Political Distraction. 49 
 
 meanwhile another venture, to which they had com- 
 mitted themselves, was having no such manageable issue. 
 The riot at Edinburgh that had greeted the attempt to 
 read the new liturgy in July 1637, had led to formal 
 protest which, in the spring of 1638, took the shape of 
 the Covenant. In 1639 concessions were extorted from 
 the king by a Scottish army in the open field, and yet 
 again, at the end of the same year, there was a new 
 prospect of war. Hobbes is of opinion that the English 
 people never could have been brought to support the 
 Parliament in the Civil War, but for the diabolical art 
 with which the Puritan leaders made their profit out of 
 the king's difficulties in this "unlucky business" of the 
 Scottish Prayer-book, forcing him to take up false posi- 
 tions and goading him into acts of rashness. 1 Ee this as 
 it may, the turn of the Puritans at last had come. [ Ship- 
 money and other exactions being no longer possible or 
 sufficient, in April 1640, after eleven years of autocratic 
 rule, the king was reduced to asking for war-supplies 
 from a Parliament. J 
 
 Distraction of this kind, grown so intense and per- 
 sistent, it was not in the nature of Hobbes to with- 
 stand. Continuing to live with the young Earl of 
 Devonshire, after the course of training was ended in 
 1639, he mixed in the society of Lord Falkland, Hyde, 
 and the others who, later on, formed a tiers parti in 
 the State men whose concern in every change of the ^ 
 political scene was deep and anxious. For himself, 
 he was an old political observer, with fears that may 
 have become lulled but were only too easily revived; 
 and, having always for his last and highest aim to 
 i E., vi. 198. 
 
 P. X. D 
 
50 Holies. 
 
 become a political teacher, he could not shut his eyes 
 to the need, growing every day more pressing, that a 
 teacher should appear. One thing, accordingly, is not 
 doubtful, however it may be impossible to trace in 
 detail the effects wrought upon his mind by the progress 
 of events that they soon became too much for his 
 philosophic resolution. 
 
 The general result is told in a statement prefixed, in 
 1646, to the first-published of his original works, the 
 * De Cive.' He was labouring, he says, quietly at his 
 appointed task, when " some few years before the civil 
 wars," the state of the country, " boiling hot with ques- 
 tions concerning the rights of dominion and obedience 
 due from subjects," forced him to defer the exposition 
 of his doctrines of Eody and of Man, and " ripened and 
 plucked" from him the political section of his philosophi- 
 cal system. 1 This statement is at fault only as it seems 
 to imply that the ' De Cive ' itself was the first work 
 extorted from him. Another statement, of much later 
 date (1662), gives more exact information, if not of 
 the progress of his philosophical enterprise, at least of 
 his actual occupation about the time when Parliament 
 assembled in April 1640/ Seeing, he says, in that Par- 
 liament, the peace of the country and the safety of the 
 king endangered by attacks on the royal prerogative, he 
 wrote " a little treatise in English " to prove that the 
 powers and rights called in question were inseparably 
 annexed to the sovereignty, which was not then denied 
 to be in the king j \ of which treatise, " though not 
 printed, many gentlemen had copies, which occasioned 
 much talk of the author, and, had not his Majesty dis- 
 i L., ii. 150; E., ii. p. xx. 
 
" Little Treatise " of 16Jfi. 5 1 
 
 solved the Parliament, it had brought him into danger 
 of his life. " Y Now there can be no question that this 
 "little treatise" was made up of the two parts pub- 
 lished separately, ten years later (1650), under the titles 
 'Human Nature' and 'De Corpore Politico.' Pre- 
 fixed to the ' Human Nature ' is a dedicatory epistle 
 which refers rather to the subject of the ' De Corpore 
 Politico,' and addressed as it is " to the Earl of New- 
 castle, governor to the Prince his Highness," bears the 
 date, May 9, 1640. This, with various indications in 
 the body of the two small books, would suffice to prove 
 that they were written originally as one work in the 
 spring of 1640, and so to identify them with the 
 " little treatise," which Hobbes declares gave so much 
 umbrage to the Parliament then sitting. But the fact 
 is placed wholly beyond doubt by the preservation of 
 various MS. copies combining the two parts under one 
 title of ' The Elements of Law, Natural and Politique,' * 
 while the copy at Hardwick Hall has the common dedi- 
 catory epistle in Hobbes's own hand. 2 Thus it is made 
 clear that, within three years of his coming home, he 
 had not only given such shape to his political system 
 as it has in the 'De Corpore Politico,' but had also 
 wrought out his doctrine of Man (in the 'Human 
 Nature ') almost as far as he was ever able to carry it. 
 The political doctrine was not so "plucked" from him 
 now, or later in the 'De Cive,' as that he had not 
 been able first to base it, as his philosophical scheme 
 required, on a theory of human nature ; though he 
 
 1 E., iv. 414 : ' Considerations upon the Reputation, &c, of T. H.' 
 
 2 There are three copies, with another incomplete, in the single 
 Harleian Collection of the British Museum. 
 
52 Holies. 
 
 might still, in 1646, be hoping to give a more systematic 
 expression afterwards to the first draft of this theory. 
 That he can be proved to have advanced thus early 
 to all his more characteristic positions in psychology as 
 well as in politics, is a conclusion of the first importance. 
 It did not need the actual outbreak of civil war, act- 
 ing upon a timorous nature, to give him his conviction 
 of the strength of the anti-social impulses in man, and 
 of the necessity for an absolute political authority to 
 repress them. 
 
 The Parliament of April 1640, which could not- be 
 brought to recognise its single duty of voting a hand- 
 some war-supply, was dissolved on the 5th of May, 
 twenty-three days from its assembling. It is obvious, 
 then, that if Hobbes circulated his "little treatise" 
 while the Parliament was still sitting, it must have been 
 composed earlier, and not, as he suggests, with special 
 reference to the parliamentary proceedings. The one 
 perfectly certain fact not dependent on any late recol- 
 lection is, that the dedication was written on May 9 ; 
 and this may be held to prove that, while the treatise 
 was of still earlier date, the parliamentary debates had 
 the effect only of stirring up Hobbes to the circulation 
 of his views, whether privately (by manuscript copies) 
 or otherwise. That he was in any actual danger from 
 the resentment of the parliamentary leaders it is dif- 
 ficult to suppose, and it may even be doubted whether 
 his fears were not the offspring of his fancy at a time, 
 after the Restoration, when to have feared might be re- 
 presented as a proof of devotion to the royal cause. 
 Still, timid as he was by nature, he may possibly enough 
 have fancied at the time that there was no safety for a 
 
Flight to Paris. 53 
 
 man of his way of thinking, and his conduct later in 
 the year bears out the supposition. For when, in six 
 months more, after one other attempt by the king to 
 stem the advance of the Scots with such army as he 
 could raise, the Short Parliament was followed by the 
 Long, and members came up with so grim a resolution 
 that in a week Strafford was impeached, it became clear 
 to Hobbes that England was no longer the home for a 
 philosopher. In Paris, as he knew from his correspond-! 
 ent Mersenne, the scientific circle was quietly busy as 
 before. Accordingly he hurried off, "the first of all 
 that fled," as he afterwards could boast in other days. 1 
 It was eleven years before he saw his native country 
 again. 
 
 In Paris he received a hearty welcome from Mersenne, 
 who was the more glad to see him at this time, because 
 he had just been commissioned to collect on all hands 
 objections (before publication) to the ' Meditationes de 
 Prima Philosophia,' in which Descartes had now ex- 
 plicitly stated the mature results of his philosophical 
 thought. Hobbes, though fresh from the exciting 
 spectacle of the English troubles and thinking, mostly of 
 politics, was ready enough to pass an opinion on specu- 
 lative novelties that had become notorious since 1637; 
 and, being already familiar with the scientific works of 
 that year, was even eager to enter into closer relations 
 with their author. He quickly, therefore, put together 
 some sixteen objections to different points in the new 
 treatise ; but as he preferred that his name should in 
 the first instance remain concealed from Descartes, 
 Mersenne, who was not a little proud of having secured 
 i E., iv. 414. 
 
54 Ilobhcs. 
 
 such an objector, in forwarding the remarks, as early as 
 January 1641, to Descartes in Holland, introduced him 
 simply as a distinguished thinker of the new order. 
 Descartes, on his side, glad to be criticised by a man 
 reputed so able, turned with zest to the objections ; but 
 his satisfaction very speedily abated. He found a critic 
 far less ready to enter fairly into the course of his 
 thought than concerned to propound with strong assur- 
 ance other opinions of his own. The objector clearly 
 was rapt in private speculations, and could not, or would 
 not, place himself at the point where he might have 
 insight into the new system. With all his desire to be 
 criticised, Descartes was too conscious of what his thought 
 had cost him to brook easily the patronising tone of this 
 anonymous fault-finder. His replies soon became sharp 
 and curt, and near the end he roundly declared he had 
 not found one correct inference in these objections. 1 
 How Hobbes took the rebuff, does not appear. It was 
 not, indeed, the only expression of Descartes' disesteem 
 that he then drew upon himself. He had set down also 
 certain objections to some of Descartes' physical positions 
 (in the 'Dioptrique,' 1637), comparing them with others 
 of his own, which he had now been elaborating for years ; 
 and in the same month of January, Mersenne, play- 
 ing off a small trick on Descartes, apparently to ensure 
 an unbiassed reply, sent them on as if they came from a 
 friend in England. The feint was so far successful that 
 Descartes did not suspect the common authorship of the 
 two sets of objections, but it procured no better accept- 
 
 1 The ' Objections,' with the ' Replies,' are given in L., v. 249-74. 
 They were placed "Third" among the six (afterwards seven) sets 
 published with the 'Meditations.' 
 
Political Preoccupation. 55 
 
 ance for the second set. With somewhat less reason, 
 Descartes became more unmistakably angry; and after 
 some correspondence had passed with Mersenne as in' 
 termediary, bluntly declared that he would have nothing 
 more to say to the Englishman, whose designs, he more 
 than half suspected, could not be honest. 1 The men, it 
 was clear, were not to be brought together. 
 
 Ready, however, as Hobbes might thus be to express 
 himself on ultimate questions of philosophy or special 
 points of physical science, he had been drawn too 
 deeply into the rush of political excitement to be able 
 to settle, even in Paris, to the work of first laying the 
 foundation of his system in a doctrine of Eody. Nor 
 was the news that continued to come from England of a 
 kind to reassure him ; though, when the action of Parlia- 
 ment was directed against Episcopal pretensions, he could 
 reconcile himself to measures, however originated, that 
 had the effect of making the civil power supreme in all 
 the affairs of life. "lam sure," he remarks in a letter 
 to the young Earl of Devonshire, bearing date August 
 1641, 2 and referring to an incident in the Parliament's 
 dealings with the bishops, "that experience teaches thus 
 much that the dispute for [precedence] between the 
 spiritual and the civil power has of late, more than 
 any other thing in the world, been the cause of civil 
 wars in all places of Christendom." To demonstrate the 
 true functions and full range of the civil power from a 
 consideration of its origin this in the circumstances of 
 the time seemed to him the special work, or that part of 
 his general scheme of philosophic work, which he should 
 first carry through. He had, as we have seen, already 
 
 1 L., v. 277-307. 2 Given in facsimile "by Molesworth. 
 
56 Holies. 
 
 given a limited circle the benefit of the demonstration in 
 the form of the "little treatise," but he would now 
 exhibit it on the larger scale of the crowning piece of 
 his philosophical trilogy. With the ' De Give ' he ac- 
 cordingly busied himself throughout the first year of his 
 exile ; if we are not to understand as is possible that 
 the systematic treatise had already been taken in hand 
 when, in the previous year, he had given the slighter 
 sketch of his political theory. "What is certain is that 
 the full presentation of the doctrine, as he conceived 
 that it should stand within his general philosophic 
 system, was made before the close of his first year 
 abroad ; for, when issued from the press in the course of 
 the next year, 1642, the dedicatory epistle to his ex- 
 pupil bore the date November 1, 1641. The backward 
 reference, in the first sentence of the work, to a pre- 
 ceding section on Human Nature, indicated to readers 
 its place in a general scheme, but is far from proving 
 that up to this time he had made any way with that sec- 
 tion, as he had designed to present it in a formal treatise 
 1 De Homine.' 
 
 Though running to greater length, and written in 
 Latin as a work of systematic philosophy, the 'De 
 Cive ' cannot be said to differ in any respect of philo- 
 sophical importance from the earlier English draft of 
 the political theory. The style is generally richer, as 
 the matter is fuller ; the difference of the human lot 
 before and after the constitution of the civil state is 
 more sharply pointed under the two sectional headings 
 of "Libertas" and "Iniperium"; but it is chiefly in 
 a third and last section, " Keligio," which is the least 
 philosophical, that advance is to be noted upon the 
 
'De Cive! 57 
 
 smaller work which we now know as the ' De Corpore 
 Politico.' Here he enters much more minutely than 
 before into the question of the Church in relation to 
 the State. The impending catastrophe in England,/ 
 so long prepared by religious differences, forced upon 
 him the conviction that civil peace could be assured 
 only as the sources of religious strife were dried up:j 
 and this consummation, as it seemed to him, could bei 
 attained only as it was shown, by an exhaustive con-i 
 sideration of Scriptural passages to which all were ready\ 
 to appeal, as well as by the reason of the case, that the \ 
 sovereign power in the State is to be held as not less / - 
 absolute in ecclesiastical than in secular affairs. The 
 germ of this most distinctive tenet of Hobbes's is also to 
 be found in the treatise of 1640 ; but here, if at any 
 point since then, his opinions were developing with the 
 progress of t events, and even in a work professedly 
 philosophical he could not refrain from displaying his 
 feelings of the hour. In truth, however, the whole of his 
 political doctrine, in either of the expositions it had now 
 received, has little appearance of having been thought 
 out from the fundamental principles of his philosophy. 
 Though connected in the one case with an express doc- 
 trine of human nature, and in the other referred to 
 such a basis to be afterwards supplied, it doubtless 
 had its main lines fixed when he was still a mere " 
 observer of men and manners, and not yet a mechanical 
 philosopher. ^In other words, his political theory is\ 
 explicable mainly from his personal disposition, timorous ( \ 
 and worldly, out of all sympathy with the aspirations ) 
 of his time./ We may expect to see it grow still farther 
 as events unfolded themselves. 
 
58 Holies. 
 
 It is, in any case, somewhat remarkable that Hobbes, 
 when he had yielded so far to the pressure of events as 
 to elaborate the political superstructure before he had 
 formally drawn the ground-lines of his system, should 
 not have been more anxious to give publicity to ideas 
 that he considered of such immediate practical import- 
 ance. Though the 'De Cive' was printed in 1642, so 
 few copies were struck off that Gassendi declares they 
 excited rather than satisfied thirst. 1 Being in Latin, the 
 book could not well serve as a political manifesto ; and 
 we can only suppose that it was first written because, 
 however he may have been drawn into providing a philo- 
 sophical basis for his political thought, the practical in- 
 terest, as it had awoke earliest, was always uppermost in 
 him. His contemporaries, too, could not but acknow- 
 ledge his mastery in the political field. Not only were 
 / Mersenne and other members of the Paris circle proud 
 of their associate's achievement, but even Descartes was 
 constrained to allow that if, as he suspected, the author 
 of the ' De Cive ' were the same that urged the ' Third 
 Objections' against the 'Meditations,' his ability in morals 
 was far greater than in metaphysics or physics. 2 
 
 Having discharged his mind, to whatever purpose, of 
 its political burden, Hobbes now busied himself for 
 some three years or more with his general philosophy. 
 The Civil War, which no reasoning could any longer avail 
 to stop, broke out finally in August 1642 ; and while King 
 and Parliament, with varying fortunes, were locked in 
 
 1 ' Vit. Auct.,' L., i. p. xxxiii. The book was printed at Paris,, in 
 quarto size, under the title ' Elementorum Philosophise Sectio Tertia, 
 De Cive.' Copies are very rare : one (which belonged to Selden) is 
 in the Bodleian, another is in Dr Williams's Library in London. 
 
 3 Baillet, 'Vie de Descartes,' ii. 174. 
 
Physical Tracts. 59 
 
 struggle, the philosopher remained quietly at work 
 among the scientific inquirers who met for informal 
 discussion in Mersenne's monastic cell (near the Place 
 Eoyale). 1 In 1644, and under the wing of Mersenne, 
 he came first into public view as a physical investigator 
 of the new school, but also as one who was concerned 
 to drive the new mechanical principles to psychological 
 and ethical conclusions lying beyond common scientific 
 apprehension. A compressed statement 2 then inserted 
 in the preface to Mersenne's 'Ballistica' gave, with 
 some variations, the main points of his scientific doc- 
 trine of Human Nature, as it had been already written 
 out, more at length, and privately circulated in the 
 spring of 1640. At the same time a short 'Tractatus 
 Opticus,' printed as corporate part of another work of 
 Mersenne's, 3 set out his view of Eefraction in accord- 
 ance with the strictly physical theory of light to which 
 he had been making way ever since 1630. 4 His scien- 
 tific pretensions were so far recognised, that when, in 
 1645, a noted English mathematician of that day, John 
 Pell, at Amsterdam, fell upon the Danish astronomer 
 Longomontanus's quadrature of the circle, he was sum- 
 
 i L., iv. 242. a l.,v. 309-318. * L., v. 217-48. 
 
 4 During all these years he was more especially .engrossed with 
 optics. There is included in the MS. volume, mentioned in a former 
 note (p. 35), a considerable treatise in Latin (No. 22) covering the 
 whole ground of optical science, which, though written in another 
 hand, bears his own corrections and is clearly his work. He fol- 
 lowed it up, by 1646, with another in English, 'A 'Minute or First 
 Draught of the Optiques,' in two parts (Illumination, Vision), which 
 is also in the Harleian Collection of MSS., 3360. The second part 
 of this he afterwards turned to account in the ' De Homine ' (1658). 
 Molesworth prints from the original only the Dedication to New- 
 castle and the concluding paragraphs (E., vii. 467-71). 
 
60 Holies. 
 
 moned among such experts as Descartes, Eoberval, and 
 Cavalieri to give judgment between the opponents. 
 Ten years later came his own time to be judged for 
 the sin of circle-squaring. 
 
 With the leisure and opportunities he had in Paris, 
 he had by 1645 gained such command over his diverse 
 materials that he might now at last have begun the 
 composition of his fundamental treatise 'De Corpore,' 
 when once more the political distraction became too 
 strong for him, and did not leave him free to resume 
 his philosophical enterprise till six years more had 
 passed. While he had been quietly busy in Paris 
 over problems of magnitude and motion, far other 
 problems were being solved by the sword in England. 
 At first it seemed as if the king might prevail in the 
 strife; but in time a parliamentary army was formed 
 with an irresistible spirit of religious enthusiasm, and 
 the royalist power, struck down at Marston Moor in 
 July 1644, was finally shattered at Naseby in June 1645. 
 At whatever safe distance himself, and even without 
 his general political anxiety, Hobbes had too close per- 
 sonal relations with many of those who were foremost 
 in the struggle, to remain unmoved at any of its stages. 
 His young master, marked by Parliament for devotion 
 to the king before the war, had ceased, on its outbreak, 
 to take any active part, and gone abroad ; but the earl's 
 brother Charles, a gallant youth, threw himself with 
 singular ardour into the fight, and fell an early victim 
 to the prowess of Cromwell's troopers. In the same 
 year, 1643, his friend Lord Falkland perished at 
 Newbury. Another friend, Sidney Godolphin, who 
 left him a legacy of 200, was killed among the first 
 
Leviathan' projected. 61 
 
 "by an undiscerned and undiscerning hand." 1 New- 
 castle (now marquis), who commanded at Marston Moor, 
 was the patron to whom his earliest treatise had been 
 addressed. The defeated commander, being forced to 
 fly the country, found his way, after various wanderings, 
 to Paris in 1645, preceded or followed by many other 
 fugitives; and by contact with these it was that the 
 philosopher was again drawn into the political whirl. 
 
 Soon he was in such a state of mind that he could 
 not rest or do other work till he had delivered himself, 
 as he had never yet effectively done, of the message 
 he long before conceived he had to bring to his ex- 
 cited countrymen. The ' De Cive ' was known only to 
 the learned few whom it had reached when it was 
 printed rather than published in 1642. The MS. copies 
 of the earlier sketch of his political theory and view of 
 human nature were locked up in still fewer hands, and 
 the sketch, besides, had touched but slightly on the 
 religious question that was really at the bottom of the 
 political differences that had rent asunder the fabric of 
 the English State. An English book that all could 
 read, but a comprehensive book, and one going to the\ 
 root of the matter, so as to show the true and only way 
 of lasting civil peace, by constituting the secular power 
 absolute over every other in all departments of the 
 active life of men, this was the need of the time 
 which Hobbes set himself now to meet. 'Leviathan' 
 was the result, but it was not achieved till 1651, and 
 when achieved it bore traces of having been moulded 
 by all that happened in the interval. More immediate 
 evidence of Hobbes's revived interest in politics ap- 
 i E., iii. 703. 
 
62 Holies. 
 
 peared in a new, and this time more genuine, publica- 
 tion of the existing treatise, 'De Cive.' This he gave 
 in charge, early in 1646, to his admirer the French 
 physician Sorbiere, after he had inserted in the book a 
 number of notes in answer to objections, and supplied 
 a weighty " Preface to the Keader," giving the first 
 distinct public intimation of the relation in which the 
 treatise stood to a general philosophical scheme, and 
 explaining the occasion of its appearance out of due 
 order. The book in its new form was seen through the 
 Elzevir press by Sorbiere, and came out at Amsterdam 
 in 1647. x 
 
 During most of the time till 1651, Hobbes remained 
 in or about Paris. We find him about the beginning 
 of 1646 at Rouen (where he wrote his tract 'Of Liberty 
 and Necessity,' printed eight years later, and then lead- 
 ing to a great contention that will claim due notice), 
 but this may have been only a flying visit. Later in 
 the same year, however, he had so much lost hope of 
 being able to return home, and was apparently so much 
 straitened in his means, that he was just about to change 
 his whole manner of life, and take up his abode with a 
 French friend in the south, 2 when it was put in his 
 power to remain in the capital as mathematical instructor 
 
 , l L., ii. 133-432. The title was now changed to ' Elementa Philo- 
 '( sophica de Cive : ' the date of the Dedication from 1641 to 1646. 
 
 2 Called "nobilis Languedocianus " in 'Vita,' doubtless the 
 "Verdusius" to whom the 'Vit. carm. exp.' is addressed, and the 
 'Exam, et Emend. Math. Hod.' (L., iv.) is dedicated. Du Verdus 
 was a profound admirer of Hobbes, and many letters of his are pre- 
 served at Hardwick. A translation of the first two parts of the ' De 
 Cive ' by him appeared at Paris in 1660, under the title ' Les Elemens 
 de la Politique de Monsieur Hobbes.' 
 
Dangerous Illness. 63 
 
 to the young Prince of Wales, who, having left Eng- 
 land some months earlier, came over from Jersey with a 
 large retinue in the summer of 1646. How much he 
 was employed, or how long the engagement lasted, does 
 not appear. It can in no case have been prolonged be- 
 yond the spring of 1648, when the prince removed to 
 Holland, and probably it was terminated much sooner 
 by a dangerous illness that overtook Hobbes in 1647; 
 but it procured him the lasting favour of the prince, 
 who could afterwards protect him as king. It also, by 
 bringing him into close association with the chief victims 
 of the Civil War, must have helped to keep him to his 
 new task of political composition. How this used to go 
 forward is told in one of Aubrey's characteristic jottings : 
 " He walked much and contemplated, and he had in the 
 head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always 
 a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought 
 darted, he presently entered it into his book, or other- 
 wise might have lost it. He had drawn the design of 
 the book into chapters, &c, he knew whereabout it 
 would come in." 1 
 
 One or two incidents of some biographical interest are 
 related by himself of the illness, a fever, to which he 
 nearly succumbed in 1647. He lay at St Germains, near 
 Paris, and his case having become, as was thought, hope- 
 less, he was visited by Mersenne, at the request of a com- 
 mon friend who sought to win him before death to the 
 Church of Rome. Standing by the bedside, the kindly 
 father (so near his own painful end) began with 
 words of consolation, and then went on to speak of the 
 Church's power of absolution. But Hobbes broke in : 
 i Life,' 606, 607. 
 
sS 
 
 64 Hdbhes. 
 
 11 Father, I have debated all that with myself long ago, 
 and have no mind to discuss it now ; you can entertain 
 me better. When did you see Gassendi 1 " 1 Mersenne 
 took the hint, and changed the subject. However, this 
 only showed Hobbes's determination not to become a 
 pervert, and did not mean that he cared nothing for 
 religion. For, some days later, when Dr Cosins, after- 
 wards Bishop of Durham, came and offered to pray with 
 him, he gladly consented, on condition that the English 
 Prayer-book were used, and also received the Sacrament. 2 
 Long afterwards, when the clergy had turned against 
 him, and were branding him as atheist and heretic, he 
 proposed that the question as to the sincerity of his 
 faith should be referred to the bishop. 3 
 
 How he fared upon his unexpected recovery, there is 
 little to show for the next year or two. He could not 
 
 1 Gassendi (1592-1655), the chief rival of Descartes in the public 
 eye at this time, had come to Paris in 1645, as professor of mathe- 
 matics is the College Royal, from Digne, where he had held a post 
 in the cathedral for many years back ; he had also been in Paris for 
 some weeks in 1641. Hobbes and he became close friends, and had 
 the highest opinion of each other (see L., i. pp. xxxiii, lxxvi ; v. 
 307) ; but it is a mistake to suppose that the reviver of the Epicurean 
 philosophy can have exercised any special influence on Hobbes : the 
 famous works, ' De Vita et Moribus Epicuri,' and 'Syntagma Philo- 
 sophise Epicurese,' did not appear till 1647 and 1649. 
 
 Aubrey ('Life,' 626 n.) reports : "I have heard Mr Edm. Waller 
 say that W. Lord Marquis of Newcastle was a great patron to Dr 
 Gassendi and M. Des Cartes, as well as Mr Hobbes, and that he hath 
 dined with them all three at the Marquis's table at Paris." This can 
 only have been in the summer of 1648, when Descartes made his last 
 visit to Paris, and became reconciled to Gassendi after the estrange- 
 ment that grew out of controversy over the ' Meditations.' Hobbes 
 may also have met Descartes, on a previous visit, in 1644. 
 
 2 'Vita' (L., i. p. xvi). Aubrey ('Life,' 631) gives the story an- 
 other turn. See also the letter, E., vii. 464. 
 
 3 L., iv. 303. 
 
Begins to think of returning Home. 65 
 
 long enjoy the old scientific converse, the circle about 
 Mersenne having begun to show mournful blanks before 
 it was broken up in September 1648 by the death of 
 the father himself. But he had sufficient occupation in 
 writing his great book, jwhieh grew under his hand, as 
 the Eevolution advanced, into something he can hardly , 
 have foreseen. The growing ascendancy of the Inde- 
 pendents in Parliament by help of the army, and the 
 final collapse of the Presbyterian party after the Scots' 
 abortive attempt in 1648 to replace the king in power, 
 led on to the dread act of 1649, which changed the whole 
 aspect of affairs. - Later in the year we find Hobbes 
 passing into a mood that seems new. Writing then to 
 Gassendi, he lets drop the remark " For my age [past 
 sixty] I am well enough, and take good care, reserving 
 myself for return to England, if it may be." 1 So the 
 vehement upholder of the royal prerogative had begun 
 to think of going home as soon as the rebel leaders had 
 consummated their revolutionary work by taking the life 
 of the king. IsTo sooner did the dominion of the Eump 
 (or ratlier of the army) seem fully established, than the 
 chief witness against the arts by which it had triumphed 
 began to desire its protection. Was there here no 
 change of temper 1 Perhaps ; yet there might be reason 
 for his wish to return in the very hopelessness of the royal 
 cause, while the sureness of its enemies' triumph opened 
 for him too tempting a prospect of speculative freedom. 
 
 Firmly held before he had grounded it scientifical- 
 ly, Hobbes did not dream of surrendering his doctrine 
 of state and sovereignty ; but he was of a nature too 
 practical to shut his eyes to accomplished facts, and, as 
 
 i L., v. 307. 
 P. x. E 
 
66 Holies. 
 
 a philosopher, he was also too much interested in the 
 theoretic aspect of political events to view the gov- 
 ernment of the Rump, now that it was there, only as 
 an object of enmity and hate. Eagerly as he had sup- 
 ported the monarchy, willing in the enjoyment of its 
 protection to bear its shackles that left him free to ac- 
 complish the philosophic designs he had at heart, he 
 could not hut see that this new government, not less 
 powerful to protect, held out to him, whether in spite or 
 by reason of its origin, an opportunity of free speech on 
 subjects that otherwise were sealed. "While his political 
 views, as he had always declared, were not those of a 
 common royalist partisan but had a truth and a value" 
 under any form of sovereignty, he knew that, except 
 under conditions of social and political unsettlement as 
 in England, he hardly could venture to stray beyond his 
 philosophical scheme into the field of religious dogma. 
 To have, in propounding his doctrine of the place of 
 religion in the State, the advantage of free expression 
 upon forbidden subjects which he had deeply considered, 
 it seemed little in him, a private citizen and solitary 
 thinker, to face the question of transfer of the subject's 
 allegiance from a government overthrown to a new 
 power erect upon its ruins ; and the rather, as he had no 
 idea of abandoning his view that monarchy was incom- 
 parably the best government, and rebellion (though it 
 now gave him the chance of declaring how it might be 
 prevented for evermore) the most heinous of crimes. 
 Not, therefore, with any thought of turning renegade, 
 as his enemies afterwards asserted, but also without pre- 
 tending to himself that he was doing the exiled prince 
 a service, as he was fain afterwards to represent in his 
 
1 Human Nature ' and ' De Corporc Politico! 67 
 
 defence, Hobbes, anxious for personal reasons not to 
 remain longer abroad, was, I conceive, eager also to 
 seize, in the chaos of public opinion, the opportunity 
 of publishing his plans of reform in Church and State, 
 and in that view might well be willing to accept as 
 a fact the revolution against which he had honestly 
 striven. There are many signs in ' Leviathan ' of this 
 effect on Hobbes's mind of the progress of events. 
 
 Arrived thus far in 1650, he allowed or caused to 
 be brought to light that earliest work in which, years 
 before it came to civil war, he had not only drawn 
 with firm hand the ground-lines of his political doctrine 
 but founded it in the nature of man. It was now 
 printed in two distinct parts : the one, under the title 
 of ' Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of 
 Policy,' prefaced by a publisher's notice representing it 
 (incorrectly) as companion-treatise to the ' De Cive '; 
 the other, later in the year, under the title ' De Corpore 
 Politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politic.' 1 
 Next, in 1651, as if to pave the way more expressly 
 for the greater work at last completed, he issuelJft most 
 vigorous translation of the ' De Cive ' itself, as 'Philoso- 
 phical Rudiments concerning Government and Society'; 
 and so gave his countrymen the means of comparing 
 with all that he had previously thought out the wider 
 and bolder view of human and social life to which the 
 last years had brought him. 2 
 
 1 The 'Human Nature' (E., iv. 1-76) includes cc. 1-13 of the first 
 division of the original treatise. The remaining six chapters of that 
 division stand now as Part i. of the 'De Corpore Politico' (E., iv. 
 
 . 77-228) ; Part ii. corresponds with the original second division of the 
 whole work. 
 
 2 E., ii. Aubrey (' Lives,' ii. 566) mentions that Edmund Waller the 
 
68 Holies. 
 
 The printing of ' Leviathan ' went on in London 
 during the winter of 1650-51. About this time his 
 old friend Hyde (back in Paris from a vain mission 
 to Madrid for help) saw Hobbes often, and tells how, 
 on one occasion, early in 1651, he was shown some of 
 the sheets and the dedicatory epistle to Francis Godol- 
 phin, who had duly discharged his brother Sidney's 
 dying bequest. A curious conversation then passed. 
 Hobbes said that he knew Hyde would not like the 
 book when he had read it, and mentioned some of its 
 points; whereupon, says Hyde, "I asked him why he 
 would publish snch doctrine ; to which, after a dis- 
 course between jest and earnest upon the subject, he 
 said, 'The truth is, I have a mind to go home.'" 1 That, 
 after a discourse between jest and earnest, Hobbes did 
 say something like this to the solemn royalist, is likely 
 enough ; though Clarendon, writing in a spirit of bitter- 
 ness some twenty years after the event, need not be 
 supposed to give the exact shade of colour to the 
 incident. If, as he would suggest, Plobbes had been 
 meditating an infamous apostasy from the royal cause, 
 it is strange that the offender should publish his dis- 
 grace and court reprobation beforehand. 
 
 poet, who was a great friend of Hobbes's, wished to translate the 
 ' De Cive ' on its appearance, but, first asking Hobbes to begin the 
 translation by way of specimen, would no more meddle with a task 
 which Hobbes could perform better than anybody else. 
 
 Being intimate also with the poet - laureate, Sir W. Davenant, 
 and appealed to for his judgment in the preface to Davenant's heroic 
 poem, 'Gondibert,' Hobbes, early in this year, 1651 (Jan. 10, 1650), 
 wrote and published in Paris a letter on the nature and conditions 
 of poetry, chiefly epic (E., iv. 441-58). 
 
 1 ' Survey of the Leviathan,' 7 (published in 1676 ; written by 1670 ; 
 Dedication, &c, 1673). 
 
1 Leviathan ' published. 69 
 
 About the middle of 1651 the book appeared. 1 The 
 frontispiece showed a landscape : in the front, a walled 
 town and church with lofty spires ; behind, hills dotted 
 with buildings, and at one corner the sea. Towering 
 above the hills rose, in the background of the picture, the 
 body (from the waist) of a crowned giant, bearing a 
 sword in his right hand and in the left a crosier, num- 
 berless tiny figures of men being packed together to 
 form the trunk and arms of the monster. This was 
 Leviathan, personating the State or Commonwealth, 
 ecclesiastical and civil, whose "matter, form and power" 
 the book was designed to exhibit. Made up of men 
 and by men for their defence, of this Leviathan it could 
 be said, as of that other in the book of Job, " Non est 
 potestas super terrain quae comparetur ei." Underneath 
 were figured insignia, implements, and manifestations of 
 the twofold supremacy wielded by this "mortal god," 
 to whom under the immortal God men owed their peace 
 and safety : on a level, and answering to each other in 
 two rows, embattled fort and church, crown and mitre, 
 cannon and thunderbolt, armour and the weapons of 
 logical fence (three-pronged fork of syllogism and other 
 forks, with the dilemmatic horns) ; finally the shock 
 of arms on a battle-field, and a meeting of grave ecclesi- 
 astics in council-hall. 
 
 The book itself was laid out in four parts. The first 
 considered " Man," at once matter and maker of Levi- 
 athan, the great artificial man. Here Hobbes set forth 
 his doctrine of human nature anew, repeating his psy- 
 chological theory of the development of knowledge, 
 but dwelling chiefly on the passions, manners and 
 1 E., iii. 
 
70 Holies. 
 
 religion of men by nature, before showing at the end 
 how they might pass out of the misery of their origi- 
 nal condition as individuals into the ordered life of 
 society. The second part exhibited the generation of 
 " Commonwealth," conceived more vividly than in the 
 earlier works as a distinct entity, the product of human 
 art indeed, but yet, when constituted, of such a nature 
 as to have organs and vital functions like a human 
 being, with the human liability to decay and death ; this 
 novel aspect of his political doctrine having been opened 
 up to Hobbes partly by the growth of his conception of 
 science (to be made constructive like mathematics), partly 
 by his later experience of the actual dissolution of the 
 English monarchy. In the third part, setting himself to 
 consider with the utmost elaboration the constitution of 
 " A Christian Commonwealth " under the rule of Scrip- 
 ture, he managed to insinuate the results of a long-pro- 
 tracted course of rationalistic criticism, with the object 
 of barring out the spiritual pretensions of the Churches, 
 whether Papal or Anglican or Presbyterian. The last 
 part, under name of " The Kingdom of Darkness," after 
 the Kingdom of God, dealt still more pointedly with the 
 ecclesiastical sores to which Hobbes traced all civil distem- 
 per, fostered, in his view, by misinterpretation of Scrip- 
 ture, survival of Pagan superstitions, and errors of ancient 
 philosophy. Finally, in the course of a short "Keview 
 and Conclusion " of the whole work, he stated his view 
 of the duty of citizens at the national crisis of a change 
 of government; asserting, upon grave and consistent 
 grounds of principle, the right of an "ordinary subject" to 
 turn to the new power that could give protection, however 
 little he might approve of the circumstances of its origin. 
 
Effect on the Royalist Party. 71 
 
 The effect of the book at home will appear through 
 all Hobbes's later years. Abroad, it soon brought about 
 a great change in his own position. That he himself con- 
 sidered his personal loyalty impeached by anything he 
 had penned, could not be more completely disproved 
 than it is. As he had made no secret beforehand of his 
 wish to return home, so he now showed no unseemly 
 haste to be gone, but for months still continued to share 
 the fortunes and mix in the society of the royalist exiles. 
 Nay, when the young King of the Scots escaped to Paris 
 (about the end of October) after the defeat at Worcester, 
 Hobbes felt himself at perfect liberty to present to the 
 royal fugitive, fresh from the crushing disaster, a speci- 
 ally prepared manuscript copy of his book " engrossed " 
 (says Clarendon) " in vellum in a marvellous fair hand " 1 
 an odd proceeding in a conscious traitor. But if he 
 thought that he still stood where he had stood before, 
 there were others that thought differently. It is, indeed, 
 sufficiently absurd to find Clarendon declaring, in almost 
 the same breath with his mention of the gift to the 
 king, that the book was written to support Cromwell's 
 usurpation. This particular charge, afterwards com- 
 monly current though refuted by Clarendon's own ad- 
 mission, could not have occurred to any one so early as 
 1651, when Cromwell was still the servant of the Rump. 
 Nothing, however, could be more natural than that a 
 book like ' Leviathan ' should awake suspicion and dis- 
 like in the minds of royalists, then at the lowest depths 
 
 1 'Survey,' &c, 8. The beautifully written and finely bound MS., 
 now in the Brit. Museum (Egerton MSS., 1910), is doubtless this 
 copy. Some marginal titles of paragraphs, varying from the printed 
 ones, are in Hobbes's hand ; also occasional short insertions. 
 
72 Hobbes. 
 
 of despair. The exiled elergy in particular, rendered 
 critical by misfortune, and meeting in the book much 
 that jarred upon their honest religious convictions, 
 much, also, that was incomprehensible to their un- 
 reasoning loyalty, and above all, a vein of deep distrust of 
 clerical ambition, with an imposing scheme for the utter 
 subjection of spiritual to civil authority could not but 
 be affected to indignation in every fibre of their being. 
 Accordingly, as different accounts agree in stating, some 
 of them lost no time in working upon the mind of the 
 prince on his return, and for the moment they were 
 able to prevail upon his easy nature. When Hobbes, 
 soon after making his present, sought to pay his respects 
 in person to his former pupil, he was denied the 
 royal presence, and was told by the Marquis of Ormond 
 that he lay under grave charges of disloyalty and 
 atheism. Thus deprived of the prince's protection, 
 Hobbes, ever full of fears, at once saw himself exposed 
 to a twofold peril. The royalist party, he well knew, 
 counted in its ranks desperadoes who could slay who 
 had newly slain two defenceless envoys of the Common- 
 wealth, Dorislaus at the Hague, and Ascham at Madrid. 
 And there was another danger not to be slighted even 
 y by a man less prone to terror. The French clerical 
 authorities, made aware of the contents of ' Leviathan,' 
 and exasperated by such an open and unsparing assault 
 (no longer a masked attack, as in the ' De Give ') on the 
 Papal system, were moving (as Clarendon again bears con- 
 firmatory witness) to arraign the foreign offender. 1 No 
 
 1 'Survey/ &c, 9. But, writing close on the time (27th Jan. 165$, 
 to Secy. Nicholas, 'State Papers'), he says: "I had indeed some 
 hand in the discountenancing of my old friend, Mr H. . . . What 
 
Back in London. 73 
 
 course seemed left to Hobbes but sudden and secret flight. 
 After a self-imposed exile of eleven years, cast out in the 
 end by his own party and a fugitive from religious hate, 
 he could turn only to his native country which he had 
 been so ready to desert, and seek protection from the rev- 
 olutionary government which he had sacrificed everything 
 to oppose. It was a severe winter, and on the journey he 
 endured hardships which, shaken by a recent (second) 
 illness, 1 he was ill able to bear. On reaching London 
 he sent in his submission to the Council of State, and 
 without trouble was allowed to subside into private life. 
 
 the Catholics wished, I know not, but sure they contributed .nothing 
 to that justice." With Hobbes's own accounts in 'Vita' and 'Vit. 
 carm. exp.,' comp. E., iv. 415. 
 
 1 In August. Guy Patin, who was called in as doctor, gives a 
 lively account of the patient (Lettres choisies, under date Sept. 22, 
 1651). Disraeli (' Miscell. of Lit.', 267 n., ed. 1840) makes the error 
 of connecting Patau's report with the illness of 1647. 
 
 >"*" O" thr"^ 
 
 UNIVERSIT 
 
74 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 THE SYSTEM (1651-58). 
 
 When Hobbes came back at the end of 1651, an old man 
 of sixty-four, lie had made himself known to all the 
 world as the boldest and most trenchant of political 
 speculators ; but he had still to prove to the " philoso- 
 phers " that none of them had been thinking with such 
 breadth of system as he for some fifteen years past. His 
 business was now, as swiftly as might be, to set down 
 the whole foundations of his philosophy in the ' De 
 Corpore,' and then in the ' De Homine ' to present his 
 doctrine of human nature in more technical form, as 
 leading on to the foregone statement of his political 
 theory in the ' De Give.' He settled himself, accord- 
 ingly, at once to work, remaining in London (" Fetter 
 Lane ") where he might have the advantage of intellec- 
 tual society. Though he resumed his formal connection 
 with the Devonshire household in 1653, it did not suit 
 him, so long as he was at work, to live/with the earl, 
 who seems to have been mostly in the country till the 
 Restoration. 1 
 
 ~ 1 Excluded from the House of Lords all through the Protectorate, 
 as he had been since 1642, for devotion to the king ; but unmolested, 
 
1 Be Corpore ' and ' Be Homine! 75 
 
 He soon made way with his philosophical task, now 
 that his mind was at last fully delivered of its political 
 burden. In 1654 the 'De Corpore ' was in the press, if 
 not wholly printed. Delays intervened while he was 
 trying to meet objections urged privately by friends 
 against some solutions of impossible geometrical problems 
 which he fondly thought he had found from his new 
 principles ; but the objections being surmounted, or at 
 least, as he thought, sufficiently turned, publication 
 followed in the middle of 1655. 1 By this time, however, 
 he had become entangled in a vehement controversy over 
 one of the main issues of his thought (th&-dpjtiina-Qf 
 Necess ity;), and presently the whole foundations of his 
 system, which he fancied so securely laid in the 'De 
 Corpore,' were rudely shaken by a conspiracy of foes. 
 For the next two years he could describe his life only as 
 a " fight with wild beasts at Ephesus." The still out-, 
 standing treatise of the system did not appear till 1658, 
 and then proved to be only a nominal fulfilment of 
 what must be supposed to have been his original design. 
 Not much longer altogether than the old ' Human 
 Nature,' the * De Homine ' 2 consisted, in greater part, of 
 a number of optical chapters, turned into Latin (with 
 some abbreviations and other changes) from the unpub- 
 lished English treatise of 1646 (see p. 59, n., above). 
 "While he had determined to include in his general system 
 of philosophy this physical excursus, representing as it 
 did the protracted labours of past years, and to include 
 
 after submitting to Parliament, at the instance of his imperious 
 mother, in order to save the family estates, sequestrated in 1645. 
 Kennet, ' Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish' (1708). 
 
 *L.,i 2j ii. 1-132. 
 
76 Hobbes. 
 
 it with the doctrine of Man (rather than of Body) by- 
 reason of the special reference it involved to the organic 
 structure of the eye, there was added to it, without the 
 least pretence of connection, only a short account of 
 speech, appetite, the passions, &c, not more but less 
 systematic than what he had already set down in the 
 popular works. Thus, to all intents and purposes, 
 Hobbes's philosophical performance may be said to have 
 been completed in the ' De Corpore ' at the age of sixty- 
 seven, though he had the sense of an obligation left 
 which he made believe he was fulfilling as late as 
 seventy. 
 
 The story of the conflicts into which he was drawn 
 from 1654, and which checkered all his remaining years, 
 will best be told apart. It shows the man in a curious 
 light, but hardly in any degree affects the understanding 
 of his philosophical system. At this stage, therefore, 
 we may try to gain a view of his whole scheme of 
 thought, as he had been able, in one or other form of 
 composition, to set it forth. The salient Mature of the 
 system, giving it also its special interest, is unquestionably 
 its comprehensiveness. Logic, First Philosophy, Ge- 
 ometry, Mechanics, Physics, Psychology, Sociology and 
 Ethics, have all a place in Hobbes's exposition. It is not 
 much that he has to say under some of the heads, but he 
 has something to say under all, and all that he says hangs 
 (or' is meant to hang) together. It was still the age 
 when a man might think that he could compass the 
 round of knowledge and determine its issues. Bacon 
 had essayed the ordering of all human knowledge and 
 practice past, present, or to come with his wide- 
 sweeping glances. Descartes had a vision of philosophy 
 
Philosophy and Science. 77 
 
 as like a tree metaphysics the root, physics the trunk, 
 other sciences the branches, with practical mechanics, 
 medicine and ethics as the final outgrowth of all. It is 
 Hobbes's distinction, while conceiving in the same large 
 manner of human practice as related to a sum of human 
 knowledge, to have been able, in some measure, to unfold 
 his whole thought as he had conceived it. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The difference, now well understood, between Science 
 and Philosophy that Science deals with things as they 
 appear, while P hilosophy see ks to understand the fact 
 of their appearing has been clearly recognised only 
 since the special sciences began to be cultivated apart 
 from one another. The modern way of knowledge, 
 which supplements the manifold lines of phenomenal 
 inquiry by an express consideration of things in their 
 relation to mind, was prepared rather than trodden 
 throughout the greater part of the 17th century. It is 
 first distinctly traceable in Locke, who left the work of 
 " advancing the sciences " to Xewton and others, while 
 himself employed in " clearing the ground a little." 
 Descartes and his immediate followers, with all their 
 interest in external nature, had the older notion of 
 human knowledge as forming a homogeneous system, 
 to be thought out by one uniform method. They were 
 moderns in their concern for physical knowledge, but 
 they had not the modern understanding of the limits 
 within which the special sciences of nature were destined 
 to make way. Philosophy and Science were to them 
 one and the same notion, as they had been one notion to 
 Aristotle, who was seriously, or to the Schoolmen, who 
 
78 Hobhes. 
 
 were but formally," concerned with the variety of natural 
 things and processes. To Hobbes they are also one, and 
 one in a sense that departs in some respects still less 
 than Descartes' from the earlier conception. But at the 
 same time, there is that in his thought which brings him 
 nearer than Descartes, and that in his speech which 
 brings him nearer even than Locke, to those who have 
 come later. 
 
 Like Aristotle, he opposes Philosophy or Science in- 
 differently to Experience, though it is significant to note 
 how the word Science is with him pushing forward from 
 its old subordinate place to rank beside or before Philo- 
 sophy. By experience we_have a knowledge^!, ihings ; 
 philosophy or science is knowledge of their causes, t 
 Prom foregone knowledge of causes to arrive at effects, 
 or when effects arc given to strike out likely causes for 
 them in such form he is content to pass on the tradi- 
 tional description of the philosopher's work; but he 
 gives a meaning to the words that shows him to have 
 drifted far away from the old standing-ground. His, 
 V philosophy is to be concerned with " pheno mena " only, j 
 To know phenomena from the manner of their genera- ' 
 tion, or to devise some possible way of generation for 
 phenomena, if other philosophy than this is sought 
 for, Hobbes warns his readers to seek it elsewhere. 
 Not of the kind that makes philosophers' stones or "is 
 found in the metaphysic codes," his is but "the natural 
 reason of man busily flying up and down among the 
 creatures, and bringing back a true report of their order, 
 causes and effects." This is the modern conception of 
 Natural Science a vieAV of the order and relations of 
 things as they appear, without prior question as to their 
 
Scope of Philosophy. 79 
 
 appearing. And the object^ is declared by H obbes to ba 
 the gaining of power over things for hum an needs, which \ J 
 has ever been the characteri stic note of positive science. 1 / 
 
 ^Taking philosophy, then, as concerned only with thin gs 
 that appear as generated, Hobbes would at once get rid //\ 
 of the subjects that mainly exercised his Scholastic pre- I 
 decessors. God, as having no generation, and spirits, as 
 having no manifest properties (or phenomenal aspects), 
 cannot come within its scope (ta ^ Philosophy has nothing 
 to do with matters of faith, or with the facts of history, ^ 
 whether natural or civil, so far as they rest upon mere ex- 
 perience or authority. Bodies, or the affections of bodies, \ 
 remain then as its only proper subject ; and there being I 
 the two sorts of body, natural and civil (or politic), we 
 have at once the fundamental division of Philosophy into ' 
 Natural Philosophy and Civil Philosophy.^ But, as we 
 before saw that among natural bodies there is one, 
 Man, of quite special importance as both maker and 
 matter of the body politic, the series Nature, Man, 
 Citizen will best express the whole subject of philp- < 
 sophy, with the order of treatment. 
 
 Hobbes, however, in beginning with Nature before 
 Man, and calling the first part of his system ' On Body ' 
 simply, is not really satisfied to take the natural world' 
 as he finds it, and give the best account that he can of 
 things as they appear in their varied aspects and rela- 
 tions, from the point of view that we now call scientific. 
 He does not proceed without some prior inquiry of the 
 deeper sort that we still call philosophic, and the pres- 
 ence of which in such a thinker as Aristotle makes us 
 
 1 His saying, "Scientia propter potentiam " (L., i. 6), comes nearer 
 than anything in Bacon to the proverbial " Knowledge* is power." 
 
80 Hobbes. 
 
 speak of the great natural inquirer of antiquity as a 
 philosopher rather than a man of science. Before ap- 
 plying his mathematical and mechanical principles to 
 explain the actual phenomena of nature, Hobbes does, 
 in a fashion of his own, ask the question what a pheno- 
 menon is ; and, at an earlier stage (as before remarked), 
 he does not take up with magnitude and motion as the 
 prime aspects of Body till, like Aristotle, he has ex- 
 pressly discussed the fundamental notions, and first of 
 all investigated the means and method, of Scientific 
 Knowledge, /'in the Logic and First Philosophy with 
 which he begins the systematic treatise 'On Body/ 
 and later on in the transition to Physics, as also 
 incidentally in ' Human Nature ' and ' Leviathan/ 
 he cannot avoid probing, when he is not forward to 
 raise, the deeper questions which the modern division 
 of labour excludes from the special sciences to leave 
 them to philosophy. J And when it is found that his 
 general thinking has an interest and a value that must 
 be denied to his special inquiries so far as they bear 
 upon the physical world, we must after all class Hobbes, 
 in the modern period, with philosophers like Locke and 
 I Kant rather than with men of science like Galileo and 
 Newton. His special inquiries become interesting and 
 important only when they touch the subjects of Man 
 and Society, which, as they have been the last to 
 undergo (if they have yet undergone) a strictly scientific 
 treatment, have hitherto been cared for mainly by philo- 
 /^sophers. ^P r if 5 finally, Ave recur to what must be re- 
 / garded as the true original meaning of Philosophy the 
 \ guidance of conduct by insight, then truly may Hobbes 
 be described as a philosopher; for never did any one 
 
What is Science ? 
 
 83 
 
 look farther afield to bring all that he could discover 
 about the nature of the world or man to bear upon the 
 solution of the practical question how life may be 
 regulated. \ 
 
 REASONING AND METHOD. 
 
 Under the name of Logic, Hobbes begins or prefaces 
 his system with a doctrine of Eeasoning and Method, , 
 because Philosophy, as opposed to Experience, is reasoned 
 knowledge, and aims at giving a methodical, which is to 
 say, a connected and orderly, account of the causes of 
 things. Eeasoning is the means, and Method the way 
 and scheme, of science or philosophy. 
 
 While he deals with Method at any length only in 
 the systematic treatise, his doctrine of Eeasoning is to 
 be gathered also from other works. In the logical 
 section of the ' De Corpore,' where he follows the tradi- 
 tional line of treatment from Names through Proposition 
 and Syllogism to Fallacy, his real drift is indeed some- 
 what obscured. Amid all the acute observations he 
 makes on the common logical topics, he is there, as else- 
 where, seriously occupied with one question only, What 
 is Science, or true general knowledge 1 ? which belongs) 
 rather to the department of philosophy now distinguished) 
 as Theory of Knowledge ; though there is needed for the 
 solution, in the case of general knowledge, that kind of 
 analysis of the means and processes of express thinking 
 that makes up Logic. Hobbes answers the question 
 only more circumstantially in the introductory section 
 of the ' De Corpore ' than in ' Human Nature ' and 
 ' Leviathan,' and most of the merely logical details may be 'S 
 neglected without prejudice to the heart of his doctrine. \ 
 
 p. x, F 
 
80 Hobbes. 
 
 Reasoning in itself, lie always declares, is reckoning 
 or computing. "We do not reckon that is, add and 
 subtract only in numbers. In geometry, law, politics, 
 in all science whatsoever, we are putting things into or 
 taking them out of an account as much as in arithmetic. 
 Even in common experience we add or subtract every 
 time we see an object approach or recede : we are gradu- 
 ally taking account of more and more or of less and less 
 in it. But it is not by such a reckoning " compound- 
 ing and resolving of conceptions in silent thought" 
 that we arrive at science or philosophy. Particular 
 experience of sense, or memory, which follows sense, 
 is thrown out by the least change of circumstances; 
 whereas the reasoned knowledge of science holds good; 
 ^ for all minds, in all times and places. Scientific knowV 
 ledge, or knowledge of causes, is, in every sense, general^ 
 knowledge. How can natural experienceJbeJtiiined into 
 gene ral knowl edge 1 This is the first point to be settled. 
 Nobody is more urgent than Hobbes in pointing the 
 distinction between Science and Experience. " Expe- 
 rience," he declares, in language usually heard from 
 thinkers with whom he is never classed, "concludeth 
 nothing universally," while " nothing is produced by 
 reasoning aright but general, eternal and immutable 
 truth;" and the opposition runs through all his thought. 
 Olere it is reasoning against experience ; in his psychology 
 f\ \ it is reason against sense, or wisdom against prudence ; 
 [ ; in his politics it is reason against custom ; in Ids the- 
 \ ology (when he diverges into theology) it is reason 1 
 against faith, save at an innermost qore. Everywhere 
 the aim of Hobbes is to rci tionalise./ But he is other- 
 wise convinced (upon grounds of natural philosophy) 
 
Names. 83 
 
 that all knowledge has its beginning in sense, and is but 
 isense transformed. The means, therefore, of surmount- 
 jing the limits of sense-experience must still be sensible. 
 =Such a means is Language or Speech, made up of 4 
 Names. 
 
 " A name," says Hobbes, in the oft-quoted sentence, 
 " is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark which 
 may raise in our minds a thought like to some thought 
 we had before, and which, being [disposed in speech 
 and] l pronounced to others, may be to them a sign 
 of what thought the speaker had or had not before 
 in his mind." It is a m ark where mark is necessary, 
 for a ma n's th oughts ar e incon sta nt an d fading; 
 it is a sign whereby one man gets the benefit of 
 other^men's thoughffwhen without sign each man 
 would be r edu^eo!j o_Jiis_ own ; and it is c hosen a t 
 will^when another might equally have been chosen and 
 but that it is chosen it need not be employed at all. 
 What Hobbes_foils to sp.e is, that if names are both 
 mar ks and signs marks to the thinker h imself, si gns 
 of his t hought to oHiers they are signs before they are 
 marks ; since it is only as m en have a life_ in common 
 and form"~~by intercommunication a social conception 
 of things , that they become swif t to mark w hat goes on 
 within them. He errs also, as we now understand, in ^ 
 
 1 The words given in brackets are omitted in the English trans- 
 lation, here (E., i. 16) otherwise followed, of the 'De Corpore.' This 
 translation (see p. 174, below) is not from Hobbes's own hand, 
 though superintended by him. As it is more commonly read and 
 quoted than the Latin original, the warning should at once be given 
 that it is never to be trusted by itself. Though terse and vigorous in 
 style, it often misses^ and not seldom wholly inverts, the sense : see, 
 e.g., the end of 2 and beginning of 13 of chap 6. 
 
84 Holies. 
 
 not seeing that speech has in the first instance a purely 
 natural origin among men as they are constituted, how- 
 ever it may later receive all manner of voluntary, and, in 
 a sense, arbitrary developments. None the less he is 
 the first of m odern thinkers to recognise the now well- 
 established truth, that intellec tual action becomes effectiv e 
 according as it works itse lf out in a progressive system 
 of expression. 
 
 It is, however, only as names are systematically com- 
 bined into speech, in the form of Proposition, that they 
 become, according to Hobbes, the instrument of general 
 knowledge, going beyond mere' experience; and while 
 he divides names in various ways after the manner 
 of the logicians, the point of real importance is to 
 determine the character of the General Name which 
 
 enters as term into propositio n. A name, he says, is 
 called common or universal when it is given to any one 
 'of many things from which we derive a like conception, 
 or is imposed upon many several things for their simili- 
 tude in some quality or accident. " Universal " is not 
 the name of anything actually existing, as if besides all 
 
 / single men there existed man-in-general (which would 
 
 be taking the name for the thing it signifies); nor is it 
 
 Ahe name of any idea or phantasm formed in the mind ; 
 
 "but it is always the name only of some word (vox) or 
 
 name. AVhat corresponds to the general name in the 
 
 ., world of reality is the multitude of similar individual 
 things, of each of which it is the name. What answers 
 to it in the mind is the image or phantasm of some one 
 
 .' of the resembling things so designated, but it may be 
 any one; as when a pain ter drawing the pic ture of 
 a man in general, though he may choose what man 
 
Proposition. 85 ' 
 
 he pleases, must needs choose some man of those that 
 are, have been or may be, none of whom are universal. 
 Such is the sum of Hobbes's scattered statements on 
 the subject of the General Name, and when they are 
 all taken together, we may look in vain for a more cir- . 
 cumspect deliverance through all the later upholders of 
 Nominalism. 
 
 The form of Proposition arisesJ^ojQiJlie^ Name, because 
 names have this superiority over all other marks and 
 signs of thought, whether natural or arbitrary, that they* 
 may be connected into running speech, and so be made I 
 to represent continuous mental discourse or succession of) 
 thoughts. There is already combination in such a name 
 as " animal," which is made up of the two simple names 
 "body" and "animated"; but the coupling that is 
 of chief account for science or general knowledge is 
 in the form of Proposition, with the more complex^ 
 form of Syllogism. In P roposition, two names are 
 coupled so as to signify that the speaker conceives the 
 second to be a name of the same thing of which the first 
 is Tilie name. Hobbes has generally been reported as 
 saying no more; but he is careful to add that the 
 coupling, whether it is expressed by the verb " is " or 
 by an inflexion of the predicate or (as in some lan- 
 guages) by mere juxtaposition of the names, does, 
 in Proposition, besides raising by the two names the , 
 thought of one and the same thing, farther make us 
 think of the reason why upon the same thing the two \ 
 names were imposed. When, for example, we say 
 " Body is 'movable," the mind does not simply acquiesce 
 in the double designation, biit is set upon seeking out 
 what it is " to be a body " and whji^^^Jb^inoyable "n -e^. 
 
86 Holies. 
 
 or, in other words, how the thing differs from other 
 things to be thus (and not otherwise) doubly named. 
 It is then seen to have the names "body" and "mov- 
 able," which are called Concrete, as names of something 
 supposed to exist, because of certain accidents which 
 are powers or affections of the thing ; while these, which 
 \are farther the causes of our co nceiving the thing a s we 
 
 ' do, are themselves spoken of by names th at are_ call ed 
 Abstract, a kind ot names that has been grossly abused 
 
 \ by tire "me taphysical writers," but of the greatest u se 
 in science. 
 
 The p6int t hat Hobbes seems thus anxious to ma ke 
 is, t hat without the use of names in the form of prop o- 
 sition there is no coming at a knowledge of " accid ents " 
 as distinguishabl e from thing s ; and hence no Science, 
 /which deals with the generation of accidents. Con- 
 nected speech enables us to have a general knowledge of 
 things, because it enables us to view abstractly the at- 
 tributes they have in common. At other times, he is 
 content to suppose that, without- speech, a knowledge of 
 the properties of particular things might be obtained (as 
 a deaf-mute might discover in a triangle before him the 
 equality of its three angles to two right angles) but 
 could not be fixed and generalised. On either ground, 
 Janguage is proved to be the indispensable instrument of 
 jscientific knowledge, which is general as well as abstract. 
 Hobbes, only, does nothing to solve, or indeed ignores,' 
 the fundamental difficulty of explaining how the mind's 
 frailty, in keeping hold of the succession of its natural 
 "^experience, is helped by the addition or substitution of 
 an arbitrary verbal association. Language must be con- 
 ceived as having both a natural and a social origin that 
 
Truth. 87 
 
 is to say, as arising naturally between man and man- 
 before it is understood how words may become a means 
 of effectively fixing conjunctions of thought that would 
 otherwise be loose, and, still more, of conjoining thoughts 
 that otherwise would not be conjoined at all. 
 
 So much, in any case, for the generality of Science. 
 But how are the general expressions of science, then^ 
 related to the reality of things'? This is the question of^!> 
 Truth, and we have to see how Hobbes, from his logical 
 point of view, advances and is able to meet it. 
 
 A proposition, he declares, is true when the predicate 
 contains the subject within it, or is the -name of every 
 tiling of which the subject is the name ; and there cannot 
 be any other kind of truth than truth of proposition. 
 We may have experience of one thing as like another, 
 but likeness is not truth. Neither in passing from one 
 thought or representation to another, on the ground of 
 experience, will Hobbes allow that there can be any 
 question of truth, though he does not refuse to say, at 
 another time, that in such a case there may be error.V^ 
 Truth, while it can be said of names as coupled in pro- 
 position, can be said of nothing but names so coupled. 
 How else, he asks, could there be such a thing as Neces- 
 sary Truth ? It is, for example, eternally true that 
 "Man is an animal," though there is no 'necessity that ^ 
 either man or animal should eternally exist. ^Truth is, 
 in fact, a certain fixed or consistent way of using the 
 names imposed by ourselves or others ; and as names, we 
 saw, are arbitrarily imposed, Hobbes is forward, whe n 
 he is in the vein, to draw the conclusion that truth is in 
 all strictness the creation, and even the arbitrary creation, 
 of speaking men. It follows that Science, which con- 
 
88 Hobbes. 
 
 sists of names, in this sense, truly joined into proposi- 
 rv tions, and of propositions, in the same sense, truly joined 
 A \ into syllogisms, does not, like Experience, give a know- 
 ledge of facts or reality, but only of the use of names.% 
 Elsewhere he puts it that, while Sense and Memory give 
 a knowledge (of fact) that is absolute, Science, being 
 knowledge of the consequence of one affirmation to an- 
 other, is merely conditional. Thus, he argues, all true 
 knowledge reposes ultimately on definitions; which them- 
 selves are certainly true, because they are mere explica- 
 tions of names chosen with a determinate meaning. 
 
 There is no way of overcoming the difficulty here in 
 Hobbes's theory of general knowledge. His denuncia- 
 tion of the Scholastic quibbling with words, and his 
 brilliant epigrams on the abuse of language, show him 
 eager, with the foremost of his time, to work towards a 
 knowledge of things ; but he cannot express what he 
 so clearly sees the necessity of speech for science with- 
 out committing himself to positions that appear to ex- 
 clude all such reference to actual experience as can give 
 / any real import to human speech and thought. Truth, 
 with Hobbes, is so much an affair of naming, and nam- 
 l ing is so much an arbitrary process, that science, for any 
 reason that he gives to the contrary, becomes altogether 
 divorced from fact. If a true proposition is made true 
 in the act of giving names, and remains true as the same 
 names continue to be joined together, what need that it 
 have any objective application at all? In definitions 
 Hobbes leaves quite aside the question how there comes \ 
 to be such a determinate meaning expressed by one \ 
 name that it can be explicated by the combined use of 
 other more general names. Though there may be no 
 
Falsity. 89 
 
 question of real truth between the subject and pre- 
 dicate of the prepositional form in which a definition is 
 set out, it is no matter of indifference to science whether ^ 
 the elements conjoined in the predicate represent some/ } 
 actual conjunction in experience; while of truth em- ^ys- 
 bodied in real or synthetic propositions, which are not ' 
 definitions, Hobbes's theory takes no account at all. 
 
 Such as it is, however, the doctrine of Truth gets 
 some farther illustration from an interesting view of 
 Error. We may pass over what is first said on the 
 combination of propositions in Syllogism, where Hobbes 
 is original only in attempting to express the exact men- 
 tal process between premisses and conclusion and fails 
 transparently. Error in the mere " form " of reasoning, 
 he later remarks, may always be shown to arise from the 
 presence of four terms, but the right use of syllogism 
 comes by practice and the study of strict demonstration 
 (as in mathematics) rather than by heljD of logical pre- 
 cepts. The error he is more anxious to signalise is in the 
 "matter" of propositions, and should in strictness be 
 called Falsity, to distinguish it from the " tacit error " 
 .of sense or thought that consists in a mistaking of 
 natural signs, and arises, in animals as well as men, from 
 the very want of reasoning with general language. As 
 he puts it in his humorous way, the human privilege of 
 reasoning or reckoning with general names, in all things 
 of which there is a more or less, is " allayed by another, 
 and that is by the privilege of absurdity to which no 
 living creature is subject' but man only ; and of men X 
 those are of all most subject to it that profess philo- 
 sophy." Ealsity, absurdity, or senseless speech, as op- 
 posed to truth, is then the calling of anything by a 
 
90 Holies. 
 
 . name that is not its name ; or, in other words, is coupling 
 in proposition the names of different things, whereof he 
 makes four main kinds : (1) Bodies, (2) Accidents, (3) 
 Phantasms, (4) Names themselves and Speeches. As 
 many ways as there are of combining any two of these 
 with one another, so many are the ways of incoherent 
 speech current, as he shows by examples, more espe- 
 cially in the " common philosophy," against which 
 the doctrine is obviously pointed. . Names are rightly v 
 
 4 coupled only when they may be proved (by definition) 
 to be of one and the same kind. However, a proposition 
 4 is not therefore true when the fundamental forms of 
 falsity are thus avoided. To prove" it positively true, 
 definition must be carried much farther. Eoth names 
 must be resolved, it may' be over .and. over again, till 
 brought to that which is most simple in the kind ; and 
 
 r if the truth, after all, is not evident, it. then becomes, 
 says Hobbes, a question of philosophy.' That is to say, 
 it must be investigated by reasoning that starts from 
 such primary definitions as he next proceeds, under the 
 head of Method, to exhibit as lying at the basis of all 
 human knowledge. In fine, he has ' still no account to" 
 give of proposition as conjoining in -general terms the 
 facts of actual experience, but would appear - to suggest 
 that what there is more in any truth than 1 a fixed and 
 recognised use of names, is to be understood only in 
 systematic connection with certain first principles to be 
 once for all laid down in such a way as that they may 
 be accepted for rational. 
 
 The problem of Method, with Hobbes, involves two 
 questions : how to use reasoning (1) for a knowledge of 
 the causes of things generally, (2) for determining par- 
 
The Search for Causes. 91 
 
 ticular conjunctions of cause and effect ; and the answer 
 to the first not only provides the means of answering the 
 other, but takes the form of a complete scheme of -philo- 
 sophical knowledge. 
 
 The search for causes sets out from such knowledge 
 of_things as, is had by way of sense. This is a know- 
 ledge of things as they appear in fact which is to say, 
 in all that complex variety of sensible aspects that makes 
 them singular. For knowledge_of_cause; on the other 
 hand, the aspects or appearances of things must be taken 
 separately rather than as they are in fact joined together.^/ 
 Now, though less known to us than the singular things 
 of sense, universals, as the common aspects of things 
 may be called, are (in Scholastic phrase, after Aristotle,) 
 better known to nature, or in themselves. The first 
 step, then, in the actual work of philosophy is to make 
 an analysis of sensible objects into their " parts " as thus J 
 ,. understood. 
 ^ For the methodical conduct of such analysis Hobbes 
 gives no directions. With what things it should be- 
 gin, if with any rather than with others, and by what 
 steps the more should be reached from the less univer- 
 sal till the most universal notions are clearly recognised 
 to be such, is in no way indicated. Here, if nowhere 
 else, some reference might be expected to Bacon's 
 theory of Induction, had that made any impression 
 upon Hobbes's mind ; but there is not the faintest re- 
 miniscence of it. He is only sure, as it is the sensible 
 world in which he, with- his- contemporaries, is inter- 
 ested, that it is from a consideration of the actual things 
 of sense that any attempt at understanding must set 
 out. The understanding itself, however, is a purely 
 
 A 
 
<)-2 Hobbes, 
 
 rational determination, and proceeds in him without 
 any of that anxious looking backwards and forwards to 
 \ sense- experience which is the note of the Baconian 
 method. 
 
 Once obtained, by whatever way of resolution, the 
 notions, than which Hobbes can think of none more 
 universal, are then to be put together again in order to 
 account for the actual appearance of things ; but for 
 this they must first of all be defined. Some, the most, 
 general of all, such as Space, Body, Motion, admitting' 
 of no resolution into anything else or simpler, can 
 but be expressed in the shortest possible speech that 
 will seem to raise a clear and full idea of them, or, 
 otherwise, be indicated by way of examples. Others, 
 which have some conceivable causes into which fehejj 
 can be resolved, are to be defined ultimately by 
 stating these; which can only, says Hobbes, bo their 
 generating motions, since it is plain that all have but 
 one cause, namely, Motion (while of motion itself there 
 can be no other cause than motion). \Tlio whole body, 
 then, of fundamental definitions, of one class or the 
 other, with such more immediate consequences of them 
 as complete the rational account of the sensible world 
 in its most genera! aspects, makes up what he would" "* 
 call First Philos ophy.^ 
 
 Hereupon begins the more special work of rational 
 interpretation, by progressive composition of such 
 first principles of things. Body (as we shall see) being 
 assumed as extended in space, the first thing is to un- 
 derstand all the modes of extension as they are gener- 
 ated by motion simply ; or, in other words, to trace the 
 effects of simple motion in the aspects of body as ex- 
 
Scheme of Philosophical Knowledge. 93 
 
 tended : this is done in Geometry. Next to be consid- 
 ered, under the special name of Doctrine of Motion, 
 are all such motor effects between body and body as 
 appear in the manifest form of drawing, thrusting, &c. 
 In the third place, motion is to be followed out among 
 the invisible parts of bodies; but as it then appears. 
 not as motion but as sensible quality (light, sound, &c), 
 there is required a previous consideration of the causes 
 of Sense itself ; in dependence upon which there fol- 
 lows whatever most likely explanation may be con- 
 jectured for the actual phenomena of the earth and 
 heavens : the whole may bo called Physics. (After- 
 wards, as specially dependent on the physical explana- 
 tion of sense and imagination, comes the inquiry into 
 the various motions of the mind, distinguished by 
 Hobbes in this connection under the name of Moral 
 Philosophy. \ And, finally, upon this follows the doc- 
 trine of Civil Philosophy ; yet not so exclusively as 
 that there may not otherwise be a scientific treatment 
 of it upon a direct analysis of our conscious experi- 
 ence and consideration of such notions as "just" and 
 "unjust." 
 
 By the side of this general scheme of philosophical 
 knowledge, the rest of Hobbes's doctrine of Method 
 where he prescribes the way of solving particular ques- 
 tions in science and distinguishes between Discovery 
 and Demonstration claims no particular notice. 
 Enough to have seen how, in his view, it is possible, 
 from a rational determination of first principles, by or- 
 derly synthesis, to obtain an absolute science of the 
 more general aspects of things and a satisfactory under- 
 standing of such as are more special, even to the most 
 
94 Hobbes: 
 
 complex relations between man and man. But if the 
 first principles of such universal science are definitions, 
 N and, as Hobbes insists, only definitions, how is this to 
 be understood in face of the declaration that definitions 
 are nothing more than arbitrary conjunctions of names 1 
 It is another language that Hobbes now speaks, \Ne 
 
 rv/\ are now told that the words explicating any name 
 must be such as will raise an exact idea of the th.mgj>j 
 Or, if there is still some echo of the earlier declaration 
 in the saying that to refuse to accept a man's definition 
 is the same as to refuse to be taught by him, it is yet 
 added that all parts of the subject defined must be 
 
 * understood as they are resolved in the definition, before 
 this can be accepted as a principle of science. yVnd, 
 even more, the requirement now expressly formulated, 
 that the definitions of real science shall always be 
 constructive when it is possible to assign the generation 
 of the subject, transports Hobbes at once out of the 
 circle of merely verbal expression within which, in his 
 eagerness to magnify the importance of speech for 
 thought, he had let himself be imprisoned when he was 
 not thinking of the actual procedure of -science. / The 
 distinction, indeed, which he makes among the aspects 
 of things as dealt with by science that some of them, 
 and not others, admit of a priori construction is neither 
 now nor later grounded by him in such an analysis of 
 knowledge, psychological or philosophical, as can alone 
 justify it. Notwithstanding, we are left at the end of 
 his introductory section with a scheme of philosophical 
 knowledge so coherent and comprehensive, that there 
 should be no little interest in seeing him develop and 
 elaborate it into the fulness of a system. 
 
 (\ 
 
The Starting-Point. 95 m 
 
 FIRST PRINCIPLES. 
 
 In accordance with the scheme, Hobbes proceeds, in 
 Part ii. of the 'De Corpore,' to lay down the First 
 Grounds of Philosophy in a number of widest defini- 
 tions and demonstrations. Five chapters on Place and 
 Time, Body and Accident (including the first account 
 of Motion), Cause and Effect, Power and Act, Same 
 and Different- bring him to Quantity, and he is then 
 drawn into the special subject of Geometry ; though he 
 would have it that he is still occupied with First Philo- 
 sophy when he develops, in two chapters more, a theory 
 of Proportion and even seeks to determine the differ- 
 ences of Line, Angle and Figure. For clearness of view, 
 it will be well at the first stage to keep more closely 
 than he does himself to the lines of the scheme, and 
 separate out as far as possible his more strictly philoso- 
 phical principles. Though it is not altogether without 
 reason that he takes up into what he calls his First 
 Philosophy some part of the subordinate doctrines of 
 Magnitude and Motion, the very fact that we must 
 follow him later as he departs from the scheme in blend- 
 ing these two together (in one Part iii.) makes it the 
 more important to adhere to it as long as we can. The 
 first thing of all to understand is the exact position he 
 takes up in beginning his general task of scientific con- 
 struction. 
 
 Starting with a feigned annihilation of the whole 
 world save one man, with whom remain " ideas " or 
 " phantasms " of his former experience, Hobbes at once 
 finds Space and Time to have a being only in the mind, 
 yet, while purely subjective, affording all the ground 
 
9G Holies. 
 
 that is necessary for distinguishing such notions as Part 
 and Whole, Division and Composition, One and Number, 
 Continuous and Contiguous, Beginning and End, Finite 
 and Infinite. Hence he is led to assert that Body, as it 
 would be if created anew, or as it now in fact really is, 
 exists with one constant attribute of Extension, mentally 
 represented as Space, and has all its variable and varying 
 aspects explicable in terms of Motion, mentally repre- 
 sented as "Time. Now it might seem that, in thus 
 beginning with a notion of Space and Time as subjective, 
 lie plants himself at the properly philosophical point of 
 view whence it is sought to understand being from 
 thinking ; but it is not so. He never makes any ques- 
 tion (like Descartes) of the absolute existence of Body, or 
 doubts with himself how it can come to be known. He 
 assumes it as unreservedly as it is assumed in the positive 
 sciences, where the problem is to find the simplest which 
 is to say, the most general phenomenal expression for 
 its various manifestations. It can-rif not be said that 
 thinking is of as little account with him as with the 
 common scientific inquirer, who also thinks, but does 
 not think of the thinking, in comparing things with one 
 another. Hobbes has been led, by his previous analysis 
 of language as the instrument of thought, to doubt or 
 disbelieve the full reality of a general knowledge of 
 things. As he now puts it, "when we calculate tire 
 magnitude and motions of heaven or earth, we do not 
 ascend into heaven that we may divide it into parts and . 
 measure the motions thereof ; but we do it sitting still 
 in our closets or in the dark." The fiction of a world as 
 no longer really existent, but only thought of, seems to 
 him a good way of showing what can be known gener- 
 
Space and Time. 97 
 
 ally which is to say, scientifically of the world as it 
 really is. This is not touching the bottom of know- 
 ledge, and it is at a later stage that Hobbes has forced 
 upon him, to the extent that he ever recognises, the 
 proper question of philosophy; but it is science of more 
 than usual insight. 
 
 The view he begins with of Space and Time gives 
 at once the measure of his insight. It was no small 
 stretch of thought to conceive of space as merely subjec- 
 tive, and declare that such is the very space that all men 
 truly mean when they speak of it. There is also a hint 
 of deeper philosophical consideration in the remark that 
 the phantasms remaining with the survivor from the 
 wreck of things may be viewed in either of two ways 
 as mental facts if the question be about the mind's 
 powers, or as yet appearing to exist or stand outside ; in 
 other words, as having either a subjective or an objective 
 reference. But the objective reference is what really 
 concerns him, when he straightway defines Space as the 
 p hantasm of an exi stent thing simply as existe nt. A 
 phantasm as it is proved to be by remaining as a fact of 
 consciousness though the world of things were destroyed, 
 it not only, with Hobbes, portends a reality of extended 
 body but cannot otherwise than as an effect of extended 
 body have its being in consciousness accounted for., 
 Tjtnp. also, as taken note of by movement of sun or 
 clock, he regards as a phantasm produced by body in. 
 motion, or would fain call simply the idea of motion oir 
 moved body. He has to add, however, that it stands 
 rather for the fact of s uccessio n or before- and-a fter in 
 motion ; which means that it is a prior fact of conscious- 
 ness involved in the perception of motion, rather than in 
 
 p. x. G 
 
98 Hobles. 
 
 any way explicable from motion as an objective occur- 
 rence. Altogether, he is clear only on the point that 
 Space and Time are not other than subjective, while 
 somehow related to a reality of body extended and 
 moving. How related, it needs a deeper kind of philo- 
 sophical inquiry to determine than any that he attempts. 
 Body being thus assumed in no way accounted for 
 by Hobbes, what the initial fiction serves to bring out is 
 the two main aspects, of Extension and Motion, und er 
 w hich, body is known or can be made the su bject of 
 science. The fiction is dropped as soon as he passes on to 
 say that, if any of the bodies that were supposed to be 
 annihilated is now supposed to be called back again into 
 real being, such body will subsist of itself independently 
 of thought will exist outside of the thinker, and yet, as 
 it is extended, will fill or coincide with some part of 
 (imaginary) space. How the coincidence may be under- 
 stood is, again for want of deeper inquiry, left undeter- 
 mined ; though perhaps he has the difficulty in view 
 when he adds that body, as it is called subject (substance), 
 is so put away under imaginary space as to be apprehen- 
 sible by reason only, not by sense. The observation is 
 carried no farther, and he remains satisfied with any 
 expression that, while not ignoring a relation of being 
 to thought, will suffer him to pass as swiftly as may be 
 to the special theory of Magnitude and Motion, in which 
 he is more interested than in the fundamental questions 
 of general philosophy. As he began, too, by taking 
 space as the mental representation of body, he makes 
 no question, when laying the foundations of his system, 
 of there being aught but body to be mentally represented. 
 It is elsewhere, chiefly upon occasion of his coming 
 
Body and Accident. 99 
 
 across the current notions of spiritual existence in his 
 criticism of religion, that he considers the possibility of 
 being that is not corporeal, and scouts it : arguing that 
 if anything really exists it is and must appear as 
 extended ; or that if anything (ghost or spirit) appears 
 extended without being really so it is merely phantas- 
 mal, like a dream-image or reflection of an object in 
 water, devoid of all true reality. 
 
 For the scientific theory of Body, however, to which 
 he thus confines himself, he finds it necessary to make 
 philosophical distinction of the notion of Accid ent, un- 
 derstanding this as widely as attribute or quality. 
 Negatively, accident is neither body~nor part of bo dy 
 nor in any intelli gible sense (as it i s said) inherent in 
 "130 dy . I'ositiveTy^it is better understood by examples 
 than by any formal definition. If it must be put into 
 words, Hobbes cannot otherwise express it than as our' 
 way of conceiving body or (which, he says, is the same 
 thing) the power body has of making itself be conceived. 
 But the true question to ask in the case of any accident 
 is rather : How does it happen (accidit) that body ap- 
 pears thus or thus 1 which implies that it might appear 
 otherwise ; and this is just what can be said of all its 
 ways of appearing save one. The extended Tnqgnjt.ndft 
 because of which anything is called body cannot be 
 absent unless the body ceases to be, or cannot be con- 
 ceived as in any way altere d while the body rem ains 
 what it is ; but all other accidents u nder which body is 
 tho ught of may be generated px ~destroyed, andT when a \ 
 body, itself is said to be generated or destroyed it is 
 properly of its accidents (ahvays excepting its extended 
 magnitude) that this is to be understood. What has 
 
100 Hobbes. 
 
 been called Essence is, then , nothing bu t the a ccident (!) 
 for which a thing gets its name ; being otherwise called 
 Form, when viewed as it is generated. Hobbes is willing 
 also to adopt the traditional expression materia prima 
 to mark the conception of bod y in general as simply 
 extended : not that there is any such thing really ex- 
 istent without special form or accident, but because it is 
 from a consideration of body as simply extended that 
 all explanation of the particular aspects of body must 
 set out. 
 
 Hobbes's fundamental position, then, being that, as 
 Body b y its o ne indefeasible attribute of Exte nsion 
 begets the phantasm or idea of Space , it is itself under- 
 stood as this is understood, the question for science is 
 how, in detail, the various and varying aspects of ex- 
 tended body ( accidents as the sejnay properly be called) 
 take their rise. To this his general answer is : by way 
 of Motion. There are first the varieties of extended 
 magnitude, more particularly of Figure, that body pre- 
 sents; next the changes to which figured bodies are 
 exposed. Being merely extended in space, it is only 
 with reference to space in other words, as moved that 
 bodies can undergo chan ge ; as_jt_js_^lso_jiot_otherwise 
 than by (imaginary) motion that the different dimensions 
 of space itself, with all the varieties of figure, can be 
 conceived as determined. As for Moti on, which may be' 
 defined as " the continual relinquishing of one pla ce and 
 aco^nrmg^^another^^inrtime, he has before said that it 
 isseenat once To have no possible cause but motion 
 again. Now it is demonstrab le that motio n__or change 
 of m otion^ .in body that is extended an d_nojhing but 
 extended, can come to pass only from some extern al. 
 
Cause and Effect. Ilvr jy r tj UQJ ' ^ 
 
 body_at once m oved and contiguous. />3ffce^t^latipn of 
 things to one anoTher is thus a purely 
 
 auon oi 
 
 iSTtoft 
 
 and it is in this physical regard and no other" 
 relation of Cause and Effect is next, after the distinction 
 of Accident from Body, considered. 
 
 Though body has its being as extended, it is not as > 
 merely extended that one body becomes agent in relation / 
 to another as patient ; else all agents would produce like 
 effects in all patients. /Action between bodies depends 
 upon their special accidents. An effeclTwrought in 
 an y patient is thegeneration or destru ction of some ^ 
 accident ; and the cause of this effect is nothin g less 
 than the aggregate oi all Xc cidents, in agent and pa tient 
 togefH er^/wliich being supposed present it cannot be 
 understood that the effect is not at the same time pro-, 
 duced and any of which being absent it cannot be 
 understood that the effect is produced. Such is Cause 
 simple and entire, inclusive of causa sine qua non, which 
 may be any one of the accidents that in a particular case 
 is wanting to the production of the effect. It may be 
 resolved into Efficient Cause and Material Cause, as the 
 aggregates of accidents in agent and patient respectively. 
 Beyond these, Hobbes contends, there are no such other 
 kinds of cause to be allowed as the "writers of meta- 
 physics " have called Formal and Final. Formal Cause, 
 or, as it is also called, Essence of a thing, is no cause at 
 all, : though knowledge of the essence (in the sense before 
 denned) is indeed efficient cause of knowledge of the 
 thing. Final Cause or End, Hobbes undertakes to show 
 at 'the proper time, is also but another special case of 
 efficient cause, manifested in those things that have sense 
 or will. And thus interpreting all causation in the purely 
 

 /w 
 
 p 
 
 102 Hobbes. 
 
 phenomena l, sen sp t which we have since become accus- 
 tomed in physical science, he disposes in like manner 
 of the cognate notion of Power, which, as he takes it, 
 differs from Cause (efficient and material) only in having 
 ref erence to an eff ect not_yet hut to bej^roduced, and 
 called in this relation Act. A cause, he further remarks, 
 would not be entire if it failed to produce its effect (this 
 being supposed possible) or to produce it at the instant 
 of becoming entire. y Every effect, past, present or f uture, 
 is thus pr oduced by a necess ary cause, in the sense that 
 as soon^ajjhe^auaaj s entirethe~effecT"cannot be under- 
 stoodno t to fol lawy Contingency said of any accident , 
 is, therefore, to be understood only in respect of such 
 precedent accidents as it does not depend upon, not as if 
 any accident were itself not necessarily caused. 'SA.gain, 
 an impossible act (or event) is that to the production of 
 which there never shall be full power ; a possible event 
 is that which is not impossible, and which therefore shall 
 at some time be produced. But whatever shall at some 
 time become actual it is impossible to hinder. Every pos- 
 sible event will thus (he concludes) be necessarily produced. \ 
 Hobbes has little more to add in the way of general ' 
 philosophical doctrine before passing to the considera- 
 tion of those aspects of bodies by which they are dis- 
 tinguished from one another. Identity and Difference 
 are, however, to be understood in general, because it 
 happens to all bodies alike to be somehow distinguished. 
 Two bodies may be said to differ, when something can N| , 
 be "said "of one that cannot be said of the other at the 
 same time; and because they must always differ at 
 least in number, or be at once in two places, no two 
 are the same. But bodies may, further, differ in m 
 
Identity and Difference. 103 
 
 nitude, so as to be called Unequal j or in more than 
 magnitude, when they are Unlike, and this either (says 
 Hobbes) in species, if the difference falls within the 
 same sense, or in genus, if it falls under different 
 senses. /This unlikeness or likeness, inequality or equal- 
 ity of bodies, is called their Relation, and the bodies 
 themselves correlative; but the relation is no second 
 accident in either of the correlatives, only another name 
 for the accident in each upon which the comparison is 
 made.^> " He that makes two unequal bodies, makes also 
 their inequality; and he," Hobbes continues, with a 
 practical object which there is no mistaking, " that 
 makes a rule and an action, makes also, if the action be 
 congruous to the rule, their congruity; if incongruous, 
 their incongruity." As for the much-debated question, 
 what makes a body to be identical with itself, some 
 placing the ground of identity in unity of the matter, 
 others in unity of the form, and again others in unity 
 of the aggregate of accidents, here, too, as he shows at 
 length, everything really depends on what the name of 
 the body is given for. 
 
 Of the topics that follow Quantity, Proportion, &c. 
 it may at least be said that they are not treated in 
 a way to justify their inclusion in " First Philosophy." 
 
 MAGNITUDE AND MOTION. 
 
 After determining what pertains to Body in g eneral, 
 taken as simply extended, Hobbes has next,in~~his 
 scheme, to account for its particular appearances, be- 
 ginning with the varieties of extended magnitude itself. 
 Until it is understood how this or that figure arises, 
 it cannot rightly be asked how bodies, being figured, 
 
104 Holies. 
 
 move as in the way of change they c an but move 
 in relation to one another. But as the generation, of 
 any figure is also not to be conceived except as some 
 motion, the subjects of magnitude and motion become 
 inevitably bound up in Hobbes's exposition from the 
 first; and they are indeed so intertwined to the last, 
 in the one ill-ordered section of " Proportions of Motions 
 and Magnitudes " which is all he offers in transition from 
 "First Philosophy" to "Physics," that we shall best, 
 in attempting to pass as swiftly as possible over this 
 portion of his work, bring under one head all that needs, 
 for any purpose, to be noted of his mathematical and 
 mechanical principles. 
 
 It is certainly nothing of positive value in the way of 
 special results that lends any interest to Hobbes's mathe- 
 matical chapters in the ' De Corpore ' or to the later con- 
 troversial writings in which he defended and developed 
 his notions in a very singular manner, brimful as both 
 are of the grossest errors and inconsistencies. The in- 
 terest that, notwithstanding, may be claimed for them 
 is of another kind. Refusing to look at any science 
 otherwise than in its place in the general body of human 
 knowledge, Hobbes makes some approach towards a 
 true philosophy of Mathematics, or at least Geometry ; 
 and, while aspiring to recast the principles of the science 
 in accordance with a philosophical idea, he had it also 
 in view to make them more effective for the solution 
 of questions that hitherto had baffled human powers, 
 especially such as he conceived to be involved in the 
 task of physical explanation which had become the 
 worjc of his age. 
 
 The prominence he assigns to Geometry, as if it were 
 
Number and Extension. 105 
 
 equivalent to Mathematics, follows from his original 
 position that nothing but extended body exists as the 
 subject of science. Arithmetic or the science of num- 
 ber is, in his view, so much a dependant on Geometry 
 that he gives it no place at all in his general scheme or 
 exposition. Elsewhere he contends that its subordina- 
 tion is proved by its tardy and imperfect development 
 among the Greeks ; has only scorn for the more general 
 calculus of Algebra which his contemporaries were mak- 
 ing so powerful; and would even (at a controversial 
 pinch) derive the very notion of number from the break- 
 in g-up of extended magnitude into parts. Ey implica- 
 tion, however,' he none the less admits the essential 
 priority of Arithmetic. His conception of Logic, which 
 stands before the whole system of knowledge, is of a 
 loose kind of calculus, as its alternative name " Computa- 
 tion " declares. In First Philosophy he recognises that 
 bodies are to be considered as they difFer numerically 
 before account is taken of any differences of extended 
 magnitude. And he always puts forward, as the " mar- 
 row of Geometry," a doctrine of Proportion, which, 
 though exhibited by way of lines, is designed to solve 
 the general question of Mathematics how to determine 
 the quantity of anything by comparing it with some 
 other quantity or quantities measured. 
 
 ]STow, in all such mathematical or, as he calls it, 
 geometrical reasoning, Hobbes's idea is that the start 
 should be made from definitions that declare the actual 
 construction or generation of the subject. After more 
 or less of wavering in his earlier writings, he comes 
 finally to the opinion that Geometry is the demonstra- 
 tive science it is, and type of what science at its best 
 
106 Holies. 
 
 can be, because we make the very lines, figures, &c, 
 under investigation, and thus have complete hold of the 
 causes whereon they depend. He is even ready to deny 
 that there can be any geometrical truth scientifically 
 established that is not directly deduced from construc- 
 tive definition. In general, however, he is willing to 
 accept the traditional body of conclusions established by 
 Euclid and others from principles that are not expressly 
 constructive, and only is concerned to revise the prin- 
 ciples in this sense with the double object noted before 
 of putting the science on a sound philosophical basis, 
 and making it practically effective for the resolution of 
 physical questions. So ' far as his purpose is philoso- 
 phical, his view of the demonstrative character of geo- 
 metrical science as depending on the peculiarity of its 
 subject-matter, which admits of free construction and 
 therefore of exact definition must be pronounced both 
 true and original ; though he never suggests any reason 
 why our cognition of space or extension is thus peculiar. 
 After first defining line, surface and solid, by motion 
 of point, line and surface, and so determining space to 
 have not more than three dimensions because the motion 
 of a solid can generate nothing more than its front 
 surface will, Hobbes seeks to apply his idea of con- 
 structive definition to the doctrine of Proportion, in 
 order to obtain a simpler solution than Euclid's of the 
 difficulty of incommensurables. He begins, however, 
 with a definition not constructive, which is designed to 
 cover equally the two varieties distinguished as arith- 
 metical and geometrical proportion, but which only 
 confounds the notions of ratio and proportion and 
 leads on to an expression of true (geometrical) propor- 
 
Proportion 107 
 
 tion that either resolves it into so-called arithmetical 
 or leaves it as disparate from this as in the traditional 
 expression. To meet the difficulty of incommensur- 
 ables, his proposal is that the proportions of all mag- 
 nitudes should be expressed in lines supposed to be 
 generated by uniform motion, whereupon each (he 
 thinks) might be measured by the mere difference of 
 the times of generation, whether the lines themselves 
 are commensurable or not. But here, again, he either 
 merely restates the difficulty in a less manageable form, 
 or turns geometrical into arithmetical proportion, besides 
 ignoring incommensurability in numbers.V He makes, 
 too, the monstrous assumption that the proportions of 
 all magnitudes can be represented as lines, when Euclid 
 finds it necessary to prove the possibility even for the 
 simplest case of triangles. Had he more thoroughly 
 grasped the true nature of the difficulty, he could not have 
 failed to see with what art Euclid, in an expression 
 laboured indeed but simple for the case, had managed 
 wholly to surmount it. 
 
 In dealing next with the main differences of lines and 
 angles, it is marvellous what perverse and inconsistent 
 applications Hobbes makes of his sound philosophical 
 idea. He has, for example, the notion of angle as 
 generated by movement of one line in relation to 
 another; but, in order to cover the case of so-called 
 " angle of contact," formed by the tangent to a curve, 
 concerning which there had been much dispute, he does 
 not hesitate to imagine two straight lines as in contact 
 throughout their length, and then to declare that the 
 generating motion consists in pulling the lines apart 
 except at one point, without flexion (except at the 
 
108 Hobbes. 
 
 point) in the case of rectilineal angles, but with con- 
 tinual flexion in every imaginable point of one or other 
 or both of the lines in the other case. It does not in 
 the least trouble him that he has sacrificed the very 
 notion of angle, so long as he can pose as the reconciler 
 of a difference which others could not overcome. Nor 
 does this hinder him from straightway afterwards de- 
 claring with the others that there is after all no relation 
 of quantity between a rectilineal angle and the " angle 
 of contact " for which he had dared so much ! 
 
 A later saying, that angles vary in size with the size 
 of their vertical points, is not less characteristic. 
 Though at times Hobbes apprehends clearly enough that 
 Geometry works with ideal determinations and construc- 
 tions rigorously defined, and maintains that the size of 
 points actually set down, or breadth of lines as drawn, 
 is to be neglected either as being irrelevant or (from 
 another point of view) as being so small, he cannot in 
 general divest himself of the notion that an abstraction 
 is a nonentity. Science has to give a knowledge of 
 real things, and real things are bodies actually extended. 
 As points and lines, to be anything at all, must have a 
 real size and breadth, must not this also on occasion be 
 considered? In practice, accordingly, Hobbes considers 
 himself warranted in reckoning, or not reckoning, the 
 different magnitudes, just as he finds convenient with 
 results sufficiently remarkable. 
 
 It is not till after he has given the definition of lines 
 and angles in all their variety, and added a definition 
 of Figure as " quantity determined by the situation or 
 placing of all its extreme points," that Hobbes himself 
 professes to pass (from First Philosophy) to Geometry. 
 
Figure and Motion Endeavour. 109 
 
 Geometry has then assigned to it the task of seeking out 
 the quantities of figures from the proportions of lines 
 and angles. With the properties of figures, as distinct 
 from their measure, Hobbes does not concern himself, 
 being content, under this head, to accept the results 
 of Euclid and other geometers. It was the ques- 
 tion of measure, in relation to the work of physical 
 inquiry, that was occupying the best mathematical 
 heads of the time. From Descartes to Wallis, after 
 Vieta in a former generation, all were struggling, by 
 every possible device of analysis, to find the means of 
 making quantitative determination of figures not possible 
 before. Hobbes's own plan, in the light of his philo-. 
 sophical principles, was to work out the theory of Figure 
 and the theory of Motion pari passu. The rational doc- 
 trine of motion, to be afterwards used in interpreting 
 the actual processes of nature, should be evolved in 
 the ideal generation of extended figures; while the, 
 geometrical figures necessary for demonstrating the pro- 
 perties of motion should themselves be quantitatively 
 determined in the act of being generated by this or that 
 kind of motion. ^ 
 
 In the one view, as in the other, Hobbes starts from 
 a conception of what he calls Endeavour, defined as 
 motion made in less space and time than can be ima- 
 gined, or made through the length of a point and in an 
 instant of time j which is to consider motion by help of\ 
 a similar analytical device as when length was con-! 
 sidered to be developed from the motion of a point./ 
 To velocity of motion corresponds impetus of endeavour, 
 and from this basis Hobbes works out first a geometry 
 of motion, as uniform or accelerated, also as compounded, 
 
110 Robbes. 
 
 and thence a general theory of figures, complete or 
 deficient according as the generating motions are kept 
 uniform or are continuously diminished. In this way, 
 thoiigh by very clumsy and incoherent demonstrations, 
 he finds, as others had found before him, a general solu- 
 tion of the problem of rectification of parabolic curves. 
 Then, after a digression on angles of incidence and re- 
 flexion, his geometrical effort culminates in a series of 
 desperate attempts to square the circle, whereby hangs 
 a tale later on. 
 
 Though Hobbes must confess that the crowning prob- 
 lem is not solved in the 'De Corpora,' he has no doubt 
 of his ability to arrive at the solution, and hence can 
 assume that the thing is done. He turns accordingly 
 without misgiving to the task of making now such 
 abstract determination of Motion as has a direct bearing 
 upon physical inquiry. .With this view, a motion that 
 he calls simple because all parts of the moved '"body 
 describe equal lines, and circular because the body 
 returns to its original position after each revolution, 
 is studied in detail both in its geometrical and in its 
 mechanical aspects. What kind of currents a body 
 moved with such an eddying motion will set up in a 
 fluid medium, and how these currents will affect bodies 
 floating in the medium, dissipating (as he thinks) het- 
 erogeneous and aggregating homogeneous bodies, are 
 questions that he determines with obvious reference 
 to the solar system as treated later on. The study 
 of such mechanical effects of the motion take,s.Jiim, at 
 last, clearly beyond Geometry into the next division, as 
 he had marked it out, of his general scheme of know- 
 ledge, where Motion of body in relation to other body 
 
Mechanical Action. Ill 
 
 falls to be considered. Following, then,' upon the effects 
 of "simple circular" motion he takes the effects of 
 " compound circular " motion or rotation upon an axis, 
 and adds next what he has to say of other varieties of 
 mechanical interaction before concluding his whole 
 abstract doctrine of Magnitude and Motion with a 
 theory of the balance and of the centre of gravity in 
 different figures, and with a doctrine of refraction and 
 reflexion. A few points only need here be singled out 
 to illustrate his view of mechanical action. 
 
 That all origin or change of motion in any body is 
 fronTwithout, and proceeds by way ot mechanical im- 
 pact from some other body, entered into Hobbes's first 
 and most general conception of Motion. Where body acts 
 on body in the way of pressure, without~vfsTbIe" motion 
 resulting, lie interprets the action as that kind of motion 
 through length considered as a point which he has called 
 Endeavour. Whether it results in visible motion or not, 
 what has to be understood universally of endeavour is 
 that it is indestructible and propagates itself without 
 limit of space. In empty space, a body moved with 
 any endeavour will continue moving with uniform 
 velocity, because there is nothing to stop it; but, also 
 in space that is full, the endeavour being motion will 
 move what stands before it, and this again what stands 
 next, and so infinitely. Nor because, in a world full of 
 body, endeavour seems to become weaker the farther 
 it is propagated, is this really so : it is not, Hobbes 
 is ready to declare (with the illustrative instance of] 
 a visible heap of sand made up of invisible grains), a 
 question of sense but of reason, and the motio n which \ 
 has ceased to be sensible is still not the less real and! 
 
112 Holies, 
 
 effective. 1 Endeavour must also, he thinks, upon like 
 grounds, be held to propagate itself thus infinitely in a 
 single instant of time ; though what is then the mean- 
 ing of motion as proceeding in time (or of time as the 
 phantasm of motion) he does not say. It follows that, 
 in a plenum (such as he afterwards conceives the actual 
 world to be), there is no real difference between draw- 
 ing and pushing : what draws propels that which is 
 in front of it, and the pulsion by some way of circuit 
 must, in the absence of all void, work round instantly 
 so as to act from behind upon the body that is said to 
 be drawn. 
 
 These are some specimens of Hobbes's more peculiar 
 manner : he had Galileo before him to follow in other 
 less speculative observations on the mechanical relation 
 of bodies. Distinguishing also their " internal parts " 
 (though without any definition of them as atoms 
 or otherwise), and positing a mechanical interaction 
 amongst these, he is able to give some account of the 
 general properties of matter, as toughness, elasticity 
 and the like, but without any order or system. A 
 closing reference to Habit as motion made more easy 
 and ready by perpetual and repeated endeavours in a 
 way different from the motion that is natural to any- 
 thing originally is of interest as having a psychological 
 application, which is so much present to his mind that 
 he first illustrates the fact by the case of a person learn- 
 ing to play a musical instrument, and only then seeks to 
 extend it to the case of inanimate objects like a cross- 
 
 1 L., i. 182, 278; E., i. 217, 342. On the question of cumulative 
 agency (as of sand-grains in a heap), familiar to later speculation, 
 compare E. v. , 304, with its interesting personal reference. 
 
Method of Physical Science. 113 
 
 bow bent till it loses its spring. The observation should, 
 of course, have been turned the other way to have any 
 point or relevance here; but it is useless to look for 
 order, coherence or definite purpose throughout all this 
 part of Hobbes's exposition. He collects himself and 
 proceeds henceforth in less haphazard fashion when 
 he leaves the ground of abstract principle, and confronts 
 the world of actual fact that offers itself to physical 
 inquiry. 
 
 NATURE. 
 
 Such as it is, Hobbes's doctrine of Magnitude and 
 Motion, while completing the statement of abstract 
 principles involved in the explanation of anything that 
 he can regard as a subject of science, completes also for 
 him all that part of the theory of Body that consists in_y 
 deducing the effects of causes known. There is no 
 rational which is to say, constructive demonstration 
 possible of the actual constitution of Nature. Know- 
 ledge of physical facts cannot begin from necessary 
 causes embodied in definitions, but only from the facts 
 themselves as given in experience. The question now 
 therefore, is to find not the effects of simple causes but 
 causes of complex effects. Instead of a universal and 
 certain demonstration, certain at least to all that accept 
 the premisses, a possible generation of the particular 
 facts, provided it accord with the principles of the 
 abstract doctrine of Motion, is all that can be found or 
 need be sought. It is all that can be found, because 
 there is no effect in nature that its Author might not I 
 have brought to pass in more ways than one. It is all , 
 that need be sought, because it would, as well as the 
 
 P. X. H 
 
114 Hobbes. 
 
 very truth, enable us to produce the effect, supposing 
 the materials and the means of bringing them together 
 were in our hands. 
 
 The reason given by Hobbes for the merely hypo- 
 thetical construction of Physics is jpartly the complex- 
 ity of the motions that are actually found in nature, but 
 more the fact that natural bodies appear with sensible 
 qualities, some of which (as colour, sound, &c.) are not 
 perceived as motions at all. The fact of natural bodies 
 appearing to sense introduces, besides, a special com- 
 plication. However it be with such abstract consid- 
 eration of Body as has gone before, it strikes Hobbes 
 that i n Phvsics. at least, there is something plainly pre- 
 supposed. TWnrgJift p hysical qualities orsensible 
 aspects of things ar ej-mfWstnQ d, must not the na ture or 
 cau se of Sense itself be known 1 ? As he puts it, the 
 
 1 most remarkable of all phenomena is to <(>aivco-0ai the 
 fact that some natural bodies (men and animals) have 
 a phantasmal representation of things ; and the first 
 step is to understand the conditions of this. They ar e 
 give n by Hobbes in the form of a mechanic a l theory of 
 Sensed the interest of which, introduc eiLwhere it is, lies 
 in its being a more expressly reasoned affirmation* than 
 is common with physicists of the necessity (for science) 
 of construing the s ensibl e, q ualities of bodies as mo des 
 of motion transmitt ed to the organis m. As a physio- 
 logical theory, it is, however, out of place at the thresh- 
 - old of physics, more especially when extended, as Hpt>bes 
 
 _ does not hesitate to extend it, beyond Sense, to such 
 other mental functions as Imagination and Will j while 
 it is equally out of place so far as it may be intended to 
 do duty for a general theory of phenomenal experience. 
 
The World a Plenum. 115 
 
 If Hobbes was to raise the question as one of philo- 
 sophy, it should have been raised at the beginning of 
 his system, and much more widely. As a question of 
 science, its place is after physics, when the facts of life 
 and mind come up for inquiry. The theory of Sense 
 may then stand over as part of the scientific psychology 
 which he seeks to work out under the next head of Man 
 where indeed he resumes it. 
 
 There is, besides, the more reason for passing by the 
 excursus on Sense, because Hobbes after all proceeds, 
 first, to ask simply what are the actual bodies or " ob- 
 jects " to be found in nature. Though he would con- 
 nect this question with the preliminary inquiry by 
 professing to seek for the efficient causes of Sense, he 
 gives in reply a view " of the World and of the Stars " 
 which is as frankly objective as the statements of 
 positive physical science commonly are ; or if it con- 
 tains a subjective reference, the reference is not to Sense. 
 Thus he begins with the remark that, while few ques-~, 
 tions can be raised concerning the world as a whole, 
 none having reference to its magnitude and duration can 
 be settled, because the human mind, being limited to 
 phantasms that are only of the finite, can neither con- 
 ceive the world as infinite in space and time nor prove ^ 
 it finite by any reasonings on the nature of infinity : 1 
 questions of the kind, constantly begetting others 
 equally insoluble, lie out of the province of the " philo- 
 sopher " (as man of science), and should be left to be 
 determined by lawful authority. It is, again, upon 
 a metaphysical ground that he ultimately rests in 
 
 i "All this arguing of infinite!* is but the ambition of schoolboys." 
 E., vii. 446. 
 
 ' 
 
116 Holies. 
 
 deciding the one cosmical question between Vacuum 
 and Plenum which he puts forward as a proper 
 subject of scientific reasoning. Examining the argu- 
 ments of Lucretius (after Epicurus) in favour of vacuum ; 
 rejecting also the modern experimental proofs urged 
 on the same side, including Torricelli's and (at a later 
 time) Boyle's, because in all of them the penetrative 
 power of air through water or mercury, or by the side 
 of the most closely fitting piston in an air-pump, is not 
 sufficiently allowed for ; he declares himself willing, for 
 his own part, to take his stand upon one single experi- 
 ment in proof of plenum, that water will not run out by 
 the small holes in the bottom of a gardener's pot when 
 closed at the top. It is plain/ however, that the 
 strength of his conviction that jtllere is no vacuum in 
 nature comes rather from his fundamental philosophical 
 conception of body as alone^real, and of space as nothing 
 but subjective phantasm. / For all his approach to the 
 scientific point of view in the reference of the question 
 to experiment, he decides for plenum in as purely meta- 
 physical a spirit (though not on the same grounds) as 
 Descartes. He could not else so perversely, even 
 ludicrously, misinterpret the physical experiments on 
 which he professes to rely. 
 
 Excluding, thus, the supposition of vacuum, Hobbes 
 otherwise premises, for the application of his abstract 
 principles of motion to nature, that movable bodies are 
 of three kinds fluids, with parts separable by the 
 slightest effort, solids, that can be parted only with 
 greater force, and bodies mixed of fluid and solid; it 
 being understood that fluid is to be taken strictly, not 
 as dust or meal may be so called, but as divisible into 
 
The Ether. 117 
 
 parts themselves always fluid which is true, he thinks, 
 of water and the like. The world as a whole may then 
 be taken as an immense space (which Hobbes now 
 seems to have no difficulty in thinking as other than 
 phantasm), including bodies solid and visible earth 
 ancT stars, bodies solid but invisible smallest particles 
 or atoms scattered about amongst the others, and, last, 
 a most fluid ether filling up all that remains so as to 
 leave no empty space at all. The great solid bodies (at 
 least the sun and planets) are to be credited with a 
 natural motion ; as are also the minute particles strewn 
 everywhere about. The parts of the pure ether, on the 
 other hand, have no motion at all but what they re- 
 ceive from the solid bodies (great or small) floating in 
 them. 
 
 To take the ether first : it is air, common air, but 
 without the invisible solid particles commonly mixed 
 up with air. Even as air it is invisible, nor is it ap- 
 prehensible (Hobbes thinks, even as air) by any other 
 sense: it is known to exist as body only upon thej 
 rational ground that without a bodily medium to con- 
 vey motion distant objects could not act upon our 
 senses at all. Spread everywhere round solid bodies, 
 it is also spread through them in contact with their 
 ultimate particles, and as it passes in or out among 
 these causes rarefaction or condensation. Weight it 
 has none, because it has no motion of its own at all 
 and therefore not that particular motion (towards the 
 earth's centre) which gravity is. But, though devoid of 
 proper motion, it is highly mobile, and, agitated by any^ 
 movement, it can set other things in motion, while it, 
 transmits the agitation outwards from the source equally 
 
118 Hobbes. 
 
 in all directions, and indeed without any loss howsoever 
 far carried. So conceived, the air or ether is used by 
 Hobbes in the explanation of all natural processes, 
 whether they appear as motions, or, though really motor, 
 appear to sense otherwise. 
 
 Among the great solid bodies in nature, the sun has 
 the first place ; next the planets in order outwards ; and 
 beyond these the fixed stars, at varying distances but 
 all so great that the radius of the earths orbit is but as 
 a point in comparison. All of them may be supposed 
 to have a proper motion of the sort which Hobbes has 
 before called " simple circular." In the sun and earth, 
 this (with the ether as medium) is, he thinks, sufficient 
 to account for all the specific motions and relations as- 
 sumed in the Copernican view of the world. The start 
 must be made from a real motion in the sun. The im- 
 material species of the Schoolmen are no cause at all ; 
 and Kepler's magnetic virtue, of which nothing is known, 
 must be some kind of motion, if it is anything. An 
 axial motion of the sun is, indeed, insufficient, as propa- 
 gating no outward endeavour to the earth ; but motion of 
 the " simple circular " sort contains such endeavour, and, 
 through the medium of the ether, it not only explains 
 the annual and diurnal motion of the earth, but at the 
 same time, by virtue of its properties as demonstrated 
 abstractly before, provides for that parallelism of the 
 earth's axis, to account for which Copernicus was forced 
 to complicate his theory with the assumption of a third 
 motion. Such motion in the sun is not in a circle large 
 enough to be apparent to sense, but may be supposed as 
 swift and energetic as can be. How by throwing off the 
 ether it causes this to fall into a circular stream, which 
 
Solid Bodies, visible and invisible. 119 
 
 bears the earth round in the current ; causes the earth 
 also to rotate on its axis, which remains always parallel 
 with itself ; gives the earth such an eccentric orbit as 
 Kepler had made evident ; is involved also, with similar 
 original motions in the earth and moon, in bringing to 
 pass the tides of ocean, all this, and much else, Hobbes 
 finds no difficulty in supposing to his own satisfaction, 
 making as much or as little reference to his abstract 
 doctrine of motion as he finds convenient, or not hesitat- 
 ing, at a pinch, to run directly counter to this or that 
 " demonstration." Except that he must be allowed the 
 credit, over Descartes, of accepting without reservation 
 the heliocentric system, and of being in his way not less 
 concerned than Newton himself to interpret it upon 
 plain and intelligible physical principles, no account is 
 to be made of his astronomical doctrine. Connected 
 with it is the explanation that he gives, at a later 
 stage, of terrestrial gravity. A stoue thrown up falls 
 through being pressed downwards by the air, which the 
 diurnal motion of the earth throws off higher than the 
 stone at every part of its upward course. Because, then, 
 this motion of the earth has less effect upon the circum- 
 ambient air towards the poles, he does not hesitate to 
 declare boldly that the force of gravitation will be less 
 there than at the equator ! 
 
 The little bodies assumed by Hobbes as third constit- 
 uent of the universe eluding sense like the ether, but 
 solid like the great masses are brought forward when 
 he turns from the general processes of nature to explain 
 the sensible qualities of things. He speaks of them , 
 occasionally as atoms, and it is by aggregation of 
 such invisible elements that visible bodies must be sup- * 
 
I 
 
 1 20 Hobbes. 
 
 posed compounded ; but he has no theory (like the earlier 
 Atomists) of the manner in which the composition may 
 have taken place, being satisfied if he can think of 
 bodies, however vaguely, as having parts that may be in 
 motion when the bodies themselves seem at rest. Other- 
 wise, the minute particles are to be understood as scat- 
 tered everywhere through the ether in countless number, 
 and differing among themselves in consistency, magni- 
 tude, motion and figure. They are there to be had re- 
 course to whenever Hobbes chooses to fancy them as 
 concerned, by motion communicated to the ether, in the 
 production of any sensible effect. In the last resort, 
 owever, it is neither on the particular conjunction of 
 moving corpuscles in ether, nor on the particular kind 
 of motion in the molecular constituents of bodies, that 
 Hobbes lays most stress in the explanation of the 
 properly sensible aspects of body. A real motion must 
 be supposed in bodies; but it is as this is taken up, 
 directly or through the medium of ether, by a sense- 
 organ and continued as a real motion within the organic 
 frame, that light, sound or other such " phantasm " (as 
 in subjective speech, already at this stage, he is for- 
 ward to interpret the sensible quality) arises. Hence 
 the prominence that he gives to the physiological con- 
 ditions in his physical doctrine. 
 
 The details of the exposition may be lightly passed 
 over. The source of the motion which appears as Light 
 to the eye, is the same " simple circular " motion of the 
 sun carried outwards by the ether which has already 
 been used to account for the larger natural effects ; the 
 fact that it is now received by the eye making all 
 the difference. Heat is another effect of the same 
 
Sensible Qualities. 121 
 
 original solar motion, as this may be supposed to set up a 
 fermentation of the particles of air ; whereupon, to pre- 
 vent vacuum in the air-medium, the fluids of the sentient 
 body are called forth (in perspiration) and the solid 
 parts swell. Cold is, with Hobbes, not simply the 
 absence of heat but a positive quality in the opposite 
 sense, dependent on the action of wind, the explanation 
 of which (as of gravity) carries him back to a consider- 
 ation of the greater processes of nature, viewed out of 
 special relation to the animal organism. The formation of v 
 ice, the difference of Hard and Soft in bodies, with much 
 else, including the causation of lightning and thunder, 
 all fall to be treated in this connection before he returns 
 to deal with Sound, Odour, Savour and Touch, in the 
 organic reference. Sounds are treated, in their various 
 modes, at some length with real intelligence ; Smells and 
 Tastes more briefly, though with the same clear appre- 
 hension that, in as far as there can be any scientific un- 
 derstanding of them, they must be interpreted as varied 
 motions in the bodies called odorous and sapid, communi- 
 cated to our organs of sense. A few closing words on 
 Touch supply the proper organic reference omitted from 
 the earlier consideration of temperature and texture of 
 bodies as affecting the sensitive skin. Here Hobbes 
 acutely remarks, as regards Eough and Smooth, that, like 
 Magnitude and Figure, they are not taken note of by 
 simple touch only, but, as he thinks, " also by memory." 
 It is a pity that the remark is not followed out where 
 it should properly have been made in the psychological 
 section to which we may now proceed. 
 
122 Hobbes. 
 
 If the mathematico-physical sections of Hobbes's philo- 
 sophy, in spite of the true ideas that occasionally 
 inspire them, give him no place in the history of effec- 
 tive science, it is otherwise with his doctrine of Man. 
 Here, though he had more to borrow from those that 
 went before him, he yet succeeded by definiteness of 
 view and freshness of observation in making a real 
 advance. The doctrine must be collected from the 
 various expositions in which it is differently and never 
 otherwise than partially set forth : from the ' De 
 Homine,' which gives, if little more, at least the idea 
 of Man as the proper pivot of the whole philosophical 
 system; from the 'De Corpore,' where as a natural 
 body Man already figures j but chiefly from the outlying 
 1 Human Nature ' and ' Leviathan,' which have in view 
 the matter and maker of the body politic. 
 
 True to his general principles, Hobbes confines the in- 
 
 i quiry to human nature as it actually appears " the sum 
 of man's natural faculties," bodily and mental. He has no 
 scientific account to offer of the origin or destiny of man ; 
 nor, except in critical reference (as before mentioned), 
 does he face the question of man's being in the ultimate 
 metaphysical sense. Whether in man, as mental are 
 
 ^distinguished from bodily faculties, there is a spirit as 
 well as a body, is a point on which his statements 
 waver. At times he is ready to speak of a distinct spirit 
 in man, and only contends that it cannot be incorporeal 
 because all that really exists is extended; but more 
 often he anticipates the later animistic view in urging 
 that what men call spirit or ghost is mere subjective 
 
Bodily and Mental Poivers. 123 
 
 representation or phantasm dream -image, reflexion, 
 shadow, or the like mistaken for objective reality. 
 
 While it is one chief feature of Hobbes's scientific 
 doctrine to bring man as endowed with mental qualities 
 into relation with the physical world as mechanically 
 interpreted, by making prominent, wherever possible, 
 the organic conditions of mind, the "bodily powers"! 
 by themselves distinguished as nutrition, motion and 
 generation do not long detain him. There is every- 
 where proof that he had made careful physiological 
 studies ; but, eager as he was to accept Harvey's revolu- 
 tionary discovery, he advanced but a little way towards 
 the later understanding of the nervous system that was 
 then first rendered possible. The nerves, which he 
 knows to be specially involved in sense, he still (with 
 Galen) supposes to have the function of distributing 
 "animal spirits" conveyed to the brain by arteries from 
 the heart, where they are elaborated; and thus (with 
 Aristotle) he retains for the heart the primacy over 
 brain as regards the mental not less than the bodily life. 
 ^The mental powers are twofold Cognitive and 
 Motive. The cognitive power, also called imagination 
 or conception, is what gives to a man that imagery or 
 representation of external things which, once it is ob-' 
 tained, remains though the things themselves should b 
 destroyed. The motive power of the mind, called ani- , 
 mal or voluntary," in distinction from the vital motion 
 of the bodily frame, involves and is dependent on the I 
 function of mental representation \ It is the cognitive 
 power, then, that has first to be understood in its various 
 modes, beginning, as is natural from the scientific point 
 of view, with Sense. 
 
 a 
 
 ^ 
 
124 Hobbes. 
 
 Hobbes, we saw, did not pass to consider the sensible 
 aspect of things in Physics, without signalising the 
 fact of Sense or phenomenal experience as itself a 
 phenomenon to be accounted for in the way of science ; 
 and, though the fact of subjective representation may 
 not thus have its philosophical import exhausted nor 
 is well coupled with the particular facts of Physics, to 
 recognise it as such a matter of inquiry is a very notable 
 step. It is to proclaim that there is room and need for 
 a science of Psychology as well as of Physics that 
 Mind can be investigated by the same method and 
 under like conditions as Nature. Such a conception of 
 psychological science has steadily made way in later 
 times, and to Hobbes belongs the credit as early as any 
 other, and more distinctly than any other, of having 
 opened its path. Nor, although his other conviction of 
 the need of organic reference is apt at times to make 
 him lose sight of the properly psychological fact in a 
 mere statement of physical and physiological conditions, 
 is it other than a science of Mind towards which he 
 works in his doctrine of Man. His mechanical princi- 
 ples, applied to the bodily organism, carry him but a 
 short way after all, and for the rest he has to trust to 
 subjective observation, which he was in the way of prac- 
 tising long before he began to conceive the possibility of 
 bringing its results into relation with the phenomena 
 of motion in nature. In seeking for the cause even 
 of Sense, he sees the need of some other " sense " to 
 take note of Sense by; and though he too simply 
 declares that Memory is all that is wanted to account 
 for such introspective consciousness, the fact is not 
 doubtful to him that we "do take note in some way or 
 
Sense. 125 
 
 other of our conceptions/ 7 or, again, that what one man. 
 finds by "looking into himself" discloses also what are 
 the thoughts and passions of all other men upon the 
 like occasion. 
 
 Hobbes has thus always apart from metaphysical 
 foundation a distinct enough conception of the peculi- 
 arity of mental phenomena that makes them, however 
 closely related with phenomena of nature, a subject of 
 special inquiry. Notwithstanding, at the stage of Sense, 
 where the physical conditions can be most definitely 
 assigned, he is but too ready to fall into thinking or speak- 
 ing as if everything were done in assigning these; or, 
 because the " phantasms " or " ideas " of sense, as they 
 come and go, may be viewed as arising from the mechani- 
 cal action of external bodies upon the reacting physical 
 organism, would from this explain their properly psy- 
 chological or subjective character. In particular, the 
 outward reference of sensation in the act of perceiving ob- 
 jects, or the apparent outness of these, seems to him sufiV 
 ciently accounted for by the fact that the inward motion 
 received by way of sense-organs calls forth an outward 
 reaction from the brain (or heart). Sense, which he 
 defines, more carefully, as the phantasm appearing under 
 such physical conditions, he sometimes speaks of as 
 mere reaction in the organism, as if it had no phantas- 
 mal or subjective character at all. Physical considera- 
 tion serves him better in suggesting or strengthening 
 his conviction that light, sound and other modes of 
 sense, as we have actual experience of them, are but\ 
 phantasms or subjective states. If it took him some ^ 
 time before he could get rid of the popular notion of^ 
 sensible qualities as in things, or of the Scholastic " 
 
126 Holies. 
 
 hypothesis of sensible species devised to explain our 
 natural apprehension of them, he saw in the end as 
 clearly as Locke after him or as Descartes at the time 
 that sense is mere seeming, on occasion of mechani- 
 cal interaction between external bodies and the liv- 
 ing organism. This was his express presupposition in 
 Physics when giving account of the sensible qualities 
 of bodies ; and now, in dealing with Sense as a psycho- 
 logical fact of human nature, the demonstration is given 
 with as much completeness as could be desired; his 
 favourite proof being drawn from the appearance of 
 bodies as reflected in water. He has also the deeper 
 observation that, as it is the whole organism, not a, 
 particular organ, that is in any case the " subject " of 
 sense, so it must be a real extended body (in relation^ 
 with the organism), e.g., the sun, and not any so-called 
 sensible quality, as light, that is properly to be called 
 the " object " of sense ; but how in such object we per- 
 ceive the extension, he does not at all consider, merely ) 
 remarking at one place, in the traditional manner after! 
 Aristotle, that "motion, rest, magnitude, and figure arev 
 common both to the sight and touch." 
 
 Otherwise he has to note of Sense (from the subjective X 
 point of view) that it always carries some memory with / 
 it, or involves nothing less than a judgment of objects/ 
 by comparing and discerning their phantasms ; and this 
 suggests to him that physically it cannot be regarded as 
 a simple reaction in body, else all bodies must be de- 
 clared sensible. There is need of organs, as such are 
 actually found in men and animals, fitted to conserve the j^ 
 motion, if the phantasm as it arises is not instantly to 
 pass. The comparison or assimilation of sense-impressions 
 
Sense. 127 
 
 gets little farther attention, though he notes, in one place, 
 its ground-form the recognition of identical experiences 
 had at different times. As regards discrimination, he 
 has the famous passage, ending with the epigram : "It 
 is [almost] all one for a man to be always sensible of the 
 same thing, and not to be sensible at all of anything." x 
 But though "a perpetual variety of phantasms" is 
 necessary for sense, a man, he goes on, cannot therefore 
 discern many things at once. A sense-organ, and still 
 more " those parts of every organ that proceed from the 
 root of the nerves to the heart," cannot be moved divers 
 ways at the same time, so as to yield a number of dis- 
 tinct phantasms; or being strongly stirred in one way 
 cannot but be less fit to take on any other impression. 
 If we would read a printed page, the letters must be 
 taken separately ; when the whole page is looked upon 
 at once, we read nothing. Hence he concludes 
 
 "It is manifest that every endeavour of the organ out- 
 wards is not to be called sense, but that only which at several I 
 times is by vehemence made stronger and more predominant \ 
 than the rest ; which deprives us of the sense of other phan- I 
 tasms no otherwise than the sun deprives the rest of the stars j 
 of light, not by hindering their action, but by obscuring and 
 hiding them by his excess of brightness." (E., i. 396.) 
 
 The struggle among presentations (in the language 
 of later psychology) to rise above the ' threshold of con- 
 sciousness ' could not be more aptly figured, but Hobbes 
 adds nothing farther towards a theory of sense-percep- . 
 tion. Only, some special questions of vision are intelli- 
 gently treated in the optical chapters of the ' De Homine,' 
 
 1 E., i. 3SH. "Almost" is an addition of the translator's ; see L., 
 i. 321. He returns to the subject in E., vii. 83. 
 
 s 
 
128 Holies. 
 
 as such questions were understood before Berkeley first 
 gave them proper psychological form. 
 
 He passes next to Imagination or Fancy, following 
 the general line of Aristotle's observations but seeking 
 to give them additional precision in physiological ex- 
 pression. Like water troubled, he continues in his 
 picturesque fashion, an organ of sense will remain in 
 motion after removal of the exciting agent. In that 
 case, the corresponding phantasm is called Imagina- 
 tion, as differing from sense ; or Memory, if regard 
 is had to the fact of lapse of time, which, like distance 
 in space, is found to render the phantasms of sense 
 both less clear as wholes and less distinct in their 
 parts. The state is one of decaying or weakened sense ; i 
 but how weakened 1 As mere removal of the object (or 
 agent) does not of itself obliterate the motion caused in 
 the organ, the weakening can only be due to the fact 
 that the same or other connected organ has meanwhile 
 been otherwise stirred. Thus, in Hobbes's view, the 
 representative image is a state of sense overpowered by 
 newer sense-experience, against which it maintains itself 
 as well as it can. But, as the. stars, obscured by the sun 
 in day-time, shine out at night, so, in the absence of 
 sense, images may start forth with the clearness and 
 distinctness of Dreams. The dream-image proves, in 
 fact, that it is not the mere absence of an exciting object 
 that makes the waking-image faint ; though, otherwise, 
 image and dream differ, in that the brain in the one case 
 remains in motion from an external object no longer 
 present, while in the other it is excited from distemper 
 of the internal parts of the organism or other motion in 
 them, formerly, it may be, transmitted from the brain 
 
Imagination and Dlscursion. 129 
 
 itself. All the phenomena of dreaming, noted by 
 Hobbes with especial interest and care, consist with this 
 view the want of order and coherence (" like stars 
 between flying clouds"), composition from previous 
 experiences, interposition (as often happens) between 
 waking-states, absence of wonder, &c. He also remarks, ? 
 under the name of Fiction, the formation of compound 
 images like a golden mountain, explaining the conjunction 
 of elements given separately in sense by composition of 
 motions in the brain. 
 
 In imagination, however, there is not only the image 
 in its various forms to be understood, but how one image 
 succeeds another. Hobbes designates the fact of the 
 succession by the names of Train of Imaginations, 
 Mental Discourse, or Discursion, and declares without 
 hesitation that " we have no transition from one imagi- 
 nation to another whereof we never had the like before 
 in our senses." All fancies being motions that remain 
 from the motions made in sense, one is revived after the 
 other that went before it in sense, " by coherence of the 
 matter moved, as water upon a plane table is drawn 
 which way any one part of it is guided by the finger." 
 When unregulated by any desire or design, the succes- 
 sion may appear to be as utterly casual as in dreams, 
 but this is only because of the endless variety of sense- 
 experience, and even " in this wild ranging of the mind 
 a man may ofttimes perceive the way of it, and the 
 dependence of one thought upon another." This he 
 illustrates by the well-known example of the " Roman 
 penny." What he does not mark, either in this case ^ 
 or in the case of regulated discourse (assuming the forms 
 of Reminiscence, Expectation, Sagacity, &c), is any 
 
 p. x. I 
 
130 Holies. 
 
 such distinction between the relations of contiguity and 
 similarity among mental states as had been noted by 
 Aristotle in the explanation of memory, or has been I 
 noted since by those thinkers who have sought in ' Asso-/ 
 ciation' the ground of all mental synthesis. Without 
 using the word, and giving it no such width of philoso- 
 phical application as the later Associationists, Hobbes 
 allows for ' contiguity ' only in the process of represen- 
 tation. His physiological account of the process, chiefly 
 figurative, is vague enough, but hardly more so than 
 that with which science has even yet to be content. 
 
 So much, then, being understood of Mental Discourse, 
 nothing more, according to Hobbes, is required to 
 account for all that may be summed up as Prudence in 
 man the quality that he shares with the brutes and 
 has only to a greater degree, particularly in the form of 
 anticipating his experience upon memory of what has 
 gone before. The distinctively human faculty of Eeason 
 and Science needs other explanation. \Reason is a power 
 of conjoining things otherwise than as they occur in, 
 natural experience; science is knowledge of the true 
 or unfailing causes of things (no mere memory of their 
 particular antecedents), and more especially it is the\ 
 orderly and organised understanding of causes in general 
 for the furtherance of human welfare./ This is attained 
 by men only as they have the power of fixing the suc- 
 cession of their thoughts by the use of a system of 
 definite marks, which, as standing equally for any one 
 of a multitude of similar experiences, discharge the mind 
 from the burden of representing the whole mass of its 
 experience as actually had, and enable it to single out 
 the permanent conjunctions obscured by variety of time 
 
\ 
 
 Motive Power. 
 
 and place and circumstance. So mu 
 Hobbes urge from the first in laying the 
 his reasoned system of knowledge j and now, again, in 
 dealing with Speech as a fact of human nature, its 
 necessary implication with the function of general think- 
 ing both when thinking takes the form of true science 
 and when it lands men in absurdity, from which the 
 speechless brute is free is enforced with the most 
 telling art. But he attempts nothing more. The scien- 
 tific question how speech arises, which he might have 
 effectively grappled with from his physiological point 
 of view, is not touched; neither does he occupy himself 
 further with the manifold processes of thought proper 
 to be accounted for by any satisfactory psychological 
 theory. He turns instead to the "motive power" in 
 man, which is to give occasion for the construction, by 
 reason, of Body Politic over Man. 
 
 Here the reference to organic conditions, which has 
 disappeared at the higher stages of the conceptive 
 faculty (after imagination), becomes again for a time 
 prominent with Hobbes. Animal or voluntary motion, 
 which involves " conception," is not only a bodily pro- 
 cess as far as conception is such, but is also immediately 
 dependent on the vital motion of the body. The phan- 
 tasm or conception of something external, which arises 
 when motion is sent inwards through a sense-organ to 
 the brain in its connection with the heart and evokes 
 an outward reaction thence, is not the only effect of 
 such motion. According as the vital motion of the 
 heart itself is helped or hindered, there arises another j 
 kind of sense, namely, of Pleasure or Pain, which seems! 
 to be within the body from the motion being inwards, 
 
132 Hobbes. 
 
 as Hobbes has no more difficulty in supposing now than 
 when he explained the objective reference of sensation 
 from a bodily reaction outwards. At the same timeV 
 there is here, also, an outward reaction of another kind. x 
 The heart's motion, when heightened, has the effect of 
 so directing the " spirits " along the nerves to the sense- 
 organ affected as to sustain and augment the motion set 
 up there ; or, if it is depressed, the vitality is restored by ?~ 
 the bending or straightening of other parts of the body. 
 In other words, there is upon occasion of pleasure or 
 pain an internal (physical) endeavour to or from, which, 
 invisible as it is, may have visible result ; and such 
 endeavour is what is called Appetite or Aversion. Thus 
 does Hobbes keep his promise that he would show 
 " final cause," in things having sense and will, to be 
 also but a case of " efficient cause." Pleasure and 
 Appetite are, indeed, one and the same fact viewed 
 in different ways: Pleasure, the " sense" or subjec- 
 tive phase of heightened vitality; Appetite, a natural 
 "endeavour" not to be distinguished from the height- , 
 ened vital action. It is a remarkable anticipation of 
 later scientific theory as to the first beginnings of any- 
 thing that can be called voluntary action in relation to 
 sense. 
 
 Appetite to or aversion from, upon actual pleasure or 
 pain of sense, is, however, but the rudimentary form of 
 will. Beyond pleasures and pains " of sense," there are 
 pleasures and pains " of the mind," involving imagina- 
 tive expectation, which, in the form of Hope and Fear 
 of good and evil (as the objects of desire and aversion 
 may generally be called), count for as much more in the 
 determination of action as imagination reaches beyond 
 
Will. 133 
 
 present sense ; while they are not less real " endeav- 
 ours" or beginnings of motion in the animal system. 
 Now there is for ever going forward in the mind a most 
 varied play of such imaginations, the man moved this 
 way or that by anticipation of good or evil to come. (So 
 long as the alternation of appetites and aversions, hopes 
 and fears, proceeds, the state of mind is to be called "De- 
 liberation ; but let the deliberation end with the passing 
 into act of some one inclination, and then it becomes ' 
 Will. "Will is the last appetite in deliberating." Not 
 less voluntary, however, is the simple original form of 
 direct action upon a present pleasure, for there the one 
 appetite is the last. And, generally speaking, there is 
 nothing to be called Will in human nature but this fact 
 of action upon some appetite or some representation of 
 good and evil. ^ 
 
 Hobbes is content with such a summary account of 
 Will as the mental phase of a purely mechanical process, 
 simple or complex, in the nervous system, when not, as 
 we shall afterwards see him, drawn into controversy i 
 (with Bishop Bramhall) on the philosophical issues in- 
 volved in the determination of human action. Even 
 then, while there are few aspects of the philosophical 
 question on which he does not at some stage pronounce, 
 ready as he is to follow his adversary into all its im- 
 plications, as they had been drawn out by Scholastic 
 theologians, and eager to employ his dialectical skill in 
 exposing the difficulties or weak places of the indeter- 
 minist position, it is plain that his own thought on the 
 subject has always an essentially limited range. Man 
 acts as he is moved mechanically in the first instance \ , 
 (or last resort) from without, and is not the less median- / 
 
134 , Hobbes. 
 
 ically moved because he has a sense of the motion, \ 
 which may be psychologically considered. The psycho- 
 logical consideration tends to separate Hobbes from the\ 
 fatalists and the theological preclestinarians with whom 
 he does not hesitate, on occasion, to speak, and gives 
 him the first place in the modern succession of scientific 
 determinists, by none of whom he has been surpassed in 
 clearness of conception and statement, so far as his view 
 extends. It, only, does not extend very far, with his 
 psychology confined to the more superficial aspects of 
 human nature, and never coming within sight of the 
 notion of personality, or even of character, as involved 
 in self-determination. The like, however, may be said 
 of many who followed in his track; and if Jonathan 
 Edwards (in 1754) is anxious to disown any debt to 
 such an " ill-minded mischievous man," Priestley (in 
 1777) can only wonder that Hobbes should have pro- 
 pounded " the proper doctrine of philosophical necessity " 
 so clearly and defended it so ably. 
 
 He expands more freely on the Passions, his special 
 name for the mental pleasures and pains which " arise 
 from the expectation that proceeds from foresight of the 
 end or consequence of things, whether those things in the 
 sense please or displease." They may be summed up 
 under the two heads of Joy and Grief ; and without more 
 circumstance, in ( Leviathan,' he proceeds to characterise 
 in pithy terms the multiplex forms of each, supplementing . 
 afterwards the account of human impulses to action by 
 chapters on " Power " and on " Manners " as " those 
 qualities of mankind that concern their living together 
 in peace and unity." In ' Human Nature,' with less 
 separation of topics, the analysis had before been carried 
 
The Passions. 135 
 
 deeper. Hobbes there brings out into full relief the 
 element of (intellectual) representation that is in all 
 Passion '(Emotion), as distinguished from Sense-feeling. 
 " Conception " being, he says, of past, present or fu- 
 ture, the pleasures and pains of Sense are to be distin- 
 guished as involving no conception but of an object 
 present to the bodily organs ; or when, as sometimes in 
 smell, and generally in hearing and sight, the sense- 
 impression is accompanied with representation, the pleas- 
 ures and pains partake rather of the character of pas- 
 sions. In Passion proper the conception, as expectation 
 of good or evil, is directly of the future, but indirectly 
 also of the past, because all anticipation reposes on pre- 
 vious experience; more particularly, it is a conception 
 of power (or powerlessness) to produce something from 
 past experience of how it has been produced. \I\ig pas- \ 
 I sions, then, may be denned generally as the pleasure or I 
 \displeasure that men have from opinion of their Power / 
 power consisting of the bodily faculties and knowledge, 
 with all that these procure, as riches, place, friendship, 
 favour, &c./ 
 
 It is from this point of view that Hobbes gives (in 
 1 Human Nature,' c. 9) his more elaborate description 
 of the different passions, condensing into pregnant para- 
 graphs like those on Pity and Laughter, which have been 
 fought Over ever since the observations he had made 
 on men and manners when as yet he had no thought 
 of mechanical philosophy. Here his conception of man 
 as moved by purely selfish impulses is most distinctly 
 marked ; and here is to be sought the true source of his 
 theory of civil government as necessary for the preser-j 
 vation of men from the consequences of their anti-social 
 
136 Holies. 
 
 disposition. His later insight into the bodily mechan- 
 ism of mental life suggests to him that the manifest 
 differences of human wits may depend on variety in 
 the passions as conditioned by differences of general 
 bodily constitution ; while on the contrary, with the 
 original sense-endowment practically equal in all men, 
 the " temper of the brain," upon which sense depends, 
 is to be supposed equal. But he reverts (in ' Leviathan ') 
 to his position of mere human observer for his final 
 view of men's action in relation with one another. In 
 all me. alike he recognises one overmastering purpose 
 " a pei x + aial and restless desire of power after power 
 that ceaseth only in death." This assumes, as between 
 man and man, a variety of forms that may best be 
 noted at the farther stage of social life, when the ques- 
 tion is how men's natural impulses are to be repressed 
 under penalty of mutual destruction. It should, how- 
 ever, be added that Hobbes, in making his own hap- 
 piness to be the one motive spring of action for each 
 man, avoids the superficial identification of happiness 
 with mere pleasure, by declaring that " the felicity of 
 this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied " 
 but rather in "a continual progress of the desire from one 
 object to another, the attaining of the former being still 
 but the way to the latter." And once at least he can 
 forget egoistic feeling so far as to say that "that which 
 gives to human actions the relish of justice is a certain 
 nobleness or gallantness of courage, rarely found, by 
 which a man scorns to be beholden for the content- 
 ment of his life to fraud or breach of promise." (E., 
 iii. 136.) 
 
 One other natural disposition is finally to be noted 
 
Seed of Religion. 137 
 
 in man not the less natural because it is carried over 
 into the social state and needs very special regulation 
 there. Hobbes never fails to signalise in man (alone 
 among animals) a "seed of Religion," springing from 
 general intellectual curiosity, as well as from the power 
 of forecasting the consequences of things as good or 
 evil. The mere inquisitiveness by itself should suffice 
 to lead men backward and upward along a continuous 
 chain of effect and cause to " a first and eternal cause 
 of all things, which men mean by the name of God ; " 
 but anxiety and fear, arising from the ignorance ^? T true 
 causes and thought of possible evil, have beei?, a in fact, 
 more potent in urging men to make gods of whatever 
 powers or agents they could most directly fancy to 
 account for events. The most casual antecedents, 
 "after one or two encounters," are apt to be taken by 
 most men for causes ; or invisible agents are fancied in the 
 form of ghosts or spirits, conceived, like the human soul, 
 as thin aerial substances, in ignorance of the purely 
 phantasmal character of images as they appear in waking- 
 life or in dreams. Quite in the manner of the modern 
 anthropologist, Hobbes catalogues, in ' Leviathan,' the 
 manifold sorts of supernatural beings thus imagined by 
 "the Gentiles" in wantonness of fancy or from igno- 
 rance of natural causes, the kinds of devotion lavished 
 on them in fear, and the innumerable ways of seeking 
 to divine their will. The religious tendency finding 
 such vent is indestructible in human nature ; and as it 
 has been worked upon from the beginning by legislators 
 anxious to procure authority for their civil ordinances, 
 so to the end it remains a factor of peculiar import 
 in the social life of men. 
 
138 . Holies. 
 
 There can be little doubt, however Hobbes might wish 
 by afterthought to connect his theory of Political Society 
 with the principles of his general mechanical philosophy, 
 that it sprang originally from a different line of con- 
 sideration. Direct analysis of the notions of Justice 
 and Law, in relation with such knowledge of human 
 appetites and passions as any man " that will but 
 examine his own mind" has by experience, remained] 
 for him always a sufficient basis for civil philosophy, 
 without going deeper; and just such an analysis is 
 plainly to be read in the statements with which all the 
 expositions of his political theory begin. 
 
 Men, it seems clear to him, are by nature equal in L 
 powers both of body and min d. J At least, no man is so 
 strong in body as to be safe against the attack or the 
 arts of the weakest ; and as to mind, the very fact that 
 every man thinks he excels his fellows in prudence, 
 which is experience, proves equality, for "there is not 
 ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of 
 anything than that every man is contented with his 
 f share." OTius [practically equal in power, men are also 
 alike in being moved by three ' great passions desire of 
 safety, desire of gain and desire of glory all of them 
 sources of quarrel. The desire of triumphing over others 
 in " the combat of wits," of making a reputation at the 
 expense of others, engenders the bitterest strife. The 
 desire of gain, especially when the object sought is one 
 that can be neither divided nor enjoyed in common, 
 leads directly to the use of violence. And the mere 
 desire of safety will drive even the most moderate of 
 
The Natural Condition of Mankind. 139 
 
 men to take measures against his fellows, who might 
 else at any time use their power to deprive him of 
 goods and liberty and life.\ It is not that men are not 
 sociable by .nature, as taking pleasure in one another's 
 company, or that they have no need in infancy of help 
 from others if they are to live at all. The passions just | 
 named are, nevertheless, those of which there is clearest 
 evidence among men in their dealings with one another ; 
 and the natural consequence is a state of mutual dis-^, 
 trust which can only be called war!j Let a man but 
 consider what opinion, even in the social state, he has 
 of his fellow-subjects when he rides armed ; of his 
 fellow-citizens when he locks his doors ; of his children 
 and servants when he locks his chests. There may 
 never have been a time when, over the whole world, a 
 state of actual warfare prevailed : but savages still live 
 not otherwise ; and when a nation, accustomed to peace- 
 ful government, plunges into civil strife, it is seen what 
 the human lot naturally is. Nor are independent states, 
 at any time, in other than such a state of war or con- 
 dition of chronic distrust and jealousy; though, as it 
 gives their subjects employment, the same misery does 
 not result as with individual men. "What the state of na- 
 ture means for these Hobbes ends by picturing thus, in 
 ' Leviathan ' ; 
 
 I "In such condition there is no place for industry, be-/ 
 catnse the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no 
 culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commo- 
 dities that may be imported by sea, no commodious build- 
 ing, no instruments of moving and removing such things 
 as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the 
 earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, 
 
 K 
 
140 Holies. 
 
 which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent 
 death, and the life ofjn an solitary, poor, nasty T brutish T an d 
 short. . . . It is consequent also to the same conditions 
 that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine, and thine 
 distinct, but only that to be every man's that he can get and 
 for so long as he can keep itj (E., iii. 113-115.) 
 
 . CFrom this dismal state of man by nature there is, 
 however, a way out. Men have still other passions, 
 which make for peace instead of war the fear of death, 
 
 .%/ desire of things necessary to commodious living and the 
 hope by industry to obtain thenA [Eeason, says Hobbes, 
 thereupon suggests to men convenient articles of agree- 
 ment, and directs every man, for his own good, to seek 
 after peace as far forth as there is hope to attain ifc<< 
 The same Eeason gives a man, in the state of nature, 
 the Eight to all : for, as by a " certain impulsion of 
 nature," like that whereby a stone moves downward, 
 every man desires good and shuns evil and " chiefly the 
 chiefest of natural evils, which is death," it is but 
 reasonable that he should do his utmost in self-defence ; 
 and what is not contrary to right reason is said to be 
 done jure or with right in which right or liberty it is 
 implied that a man is free to use whatever means he 
 himself judges fit. But the right, being common, is 
 vain, if it is not as Hobbes sometimes argues the 
 ^ery cause of that wretched state of universal war. 
 l^What Rea son then truly says is : Come out of the st ate 
 
 / of nature as quickly a s possible, rather than strive to 
 pass a precarious existence in it. Though a man may 
 do anything he thinks good in the state of nature, he 
 ought to seek peace. Eeason thus gives a law in an 
 admitted, if not qui te proper, sense; and becaus e the^ 
 
Right of Nature Zaws of Nature. 141 
 
 re asoning faculty is natural to men, this law may be 
 called Law of Nature,, more truly than what there has 
 been a vain attempt to set up as such upon the consent 
 of wise and learned nations or of all mankind s 
 
 " "Right of nature" always -nerv ed, the fundame ntal 
 " law of nature " or precept of reason with a view to 
 self- preservation then is, that every man ought to seek 
 peace as far as there is hopp. of atta ining it ; and from 
 this first law follow some twenty others, given with 
 minor variations in the different works. Thus, peace is 
 to be maintained by way of contract or mutual transfer- 
 ring of rights ; covenants when made are to be performed 
 the true meaning of Justice, which apart from cov- 
 enant made has no meaning; Gratitude, Sociability, 
 Mercifulness are to be practised; Cruelty, Pride and 
 Arrogance eschewed ; Equity is to be observed in judg- 
 ing between man and man; and thence Hobbes is 
 led on to particularise a number of other more special 
 prescriptions bearing mainly on the settlement of strife 
 by the peaceful means of arbitration. Laws of Nature 
 in one aspect, they may equally be called the Moral 
 Law as the summary of good manners, habits or 
 virtues among men, in the only pertinent sense of the 
 words "virtue" and "good," namely, as promotive of 
 peaceful living. And, should the deduction of them, as 
 given at length, seem too subtle and laboured to have 
 effect with men under violent passion or pressing per- 
 sonal need, they have all, adds Hobbes, been summed 
 up in the one precept, fitted to the meanest capacity and 
 powerful against all mental perturbations : Do not that 
 to another which thou wouldest not have done to 
 thyself. Only let a man place himself in the position 
 
142 Holies. 
 
 of_ others and, his passions and self-love, that weighed 
 heavily in his own scale, now weighing no more or 
 weighing against him, the reasonableness of every one 
 of the laws will immediately appear. Hobbes, it will 
 be observed, substitutes for " the golden rule " a negative 
 expression of different import perhaps unconsciously; 
 and in the same spirit he next asserts that it is not 
 required of any man that he should observe the law of 
 nature when others do not. All that is required is a 
 constant desire and readiness to observe it. The law, 
 
 {indeed, is for ever binding upon the conscience or in foro 
 interno, and this so much that the very action which 
 is done according to law may be in fact a transgres- 
 sion of it, if the intention was contrary. In this jj&w, 
 Hobbes ca n even declare that, however acti ons ma y or 
 must vary according to"mCUliis lances, the laws of nature 
 are immutable and eternal. Injustice, ingratitude, arro- 
 I gance, inhumanity, and the rest, can never be made lawful 
 [in the court of conscience ; for it can never be that war 
 to which these lead can preserve life, and peace destroy 
 it. No action that is against reason, though it were 
 repeated never so often and acquired all the force of 
 custom and prescription, can ever cease to be against 
 Reason and the Law of Nature. . 
 
 In all this part of Hobbes's doctrine, as we see, it is 
 not the mechanical philosopher that speaks, nor does 
 he take much pains to square the conception of Reason 
 as the source of right and law with eyen his psycho- 
 logical analysis of the faculty. He is working with 
 current notions of Scholastic origin, and is only careful 
 to interpret them in accordance with his personal view 
 yof the niotive forces of human nature. Since 1625, the 
 
Law and Morality. 143 
 
 traditional conception of men's social relations had re- 
 ceived a new and impressive rendering in the famous 
 work of Grotius, ' De Jure Belli et Pacis ' ; a nd, witho ut 
 being m ftntionp.d, thft l>n tfji publicist is plainly pointed 
 at by H obbes throughout as an oppo nent! Common to 
 them both, however, is the modern determination to 
 connect the inquiry into the foundation of public law 
 with a theory of morality as grounded in the facts of 
 human nature. Hobbes, it is important to observe, 
 has a distinct enough notion of the province of morality, 
 however he may be led to it only from such a supposi- 
 tion of human relations as is. gained by feigning men 
 free from the legal bonds of society. 1 And, though the 
 ground of all such actions as he indifferently calls 
 naturally or morally right is for each man mere self- 
 preservation ^ ho i s a ble on this, as he thinks, to build 
 a thoroughly rational system of human conduct which 
 shall provide for the general welfare, while not exclud-/ 
 ing anything that the consciousness of mankind recog- 
 nises as duty or virtue in the individual. Peculiar 
 to himself is his manner of subordina ting mor al to 
 positive law, when he contends, presently, that only 
 as there is formed a settled society can the moral law 
 be put in force, and, later on, that the law of the state, 
 whatever form it assumes, must wholly supersede in 
 practice any law that may be called moral; but hone 
 the less does positive law have with Hobbes a distinctly 
 moral origin and aim. It is to establish what he 
 regards as right, in the deepest sense, among men, thai 
 Civil Society or Commonwealth is called into being. 
 
 1 Compare with his fiction here the initial fiction of his whole syn- 
 thetic scheme of philosophy. 
 
144 Hd 
 
 The laws of ^nature are the wa y to peace, but to 
 understand them as such is not to practise them. The 
 generality of men will not practise them when greater 
 present gain seems to result from their non-observance ; 
 and even those who desire to observe them, which is 
 all that can be required of men, cannot by reason of 
 the lawless action of others do so, and thus are obliged 
 to fall back upon the original right of nature which 
 leads to war. Men are, in fact, in this difficulty. 
 
 Eace can come only from observing the law of nature, 
 t to observe the law of nature some security is 
 already necessary. A man can have this only as he 
 is aided by others, and the mutual consent of two or 
 three is not sufficient. The number of those who agree 
 to aid each other must be so great in comparison with 
 the number of those they fear, that a slight accession 
 of strength to the other side will not destroy the supe- * 
 riority, which is to say, the security. Is the security | 
 even then certain ? Far from it. What is to keep the " 
 multitude itself together 1 Differences of opinion, mut-\ 
 ual jealousies, private interests, will break it up as 
 soon as the common danger that united it has passed : 
 otherwise we might suppose, what is certainly not the 
 case, that all men would unite as this multitude has 
 done, and so the law of nature would come to be 
 observed without particular expedients at all 
 
 There is, in fact, but one way for men to secure the . 
 advantages of agreement, namely, by having a common 
 power set up in their midst, that shall wield the strength 
 of all to keep peace within and repel foes without. jUpon 
 one man or one assembly of men (in which plurality of 
 voices shall produce singleness of will), the power and 
 
The Generation of Leviathan. 145 
 
 strength of all must be conferred ; and when this one 
 man or assembly shall so personate_ eyery one of j he 
 multitude as to be authorised to act in all things tou ch- 
 ing the com mon peace and safety, there is somethi ng 
 more than concord or consent there is re al civil union. 
 The multitude so united has become a Body Politic, or 
 Commonwealth, or State : there is generated " that great 
 Leviathan or rather, to speak more reverently, that 
 mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, 
 our peace and defence." The transference of power 
 consists, as it only can consist, in parting with the 
 natural right of self-defence belonging to each individual; 
 whereupon all becomes subject to the sovereign or 
 supreme power thus constituted. It may take place 
 in two ways by Institution and by Acquisition, i.e.J 
 according as men have themselves come togethejl and 
 chosen to become subjects, or as they have been made 
 such by yielding to superior power imposed on them by 
 a master or father. The study of this difference, which 
 Hobbes always accentuates, will light up much in his 
 whole conception of the social relation. 
 
 The society that is formed by institution, and may be 
 called political, is always considered first by Hobbes, 
 and gives him the ground he wants for determining the 
 rights of the sovereign power, which is his chief practical 
 object, as well as the possible forms monarchy, aris- 
 tocracy and democracy that government may assume. 
 But in calling natural the other kind of society that is 
 formed by acquisition, he not obscurely suggests that 
 the institutive is first only in the logical, not the his- 
 torical, order. The state of nature, if it ever actually 
 existed, must have been put an end to by the superior 
 
 p. x. k 
 
146 Holies. 
 
 might of some men rather than by the deliberate con- 
 sent of all ; but how could it ever have existed in fact, 
 when there never was a time that there were no masters, 
 or at least fathers'? That states had their natural be- 
 ginning in families when not in conquest, or rather 
 in families gradually aggrandised by acquisition of ser- 
 vants, is evidently the real opinion of Hobbes ; though, 
 concerned as he is with rational explanation, he not 
 only puts first his supposition of the state formed by 
 voluntary contract, but cannot understand the other 
 except as it also can be shown to involve some form of 
 covenant. 
 
 Present in some shape from the first, it is only in 
 1 Leviathan ' that the notion of a Social Contract receives 
 from Hobbes the full development that is peculiar to 
 him. [Men agree to create a single authority in their 
 midst by transference of all their barren rights of indi- 
 vidual self-protection; and the rights of the sovereign 
 authority so constituted, be it man or assembly, are 
 wielded henceforth with the most absolute irresponsi 
 bility, so far as they are concerned who have once and 
 for all formally denuded themselves of particular rights 
 in hope of common protection. This is always Hobbes's 
 position ; but he gives " it "at la st this more decided ex- 
 pression, that the contract is in no sense betwe en the 
 sove reign who t akes up the rights and each oralloTthe 
 indi vidual men who resign tliem, but between man an d 
 man of these only. It is thus that the sovereign is 
 properly understood to be in no way bound to thosaQ 
 who seek protection from him. Only they are for ever 
 bound to one another to allow whatever the sovereign/ 
 does or devises for their protection, which they could ^ 
 
The Social Contract. 147 
 
 not assure directly of themselves. If, indeed, the 
 sovereign fails to give the protection for which the 
 sacrifice between man and man was made, the indivi- 
 duals may think of resuming their natural rights ; but 
 they have no remedy in any case as against the sovereign 
 that never contracted with theiriTJ 
 
 Hobbes's notion of the State as based upon voluntary 
 covenant is thus materially different from that doctrine 
 of Social Contract which, already enunciated by Hooker, ( 
 was afterwards definitely formulated by Locke and*- 
 played so great a part in the political thought and action 
 of the eighteenth century. Aiming more distinctly at 
 rational interpretation, Hobbes shows less tendency than 
 Locke to view the contract as actual historical fact ; and, i 
 seeking a basis not for popular but for sovereign rights, I 
 he understands the covenant as having force only be- 
 tween subject and subject, not between subject and[ 
 ruler. The more interesting is it, then, to observe how, 
 when he passes to supplement his general theory by/ 
 reference to that natural government paternal orl 
 despotic which obviously represents for him the his-\ 
 torical origin of civil order, h e slips unawares from his / 
 own into the other conception of contract. The con- 
 queror, it is urged, who procures himself subjects by 
 force, has their obedience not otherwise than by, contract, 
 tacit or express, when he spares their lives' and allows 
 them liberty of body, instead of keeping them as slaves 
 in durance. Also, when the family expands into a civil 
 society, it is because children have been preserved by 
 their father, when they might have been destroyed, that 
 he has a claim, as by agreement, to their obedience. So 
 serious is Hobbes with his thought of rationalising all 
 
148 Hobbes. 
 
 that he finds ! But here, at least, the supposed surrender 
 of natural right is made directly to the protecting power. 
 Though it is curious that Hobbes does not remark this 
 change in his notion of contract, it can make no differ- 
 ence in the patriarchal or the despotic state to the 
 rights of the sovereign. Keverting, then, to the con- 
 ditions imagined for the state founded by voluntary 
 institution that every man agrees with every other man 
 to submit to a common authority wielding the powers 
 of all for the protection of all, we may understand the 
 sweeping draft which Hobbes at once makes in the sover- 
 eign's favour. Power of coercion, or the sword of justice; 
 the sword of war, with absolute command of military 
 force; the power of judicature; the legislative power; 
 the appointing of magistrates and officers, judicial or 
 executive ; the determining all conditions of honour and 
 order; lastly, the judging_ofj^] rJoH-.rin^s th at may b e 
 p ublicly taught, these are the more evident rights with- 
 out which it seems to Hobbes impossible for the supreme 
 authority to fulfil the purpose of its coming into being. 
 /"And with the explication of these he joins always the 
 emphatic declaration that, the sovereignty once founded 
 in any form that seemed good to the contracting parties, 
 there is no means or possibility left to the subjects of con- 
 testing or controlling the exercise of the sovereign power, 
 much less of reclaiming or reconstituting the power 
 itself. In the form in which it was fixed, and with 
 the indefeasible rights common to every form alike, so . 
 it must ever remain, for any right the subjects have to 
 change it unless, indeed, they will front the abyss of J 
 anarchy from which it so hardly delivered them. | 
 
 Hobbes is not however precluded, by his view of the 
 
Forms of Government. 149 
 
 inviolability of the sovereign power in whatever form 
 constituted, from considering both what variety of forms 
 there are and how they tend to pass one into the others. 
 The transition from democracy into aristocracy on the 
 one hand, or into monarchy on the other, is express- 
 ly traced at least in the earlier works ; in ' Leviathan ' 
 he is anxious rather to confine himself to showing that 
 while democracy and aristocracy are, equally with mon- 
 archy, to be recognised as forms of absolute sovereign 
 power, they fall below monarchy in effectiveness for the 
 ends of government. From his rational point of view, 
 he cannot but regard democracy as the form prior to the 
 others. The very coming together of men from the 
 state of nature, in order to constitute by majority of 
 voices a civil government, is a kind of democratic act ; 
 and to constitute a democracy in the full sense, as a 
 form of polity with unlimited sovereign powers, needs 
 but a fixed prescription as to time and place of stated 
 assembling, though for efficient action there may be ad- 
 vantage in also constituting some council or man to 
 wield supreme power in the intervals. From such de- 
 mocracy, then, aristocracy and monarchy arise, when 
 from one cause or another the people choose to give up 
 their habit of assembling, and hand over to a limited 
 section of their number or to one man the uncontrolled 
 exercise henceforth of all sovereign rights ; or, of course, 
 such constitution of the civil power may be resolved 
 on by the multitude in the first instance out of the 
 state of nature. If, in one place, he declares that 
 " other governments were compacted by the artifice of 
 men out of the ashes of monarchy after it had been 
 ruined by seditions," this is said in the mere ardour of 
 
150 Hobbes. ' 
 
 pleading his favourite cause, or may be understood as a 
 momentary lapse to the historical point of view. 
 
 The case that he makes for monarchy in principle 
 includes the following as its main points, all of them 
 urged with characteristic vehemence. fThe public and \ 
 private interest of the ruler are identical.^ There is free 
 scope for deliberation, since a monarch can take counsel 
 of whom, when and where he pleases can get the best 
 counsel and get it secretly, as no assembly with its 
 studied speeches cam The resolutions of a monarch 
 are not liable to more inconstancy than belongs to human 
 nature, while an assembly is inconstant by its very num- 
 bers. Faction is not possible. The "inevitable incon- 
 venience " that the sovereign will commit outrages on 
 the people to enrich favourites and flatterers is less than 
 in government by assembly, where all will play this game 
 on the principle of hodie mihi, oris tibi. Finally, the 
 inconvenience there may be in monarchy from the 
 succession of an infant, with the temporary expedients ( 
 it involves, is at worst no greater than regularly attends ' 
 _ihe rule of an assembly. 
 
 Hobbes makes short work of other forms of gov- 
 ernment thought to be distinct from the traditional 
 three, such as elective kingdoms, mixed or limited 
 monarchies, &c. The supreme power must always, in. 
 any case, be fixed ultimately somewhere ; and where\ 
 this is in the people generally, in some particular class, 
 or in one man determines the true nature of the gov- 
 ernment, whatever superficial guise it may assume. 
 But what he always overlooks, in the eagerness of his 
 desire to prove to the revolutionaries that the essence of 
 sovereign power must under whatever form be the same, 
 
The Liberty of the Subject 151 
 
 is that something may be gained for the general well- 
 being by having the form masked and the centre of 
 power not too apparently determined. 
 
 Two chief points remain of his general political theory 
 the Li berty of the Subject and the T)uty_ of the S ov- 
 ereign. The Liberty of the Subject is most expressly 
 treated in ' Leviathan.' Starting from his abstract philo- 
 sophical position that freedom is properly said only of a 
 body as its motion is not hindered, and of man as he is 
 not hindered externally when he has the will to move or 
 act in any way, Hobbes seeks to define what liberty is 
 left under the artificial chains of the civil law by which 
 men have bound themselves. (In one sense, the subject 
 is free even under a law that binds, in that it is always 
 open to him to omit to do that to which he is bound 
 by nothing else than the fear of punishment. *But in 
 a truer sense he is free in all respects wherein the 
 sovereign has provided no laws for the regulation of his 
 conduct, when they might have been provided. In 
 another and still deeper sense the subject has liberty, 
 however the sovereign may command, namely, as there 
 are certain indefeasible rights of the individual which 
 it is against reason to think of as passed away upon the 
 institution of sovereignty. % A man cannot in any way 
 be bound to kill, wound or maim himself, or bear against 
 himself witness; or, again, to slaughter others, or perform 
 any dangerous or dishonourable office, in a case where 
 refusal does not frustrate the end for which sovereignty 
 is ordained./ Civil obedience may imply, "Kill me 
 or my fellow, if you please;" but not, " I will kill myself 
 or my fellow." The subject, also, is set free from his. 
 obedience whenever the sovereign becomes in any way 
 
152 Holies. 
 
 unable to render that protection for the sake of which 
 alone men can be thought to resign their natural 
 right. 
 
 Has the sovereign, then, an express Duty 1 ? Not to- 
 wards the subject, if, as we have seen, it is not with the 
 sovereign but with his fellow-subject that the subject 
 contracts. It is probably, therefore, not without design 
 that in * Leviathan ' Hobbes speaks of the " office " 
 rather than the "duty" of the sovereign. Still he 
 cannot deny that there is, in one sense, a " law " over 
 
 ^sovereigns, and in the ' De Cive ' he did not hesitate to 
 speak simply of the "duties of those who bear rule." 
 The law is that which, in different respects, is called 
 natural or moral or divine, and as divine has for its 
 
 ^sanction eternal death. Under such penalty the duty 
 of sovereigns but also, as Hobbes makes haste to add, 
 their profit lies in fulfilling the end for which they 
 
 I were intrusted with supreme authority, namely, the 
 safety and good government of the people. By safety 
 is to be understood not merely bare preservation, but also 
 all other contentments of life; by people, not the city 
 or state itself that governs, but the multitude of the sub- 
 jects governed, though not each man in particular other- 
 wise than as each can be reached by a general providence, 
 taking the form of instruction or laws. And as the 
 / public safety includes external defence and internal 
 
 * peace, it is the business of the sovereign to provide fully__ 
 for both. ^Hobbes can conceive of no external policy 
 
 v among nations but one of mutual distrust, with the 
 modern standing army ever ready for action. "The law 
 of nations and the law of nature is the same thing ; " 
 and the law of nature, in the absence of any constrain- 
 
 ( 
 
The Office of the Sovereign. 153 
 
 ing power over nations to keep tliem to the equal ob- 
 servance of it, resolves itself into right of nature in each 
 to assert itself as it can.) Internally, the sovereign, 
 besides ruling equally between man and man and pro- 
 viding as far as may be for the welfare of all, has main- / 
 ly to consider by what means the being of the common-^ 
 wealth shall be preserved. For dissolution is the fate that 
 Hobbes sees ever impending over the body politic ; and 
 when he advances in 'Leviathan' to the definite con- 
 ception of the state as a huge organism, it becomes nat- 
 ural for him with his ready fancy to figure the sources 
 of civil trouble as so many specific diseases, ending in ^ 
 decay and death unless the sovereign with clear insight 
 stand forward to stay and save. 
 
 The evils to be warded off are, first, all such erroneous 
 conceptions of the origin and nature of civil government, 
 springing from ignorance or fostered by the malevolent 
 purpose of designing men, as are at variance with the^/ 
 plain rational theory now first propounded by Hobbes 
 himself. To meet them, there is but one effectual re- 
 source. ^As the sovereign power should begin by learn- 
 ing its own true nature and rights from the chart now JN \ 
 at last provided for it, so it should organise and main- * 
 tain a system of public instruction in the civil duties of 
 subjects.^ Let the people be assembled at stated times &#0 
 (like the Jews every seventh day), " and, after prayers 
 and praises given to God, the Sovereign of sovereigns, 
 hear those their duties told them, and the positive laws, / 
 such as generally concern them all, read and expounded, 
 and be put in mind of the authority that maketh them 
 laws." \The teachers are themselves to be first taught 
 the like in the universities, instead of continuing to be yi\ 
 
M 
 
 
 154 Holies. 
 
 indoctrinated there in the literatures of Greece and 
 Rome, rich only in lessons of civil disobedience.^ 
 
 But is the whole function of the sovereign discharged 
 when subjects have their civil duty thus set plainly 
 before them 1 ? Far from it. Man, with a natural seed 
 of religion in him, acts not only under fear of earthly 
 sanctions; and how is the sovereign power to get its 
 laws obeyed if other power is there dividing the subjects' 
 allegiance'? The sovereign power, if it will maintain 
 itself at all and be able to provide for the safety and 
 wellbeing of its subjects, cannot choose but take in 
 hand the regulation of their whole life, religious as well 
 
 Ias secular. If it neglects to do so, another power, like 
 the Papacy in Christendom, will rise up, and, by the 
 greater might of its sanctions, make an end of civil 
 obedience. The State must be at the same time Church 
 if it is to remain State : the king will give ground to 
 the priest, unless he is himself priest as well as king. 
 But when the question is of regulating the whole of human 
 life, distinction must be made between a man!s_aciiS_and 
 hisopinions. \Lt is impossible that the state by any 
 machinery of instruction or of penalties should control 
 v/the thoughts and feelings of the subject. On the sub- 
 ject's side, with freedom of thought left ever untouched, 
 
 (the claim of anything that can be called conscience to 
 override the sovereign's commands' must be at once re- 
 
 ' jected. This is plain so far as temporal affairs are con- 
 cerned ; for the laws of nature enjoin civil obedience as 
 the elementary condition of human welfare./ In case of 
 religion, if natural religion is meant, it is not otherwise, 
 because the law of nature is but another name for the 
 
 I law of God ; if revealed religion, everything depends upon 
 
The Religious Difficulty. 155 
 
 a true understanding of its import. ^Tow what, accord- 
 ing to Scripture, is really necessary for salvation 1 Only 
 the confession that Jesus is the Christ, with whatever is 
 involved therein, but excluding all trie vain dogmas in- 
 vented by church-doctors under the influence of pagan 
 philosophy. The sovereign power which utters any 
 command trenching on the religious sphere is either 
 Christian or it is not. If Christian, it will not go against 
 the fundamental tenet. Whatever it enjoins is, there- 
 fore, either indifferent, or is likely to have as much 
 Scriptural warrant as can be adduced for the opinions of 
 private men or for the injunctions of any pretended 
 universal church ; not to say that some determination of 
 controversial points in religion is necessary. In either 
 case, the subject may safely follow its command, more 
 especially as no mental assent only outward conformity 
 is extorted; and would do wrong not to follow it, 
 because otherwise civil anarchy must result. If, on the 
 other hand, the sovereign power is not professedly Chris- 
 tian, the subject cannot indeed be expected, in a case 
 where something is required involving damnation, to 
 obey man rather than God. Let him then be ready, if 
 need be, to lay down his life, expecting the reward in 
 heaven of his martyrdom ; but in any case let him not 
 resist a power which, whether Christian or not, is 
 divinely appointed, since it has its origin in reason 
 uttering the law of nature, which is law of God. 
 
 Such is Hobbes's general answer to the great practical 
 question of his age and country, philosophically grounded 
 upon the facts of human nature as he conceived them, 
 but urged, more especially in ' Leviathan,' with the 
 
156 Bobbes. 
 
 fervour of a political reformer. By what audacious 
 criticism of Biblical texts and ecclesiastical dogmas he 
 sought to support his secularist conception of life, and to 
 insinuate, at a time of social disorganisation, his free 
 thought in the matter of religion, lies too far apart from 
 the exposition of his philosophy to be told at any length 
 commensurate with the space he himself devotes to reli- 
 gious topics, especially in his great popular work. He 
 had found, as he thought, the clearest reasons in the 
 nature of men and things for regarding any form of 
 settled polity as too great an achievement of human art, 
 and too priceless a heritage from generation to generation, 
 to be cast away for any consideration whatever, terrestrial 
 or other. Living in an age when Scriptural warrant was 
 demanded for every conclusion of the natural reason 
 that in any way touched the fabric of religious doctrine, 
 he had, then, to reckon with those texts that seemed at 
 variance as he could find others that fell in readily 
 enough with his scheme of human and social life. 
 How far the Biblical argument is to be taken always 
 quite seriously, remains as doubtful in his case as in 
 that of other forward thinkers in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury ; but the fact that his exegesis is specially heterodox 
 does not of itself prove that he aimed at weakening the 
 force of the Scriptural sanction, and was not sincere in 
 seeking such support for his reasoned opinions as his 
 hardy interpretation still left him. 
 
 These, in briefest summary, are his more character- 
 istic positions, as at Last fully defined in ' Leviathan.' 
 He contends for the free st rational c riticism of Scripture, 
 but subject always to permission from the civil power 
 a reservation which he could the more readily make as 
 
Biblical Criticism. 157 
 
 in the circumstances of the time it did not in the least 
 hamper himself. The ca use of reason i s^apecially to be 
 upheld against pretensions to revelation (by way of vision 
 or the like) on the part of the individual, " who, being a 
 man, may err, and, which is more, may lie ; " nor can the 
 private fanatic get help from Scripture, which requires 
 in a prophet, besides the power of working miracles, the 
 preaching only of such doctrines as are conformable to 
 law. h et, while reason is to be followed in all things 
 that can be brought within its scope, Hobbes also sounds 
 the note, so distinctive of English thought before and 
 after him (from William of Ockham, through Bacon, to 
 Locke), that there is a core of mystery in religion which 
 faith only, and not reason, can touch ; venturing even to 
 declare that it is " with the mysteries of religion as with 
 wholesome pills, which swallowed whole have the virtue 
 to cure, but chewed are for the most part cast up again 
 without effect."^ Applied to the question of the canon 
 of Scripture, reasoned inquiry leads to much modification 
 of current opinion as to the date and authorship of the 
 several books ; but it seems evident that the ecclesiastics 
 who, after some centuries, fixed the canon, did not falsify 
 the tradition of Christian doctrine; for, "if they had 
 had an intention so to do, they would surely have made 
 [the Scriptures] more favourable to their power over 
 Christian princes and civil sovereignty than they are." 
 A large number of particular topics Spirit, Angel, In- 
 spiration, Kingdom of God, Holy, Sacred, Sacrament, 
 Word of God, Prophets, Miracles, Eternal Life, Hell, 
 Salvation, World to Come, Eedemption, Church, Office 
 of Christ are then, in the order given, subjected to 
 criticism, with the purpose and to the effect of showing 
 
 K 
 
158 Holies. 
 
 that, when their Scriptural sense is fairly interpreted, no 
 footing is given for a priestly order independent of not 
 to say superior to the civil authority. There is, in 
 fact, no such elaborate system of dogma to be found 
 in Scripture as ecclesiastics, Papal and other, pretend : 
 that Jesus is the Christ is the one fundamental article 
 of revealed faith. ^Neither is there any warrant for 
 that extravagant scheme of supernatural sanctions upon 
 the strength of which an ambitious priesthood would 
 seek to overrule the allegiance of subjects to their 
 secular sovereign. A reign of Christ upon earth from 
 the day of judgment over the just restored to life by 
 Omnipotence (not through any natural immortality), 
 while the wicked are raised again to be consumed " in 
 second death " by fire, which, though itself everlasting, 
 cannot but make an end of those who may be cast into 
 it successively as long as the world endures, this is the 
 plain sense of the Scriptural texts bearing upon the 
 after-life. With such a simplified creed and narrowed 
 view of human destiny, what need, then, for a spiritual 
 order distinct from the naturally formed, and therefore 
 divinely appointed, organisation of national life 1 The 
 true Kingdom of God, once identifiable with the Jewish 
 polity, has, in fact, under the new dispensation, passed 
 into the variety of independent Christian commonwealths. 
 It is nothing less, Hobbes finally contends, than a 
 Kingdom of Darkness that has been set up against the 
 Kingdom of God on earth by the cunning arts of eccle- 
 siastical ambition; founding (as he shows by piquant 
 demonstration at length) on misinterpretation of Scrip- 
 ture, on demonology and other relics of Gentile reli- 
 gion, and on false notions of philosophy, metaphysical. 
 
Epilogue of 'Leviathan! 159 
 
 physical and moral. But these arts being now, once for 
 all, laid bare, and a true philosophical doctrine being 
 at last demonstrated from irrefragable principles, which 
 shows man's true place in nature and by what political 
 constitution he can alone be rescued from brutishness 
 and misery, it is impossible, or at least inexcusable, 
 that nations should any longer be led astray, by priestly 
 or other wiles, to their undoing. 
 
 Though 'Leviathan' stands apart from the formal 
 exposition of the philosophical system, it has perforce 
 been mainly drawn upon here for the account of Man 
 and Society, and with the epilogue of all written as it 
 was in 1651 we may now pass to what remains to be 
 told of the story of Hobbes's life : 
 
 " Thus I have brought to an end my Discourse of 
 Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, occasioned by the dis- 
 orders of the present time, without partiality, without appli- 
 cation, and without other design than to set before men's 
 eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience ; 
 of which the condition of human nature and the laws divine, 
 both natural and positive, require an inviolable observation. 
 And though in the revolution of states there can be no very 
 good constellation for truths of this nature to be born under 
 (as having an angry aspect from the dissolvers of an old 
 government, and seeing but the backs of them that erect a 
 new), yet I cannot think it will be condemned at this time 
 either by the public judge of doctrine or by any that desires 
 the continuance of public peace. And in this hope I return 
 to my interrupted speculation of bodies natural, wherein, if 
 God give me health to finish it, I hope the novelty will as 
 much please as in the doctrine of this artificial body it useth 
 to offend. For such truth as opposeth no man's profit or\ 
 pleasure is to all men welcome." 
 
160 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CONFLICT (1651-78). 
 
 With twenty - eight years of vigorous old age still 
 before him when he came back to England at the end 
 of 1651, Hobbes had time and strength and inclination 
 for much other work than merely putting into literary 
 form the philosophical notions which he had been slowly 
 elaborating for the best part of twenty years before, and 
 with which he had been able to connect more or less 
 closely the earlier opinions he had formed of the nature 
 and manners of men. Apart from the trouble he had 
 with some mathematical chapters of the ' De Corpore/ we 
 have seen him proceed easily enough to the completion 
 (or what he was fain to regard as the completion) of 
 his long-projected system. Now we have to turn back 
 again to the time of his home-coming, and see how he 
 fared after making bold as he had done to preach, in 
 1 Leviathan,' his audacious eirenikon to a distracted 
 country. A tangle of intermittent conflicts, growing 
 out of occasions that were never their causes, is spread 
 over most of his remaining years. Under whatever 
 guise of philosophy, mathematics or physics, it was al- 
 ways the author of ' Leviathan ' that was so vehemently 
 
Reception of 'Leviathan! 161 
 
 attacked j and none other than the author of ' Leviathan' 
 conld assume such a tone of haughty defence or venture 
 on such reckless counter-sallies. 
 
 f The great book made its mark from the first. Ap- 
 pearing at a time of social confusion and political uncer- 
 tainty, it won, by its sharp and decisive utterances, many 
 who had grown weary of the endless strife and longed 
 above all things for reposey A doctrine that TP.ypovp.fi 
 n Y n T gr^uir] , political ^v wKgjflflg, upon which the Civil 
 War had been waged, could not fail to strike minds fresh 
 from the experience of its horrors. A doctrine that did 
 rKJ_ nn TvVp-m th ~R volution in i ts origin without sup - 
 plyin g fl. rn.tiorml grmu~>d for ir-r- opting ftp T^py/Vhfjnn irj 
 its_ results, could not fail to win its way with sincere 
 royalists who had no call to linger on in hopeless exile 
 for a lost cause. Nor though something more than 
 loose surmises or the calumnies of a later time is needed 
 to prove either that Hobbes, writing in the years before 
 1650, had in view the elevation of the parliamentary 
 general, or that the puritan Protector in 1653 broke 
 through his deepest convictions to gain the services of 
 the worldly-minded reasoner could the plea of ' Levia- 
 than ' for the vigorous rule of one fail to receive a signal 
 confirmation from Cromwell's advent to power. 1 
 
 1 Clarendon's insinuations, set down some fifteen or twenty years 
 afterwards, have already been mentioned (pp. 68, 71, above). The 
 express charge that Hobbes was offered a secretaryship by Oliver is 
 made as late as 1683, four years after his death and even then not 
 unequivocally by the Kev. John Dowel in the feeblest of controver- 
 sial pieces, 'The Leviathan Heretical, &c.' (p. 137). On the other 
 hand, Hobbes is not unwilling, in his controversial ardour of 1656 
 (E., vii. 336), to claim that * Leviathan ' had " framed the minds of a 
 thousand gentlemen to a conscientious obedience to present govern- 
 ment, which otherwise would have wavered in that point. " 
 P. X. L 
 
162 Holies. 
 
 More marked, however, than any support or justifica- 
 tion the book received, was the opposition it aroused 
 an opposition that came from many sides, with Hobbes 
 standing where he was in the middle. Neither simple 
 royalist nor friend of the revolutionary government; 
 neither Puritan, with his aims so intensely secular, nor 
 Anglican, with his deep distrust of episcopal preten- 
 sions, he stood a mark for the shafts of all. It was 
 not the day of the Anglican clergy, before the Restora- 
 tion, but " dirt and slander " were " cast upon him in 
 sermons and private meetings" by the ministers that 
 held the public ear; 1 and as early as 1652 literary hos- 
 tilities began. The opening was mild enough : Sir 
 Robert Filmer, constrained to attack him, in the com- 
 pany of Milton and Grotius, for the heresy of placing 
 the origin of sovereign rights in the rational choice 
 of the governed, being rejoiced to be at one with him 
 on the question of their extent; and Alexander Ross, 
 the learned Aberdonian, being content with picking 
 a number of holes in his erudition or reasoning. 
 But, in 1654, the true war-note was sounded in the 
 1 Vindicia3 Academiarum ' of Seth AVard, Savilian pro- 
 fessor of astronomy in Oxford the prologue, as it 
 may be called, to the first act of the extraordinary 
 conflict in which Hobbes became engaged with Ward's 
 better known colleague, John "YVallis, from the year 
 1655, and which, waged irregularly over more than 
 twenty years, drained away his best energies for the 
 rest of his life. As it happened, however, that in 
 the same year he was drawn into another conflict^ 
 carried on with his left hand for a little at the begin- 
 i E., to. 237. 
 
' Of Liberty and Necessity' 163 
 
 ning of the greater one, we may best dispose of the 
 smaller first. 
 
 With Bramhall. 
 
 In 1654 a small treatise, 'Of Liberty and Necessity,' 
 issued from the press, addressed to the Marquis of New- 
 castle, from Eouen, in 1652, in reply to a discourse on 
 the same subject by Bishop Bramhall of Londonderry, 
 and subscribed with Hobbes's name. 1 It took up and 
 answered the bishop's arguments one by one, and ended' 
 with a statement, sharp and clear, of Hobbes's own 
 " opinion about Liberty and Necessity," given already 
 more shortly in 'Human Nature' and 'Leviathan.' In 
 a prefatory epistle "to the sober and discreet reader," 
 an anonymous writer inveighed, in a strain neither 
 discreet nor sober, against priests and ministers of every 
 class, and declared that here another great question, over 
 which they had been vainly or mischievously wrangling, 
 was solved by the author of ' Leviathan.' 
 
 The piece was what it professed to be, except in the 
 matter of date, which should have been 1646 ; and the 
 history of it came out in the sequel. Bramhall, an 
 active royalist, was one of those who fled with Newcastle 
 after Marston Moor, and in course of time reached Paris. 
 There, apparently in the year 1645, he and Hobbes, in 
 presence of the marquis, had a discussion on the old 
 question of Free-will. Raised anew at the beginning of 
 the century by Arminius in Holland, the question had 
 soon passed beyond the circle of speculative theologians, 
 engendering bitter political strife in more countries than 
 one, and notably in England, where Arminianism had 
 i E., iv. 229-278. 
 
164 Holies. 
 
 been hotly embraced by the royalist High-Church party, 
 in opposition to the Calvinism rooted from the first 
 among the Puritans. A sufferer by the war in which 
 the sectaries had just triumphed, besides being the very 
 type of a Laudian bishop, Bramhall was a most passionate 
 supporter of the Arminian (as it was also, in opposition 
 at this very moment to Jansenius, the orthodox Catholic) 
 view. As for Hobbes, although on the royalist side, he 
 had long held, with a strong philosophical conviction, a 
 view more nearly allied to the tenet of the Puritan sects, 
 and only was incensed against these, nor less strongly 
 against Laud and the leaders of his own party, for 
 making a political dispute out of such a merely specula- 
 tive question. The discussion between the two, carried 
 on temperately before Newcastle, having led to no change 
 of opinion on either side, Bramhall wrote down his views 
 and sent them to the marquis to be answered in this 
 form by Hobbes. At Newcastle's particular request, 
 Hobbes accordingly did furnish, early in 1646, a reply, 
 desiring, however, that it should be kept private, be- 
 cause the discussion could serve no good practical pur- 
 pose. Unpublished it therefore remained, as also a 
 rejoinder made soon after by the bishop, with which, no 
 farther notice being taken by Hobbes, the controversy 
 had then closed. It happened, however, that, in the 
 interval between writing his own reply and receiving 
 the bishop's rejoinder, Hobbes allowed a Frenchman of 
 his acquaintance, interested in the subject, to have a 
 private translation of the reply made by a young English- 
 man who secretly took also a copy for himself. And 
 now it was this unnamed purloiner who, in 1654, 
 Hobbes having meanwhile become famous and feared, 
 
BramhaWs 'Defence! 165 
 
 gave it 1 of his own motion to the public and set the 
 graceless epistle in front. 
 
 The furtive publication came upon Hobbes as a sur- 
 prise, but, with the old party ties broken and himself 
 already compromised as far as it was possible for man 
 to be, he does not seem to have borne hard on the 
 offender who straightway asked his pardon. Bramhall, 
 on the other hand, was moved to the highest pitch of 
 indignation, when he saw the treatise published, as he 
 supposed by or with the consent of Hobbes, without his 
 own original discourse that had called it forth or the 
 least intimation that, years ago, it had been immediately 
 met by a rejoinder and demolished. He proceeded, 
 therefore, to print in 1655 everything that had passed 
 between them, under the title of 'A Defence of the 
 True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent or 
 Extrinsic ISTecessity ; ' dedicating the whole in not very 
 temperate language to Newcastle, and apprising the 
 reader of his grievance against Hobbes, his contempt 
 for the nameless writer of the wicked preface, and (by 
 the way) his abhorrence of the deadly principles of 
 1 Leviathan,' which, in default of others, he himself 
 would make shift to expose. The rejoinder to which 
 the earlier pieces led up, when it now appeared, was 
 seen to be long drawn out, and was a performance often 
 clever and always very erudite. It is worthy of being 
 studied, not only as an effective statement of the view 
 it advocates, but as a good specimen of Scholastic fence. 
 Bramhall was a rather brilliant Schoolman. 
 
 1 With the omission of a few lines of very characteristic "Post- 
 script," afterwards supplied in Bramhall's 'Defence,' and to he 
 found in Hohhes's own 'Questions, &c.' E., v. 435. 
 
166 ' Hobbes. 
 
 It was now Hobbes's turn. In 1656, sore pressed as 
 lie was on another side, he published his ' Questions con- 
 cerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance,' x beginning 
 with a review of the occasion and points of the contro- 
 versy, clearing himself from the personal charges, and 
 then, as he reprinted the whole of Bramhall's book (first 
 statement, his own reply and the rejoinder), animadvert- 
 ing in language sharp as a razor upon every separate 
 paragraph. His enemies having by this time begun to 
 fall upon him, he seemed, as being never more sure of 
 himself than upon the question of the Will, to write 
 with all the vigour he could command, in order to 
 warn off assailants. " I have been publicly injured," he 
 exclaims as a last word, "by many of whom I took 
 no notice, supposing that that humour would spend 
 itself ; but, seeing it, last and grow higher in this 
 writing I now answer, I thought it necessary at last 
 to make of some of them, and first of this bishop, an 
 example." 
 
 The rest, though it is somewhat to anticipate, may 
 here be told. Bramhall, in 1658, not only returned 
 to the charge with very long-winded ' Castigations of 
 Hobbes's Animadversions, 5 but made good his threat 
 against the monstrum liorrendum in a bulky Appendix, 
 entitled i The Catching of Leviathan the Great "Whale. ' 
 To the i Castigations ' Hobbes never paid any attention. 
 The charges of atheism, blasphemy and impiety filling the 
 non-political part of the Appendix, which he declares he 
 never heard of till ten years later, he did then rebut in 
 his most cutting style, though his answers, like other of 
 his writings at that period, did not see the light till after 
 1 E., v. 
 
. UKI7EESI 
 
 Reform of the University, /* 167 
 
 his death. 1 Bramhall, made Archbishop of Armagh en 
 returning from exile at the- Restoration, had meanwhile 
 died in 1663. 
 
 In the greater strife from 1654, which only death, 
 after a quarter of a century, could compose, the action 
 may be resolved into three parts, of which the first 
 extends to 1657. 
 
 /. With Ward and Wallis. 
 
 Upon no point had greater stress been laid in ' Levia- 
 tian ' than upon the need of a radical reform in the 
 Universities. It was a fixed idea with Hobbes, trace- 
 able perhaps, as we have seen, to his own experience in 
 youth, that universities were originally founded to bring 
 Scholastic ingenuity to the support of Papal domination 
 over the civil power ; wherefore the traditional system 
 of training included nothing, beyond vain exercises of 
 speculative subtlety, but the study of Greek and Roman 
 literature, so rich in lessons of political insubordina- 
 tion. The idea may not have taken fast hold of his 
 mind before the Civil War, when he saw old academic 
 questions fought out upon the field of battle and made to 
 involve a nation's fate ; but he had become firmly con- 
 vinced that lasting peace in the state was impossible un- 
 less the sovereign power (whatever it was) took the Uni- 
 versities directly in hand, and used them to instil into 
 the minds of youth the first great duty of paramount 
 obedience to itself. To impress this conviction was one 
 of his chief objects in ' Leviathan,' and he could even 
 
 1 'An Answer to a Book published by Dr Bramhall, &c.' E., iv. 
 
 279-384. 
 
168 Holies. 
 
 venture upon the hope that some ruler would see in 
 the book the true manual alike for sovereign and sub- 
 ject, and, " protecting the public teaching of it, convert 
 this truth of speculation into the utility of practice." 
 But also, quite apart from political grounds, he found 
 much to denounce in the backward state of the univer- 
 sity-studies, and he argued vehemently for the introduc- 
 tion of the modern science that had grown up outside 
 the academic pale. 
 
 At Oxford due note was taken of his sweeping 
 charges and account kept of his self-complacent aspira- 
 tions. The University was, in fact, just then, after the 
 parliamentary visitation, in a state of healthier activity, 
 at least as regards research, than ever before. In par- 
 ticular, the contrast between the Oxford of 1603, when 
 Hobbes was there, and the Oxford of 1651, when he 
 wrote against it, was as great as any half-century of its 
 annals can show. Science especially was represented by 
 men each in his own line a leader. If Hobbes could say 
 that at the Universities geometry had only lately ceased 
 to be thought a "diabolical" art, no man of that day was so 
 fit as John Wallis, Savilian professor at Oxford, to prove 
 it an advancing science. There was no more forward 
 votary of physical science, as physical science was in the 
 days before JSTewton, than Seth Ward, the professor of 
 astronomy. With them was leagued John Wilkins, 
 Warden of Wadham College, a man imbued, as they 
 also were, with the experimental spirit of Bacon. That 
 such men, or even far weaker men than Wallis and 
 Ward, would endure to be written down by one who, 
 purposely or ignorantly, spoke of an Oxford that was 
 not theirs, and whose own reputation in science was still 
 
Ward's 'Vindicice Academiarum.' 169 
 
 all to make, could hardly be expected ; nor were they 
 likely to put themselves at the point of view from which 
 his complaints and suggestions might appear to have some 
 ground in reason. Nothing, however, was said or done 
 openly, beyond a mild reference to Hobbes by Ward in 
 a philosophical essay ('Tetamen de Dei existentia, &c.') 
 published in 1652, till the year 1654. 
 
 Early in that year came forth a work entitled ' Examen 
 of Academies,' by the lie v. John Webster, an army- 
 chaplain, inveighing, in the fashion of the day, against 
 the whole system of academic study, and, in the fashion 
 of the century, against Aristotle as answerable for it all. 
 If Webster had shown any discrimination in his attacks 
 or proposals and been less anxious to display his own 
 very ill-digested reading, his book might have been a 
 valuable, as it remains a curious, anticipation of later 
 attempts to break up the Scholastic system of the Uni- 
 versities. As it was, he committed Hobbes's mistake 
 of allowing nothing for actual advance, and so laid him- 
 self open to the clever and powerful retort of Ward, who 
 now set himself, in May 1654, to repel such persist- 
 ent misrepresentation in his 'Yihdicue Academiarum,' 
 directed mainly against Webster, but with an Appendix 
 devoted to another objector, named Dell, and to Hobbes. 
 
 Ward was a man who, when obstinate royalists were 
 being cleared out at the Universities, had no sooner been 
 ejected from a Cambridge fellowship for refusing to take 
 the Covenant, than, without taking it, he managed to 
 slip into his professorship at Oxford. With a clear head, 
 he had early made a reputation in mathematical study 
 when cultivated by few, and, having a great faculty of 
 pleasing, was bent on rising in life. His professorship, 
 
170 Holies. 
 
 held from the Commonwealth and under Cromwell, 
 separated him so little from his old royalist friends that, 
 years before the Bestoration, he had secured from one of 
 the exiled bishops the promise of a place in the Church, 
 whence he afterwards mounted to a deanery and two 
 bishoprics in succession. The same easy-going disposi- 
 tion appears to have brought him earlier into some kind 
 of relation with Hobbes himself ; so that it is even said 
 that he had written for the publisher the laudatory notice 
 prefixed to the ' De Corpore Politico.' 1 Certainly, in 
 his philosophical essay of two years later, he did not 
 take exception to some views of Hobbes's without ex- 
 pressing his " high opinion and respect for that worthy 
 gentleman " ; and in the Appendix to the ' Vindicise ' 
 itself traces of the feeling may still be discerned. The 
 traces, however, were well overlaid; for, with the de- 
 fence of the academic system against Hobbes's assault, 
 went a highly irritating challenge. "VVilkins having 
 first, in a letter to Ward, charged Hobbes with arro- 
 gance and unfairness, and hinted that not only was the 
 new science of nature better known at Oxford than he 
 supposed, but that, for his own boasted advances in it, 
 he was beholden to another (Warner) ; Ward repeated 
 the charge of plagiarism, mocked at the pretensions of 
 1 Leviathan/ and, under cover of the ancient Greek 
 schools, which had also been made light of by Hobbes, 
 defended the Universities. That in Hobbes's youth they 
 might have been in a low state, he allowed ; but now, he 
 asserted, the discourse in c Leviathan ' was like that of 
 the Seven Sleepers, for the new mechanical philosophy 
 was generally received, and geometry had such place 
 1 Hobbes himself mentions the report in E., vi. 336. 
 

 
 The Mathematics of the 'De Corpore' 171 
 
 that, when Hobbes's geometrical pieces should appear, 
 they would be better understood than he should like, 
 the allusion here being to his wonderful quadratures of 
 which he seems to have been boasting rather freely. 
 
 Nothing could have been better conceived than Ward's 
 clever sally to disconcert and provoke Hobbes, but at 
 first he gave no public sign. Nor, when the \ De Cor- 
 pore ' at last came forth, about the middle of 1655, was 
 there any show of petulance or other weakness in the 
 front : the prefatory epistle to the Earl of Devonshire, 
 rather, was couched in a tone of dignified self-confidence. 
 After ascribing the beginnings of true Natural Philosophy 
 in modern times to Copernicus and Galileo, followed by 
 Kepler, Gassendi and Mersenne, and of true science of 
 the human body to Harvey, Hobbes made bold to say, 
 in face of his detractors, that true Civil Philosophy was 
 no older than his own book * De Cive ' ; and, as there 
 he had put an end to baleful strife in religion and poli- 
 tics engendered by ancient and Scholastic speculation, so 
 he would now dispel the phantoms of metaphysics by 
 his doctrine of Body; soon to be followed by a doctrine 
 of Man, though he had experience how much greater 
 thanks would be due than paid to him for telling men 
 the truth about themselves. Oddly enough, however, 
 after such lofty pretension and disdain, the text was 
 found to include, at the place pointed at by Ward, a 
 most naive allowance of scientific shortcoming and out- 
 burst of bitterness. It was in the chapter (20) devoted 
 to what Hobbes thought the crowning achievement of his 
 scientific method the squaring of the circle and solution 
 of other related problems sent down from ancient times, 
 which he had fastened upon early in his late mathemati- 
 
172 Hobbes. 
 
 cal career, not without a philosophical reason and pur- 
 pose but more perhaps under the fascination that has 
 possessed so many half-trained minds. What then did 
 his achievement amount to 1 A quadrature announced 
 as false, because from a false hypothesis; a second, 
 merely approximate; a third, with a method for the 
 section of angles at will, given first as exact, but at last 
 as only "problematically said" that was all. With 
 perfect simplicity he added that he should have held 
 the hypothesis in the first attempt as true, had not the 
 insults of malevolent men forced him to look into it 
 more closely with his friends ; the third attempt he had 
 seen to be open to objection only after it was printed. 
 Still he would let stand what he had said of Yindex, 
 meaning more than one passage of triumphant recrimi- 
 nation against Ward, printed, as was evident, with the 
 solutions when he had thought them all good. 
 
 In truth, the position of Hcbbes was even weaker 
 than it thus appeared, as one man of keenest scent dis- 
 covered and set himself forthwith to expose. No sooner 
 was the book out than Ward (Vindex) and Wallis, who, 
 it is clear, had from the first been accessory to his col- 
 league's tactics, settled between them how they should 
 dispose of it. Wallis was to confine himself to the 
 mathematical sections, Ward to the philosophical and 
 physical sections, keeping his eye also on Hobbes's other 
 works. More than a year passed before Ward per- 
 formed his part in the joint enterprise (' In T. H. Philo- 
 sophiam Exercitatio epistolica '). Very different was 
 the action of Wallis, who from this time passes to the 
 front. In some three months he had ready his terrible 
 1 Elenchus Geometric Hobbianae.' Not only was Wallis, 
 
Wallis' s 'Menchus.' 173 
 
 from his mathematical knowledge and logical power, 
 better fitted than any man in England to criticise 
 Hobbes, but he had also certain more special qualifica- 
 tions for such a task as that had become. Not over- 
 scrupulous about means when he had an end in view, 
 whether it was personal advancement or dialectical 
 victory, he had an extraordinary analytic faculty that 
 had won him notoriety when exercised in deciphering 
 for the Parliament the king's papers taken at Naseby, 
 and now had easier play in tracking the sad windings * 
 of Hobbes's mathematical march. But for the malice 
 and ingenuity of Wallis, we should never have known 
 the depth of Hobbes's infatuation over those unhappy 
 problems or the incredible courses into which he 
 plunged in his resentment of Ward's original stroke. 
 
 Finding at the bookseller's an unbound copy of the 
 1 De Corpore,' Wallis observed the sheets to be greatly 
 mutilated, especially at the place treating of the measure 
 of the circle to which he first turned. He could see, in 
 confirmation of a flying report of Hobbes's difficulties, 
 that the chapter, as first printed, had been replaced by 
 another, which had again been partly sacrificed to make 
 way for a third attempt, before the singular enough result 
 that appeared was finally reached. The value of the 
 chapter as it stood Wallis quickly gauged, and saw to 
 be even less than its author, despite his naive confes- 
 sions, still claimed for it. Perceiving further that the 
 rest of the mathematics in the book was of neither 
 worse nor better quality, Wallis was first, he says, moved 
 to anger, then to mirth and at last to pity. Not in 
 pity, however, was conceived the ' Elenchus ' which 
 he proceeded to draw up. One of some copies care- 
 
174 Holies. 
 
 lessly issued in the first unamended form having fallen 
 into his hands, he was not the man to scorn such a 
 weapon of ridicule, and from it, with his unbound copy, 
 he was able to spell out the whole history of Hobbes's 
 doings from the time of Vindex's challenge. This accord- 
 ingly he laid bare, showing how, shaken from a brief 
 illusion of triumph by friends concerned for his reputa- 
 tion, again and again during the year had Hobbes per- 
 sisted in printing loose assimilations as strict truths, and 
 rough and contradictory approximations as exact solu- 
 tions of an impossible problem; till at last, rather than 
 delay his book longer, he was fain to be content with 
 his lame and impotent conclusions, made grotesque by 
 the side of the jubilant bursts which he had not the 
 heart to suppress, because he had once had the joy of 
 giving vent to them. Otherwise, Wallis dogged Hobbes 
 at every step, questioning his definitions, reducing his 
 methods to absurdity, probing with a touch that never 
 faltered the weak places of his lumbering demonstra- 
 tions, and all through never changing the tone of coarse 
 mockery except to fall into a still more irritating vein 
 of solemn sermonising. 
 
 Where another must have succumbed to such an 
 assault, it is no wonder that Hobbes was stirred to a 
 mood of fierce resentment. His whole character as a 
 philosopher seemed to him to be staked on his ability 
 to repel the onslaught of "Wallis and in turn become 
 assailant. However, he was so far careful, in superin- 
 tending an English translation of his ' De Corpore,' 
 which appeared about the middle of 1656, 1 as to profit 
 by not a few of his critic's exceptions, and especially to 
 i F i. 
 
The 'Six Lessons' 175 
 
 obliterate the traces of his passionate indiscretion. All 
 mention of Vindex Avas struck out, and besides other 
 changes quietly yielded to Wallis's invective, a new 
 series of mere "aggressions" took the place of the old 
 pretentious solutions, with the result that the transla- 
 tion, though often loose and erroneous, was niuch less 
 open to attack than the original. But the book had a 
 tail, and the tail a sting. ' Six Lessons ' were append- 
 ed for the instruction of the two Oxford professors, 1 
 or rather of Wallis, Yindex being only drawn in for 
 correction of his " Manners " in the last. In these, 
 after rehearsing his own " Principles " against Euclid's, 
 Hobbes proceeded to expose Wallis's " Paralogisms " 
 with no lack of dialectic subtlety. Only, there seemed 
 to rest a fatality on all his mathematical doings. 
 Whether it was that, coming so late to mathematics, he 
 could never quite bend himself to the conditions of rigid 
 thought and consistent statement, or that he was now 
 too angry to be master of his pen, at points the most 
 delicate and critical he fancied it open to him to plead 
 any amount of haste and negligence, without lowering 
 his head, if he could only add that he had known better. 
 ISay, he could even fight in the 'Lessons' for points 
 that he had surrendered in the translation. And when 
 he turned to assume the offensive, his attitude became 
 simply ridiculous. Three works of Wallis's one on 
 the nature of the Angle of Contact, another on Conic 
 Sections treated algebraically, and the third, 'Arith- 
 metica Infinitorum,' in which had been taken the last 
 great stride towards the discovery of the higher calcu- 
 lus made before the end of that generation by Newton 
 1 E., vii. 181-356. 
 
176 Holies. 
 
 and Leibniz lie ventured to impugn. His objections 
 amounted to nothing, even when they did not, as in regard 
 to the last-named work, betray an utter misapprehension 
 of Wallis's ingenious methods : to the ' Conic Sections,' 
 being ignorant of algebra, he could do no more than say 
 that it was " so covered over with the scab of symbols," 
 that he had no patience to examine it. At the end of 
 the lesson on " Manners," he gravely set himself to show 
 that he could give " as scornful names " as any he had 
 received ; and here he was successful enough. 
 
 Wallis, ever ready, was again to the front in three 
 months' time, measuring out, in English, ' Due Correc- 
 tion for Mr Hobbes, or School-Discipline for not saying 
 his Lessons right.' Having an easy task in defending 
 himself against Hobbes's trivial objections to his own 
 works, he snatched the opportunity given him by the 
 translation of the ' De Corpore ' to track Hobbes again 
 with a merciless persistence, step by step, over the 
 whole course, and confront him with his inconsistencies 
 multiplied by every new utterance. But it was no 
 longer a fight over mathematical questions only : two men, 
 each in his way a master of verbal fence, stood com- 
 mitted to blackening or ridiculing each other by every 
 means, fair and foul. Wallis having stooped from the 
 first to the pettiest carping at words, Hobbes had not 
 refrained from retorting in kind, and then, of course, it 
 became the duty of the other to defend his own Latin 
 with much parade of learning and launch new darts. It 
 was a coarse sally of this verbal kind, begotten of Wallis's 
 too lively fancy, that suggested to Hobbes the title of the 
 farther rejoinder with which in 1657 he sought to end 
 the unseemly wrangle. Arguing in the ' Lessons ' that 
 
'Marks of Dr Wallis's Absurd Geometry! 177 
 
 a mathematical point must have quantity, though this 
 were not reckoned, he had interpreted the Greek word 
 aTtyfxr), used for a point, to mean a visible mark with a 
 hot iron ; and thereupon WaTlis burst forth into an in- 
 sulting paragraph, charging him with making a gross and 
 ignorant confusion of arty fir] and oTiy/xa. Hence the title 
 of Hobbes's new reply : ' ^rty^at 'Ayew/>tTpta5, 'Aypoi/aas, 
 'AvTi7roA.iTetas, 'A/xa0etas, or Marks of the Absurd Geo- 
 metry, Eural Language, Scottish Church Politics and 
 Barbarisms of John Wallis, &c.' 1 In this piece, prefaced 
 by the characteristic remark that, after the title-page, 
 which was " somewhat coarse," he gave " no more ill 
 words " but returned from Wallis's manners to his own, 
 he attacked the ' Arithmetica Infinitorum ' more in 
 detail, but not more happily, than before. Otherwise, 
 he repelled, not without some force and dignity, the in- 
 sults heaped upon him, and fought the verbal points, but 
 could not leave the field without straying into a line 
 of political insinuation against his adversary perfectly 
 irrelevant, and only noteworthy as evidence of his own 
 resignation for the time to Cromwell's rule. The thrusts 
 were nimbly parried by Wallis. The objections to the 
 .'Arithmetica Infinitorum,' directed mainly against the 
 expression of proportions by fractions, came simply to 
 this, that Hobbes could not see how a groat and two- 
 pence made sixpence; the charge of rustic language 
 might be met by Hobbes's confessions of his own sins ; 
 the political charge was only that he (Wallis) did not 
 
 i E., vii. 357-428; including (pp. 401-427) an "Extract of a letter 
 concerning the grammatical part of the controversy," from Henry 
 Stubbe, who was now ready to take part against Wallis, as later on 
 he assailed the Royal Society, of which Wallis was a chief founder. 
 P. X. M 
 
178 Holies. 
 
 take 'Leviathan' for gospel. Otherwise, the reply 
 turned chiefly on the verbal question, whence its title, 
 'Hobbiani Puncti Dispunctio.' Irritating as it was, it 
 did not avail to shake Hobbes's determination to be 
 silent; and so at last there was peace for a time. 
 
 //. With Wallis and Boyle. 
 
 Hobbes held his hand in 1657, but apparently it was 
 only in order to delay no longer the completion of his 
 philosophic trilogy. When at last, in 1658, he pub- 
 lished the ' De Homine,' he took care to intimate that 
 he would still keep hold of the pen he had then hoped 
 finally to throw away " for this piece too, perchance, 
 would have to be defended." There, however, he was 
 mistaken. The larger (optical) part of the ill-compacted 
 work touched nobody closely enough to excite opposi- 
 tion ; and in the few chapters on topics of human nature 
 appended in excuse of the title there was little, if any- 
 thing, to which he had not given repeated expression 
 before. His challenge upon other issues being left un- 
 heeded, if he was not to appear as utterly crushed by 
 Wallis's last blow, he could only resume the old con- 
 flict. His opponent had continued busily produc- 
 tive, iii particular publishing in 1657 a comprehen- 
 sive treatise on the general principles of calculus (' Ma- 
 thesis universalis'). With some more special refer- 
 ence to this work, the pugnacious old man now con- 
 ceived the idea of using his new-found leisure to fight 
 the whole ground over again. 
 
 By the spring of 1660 he had put the reassertion of 
 his own positions and more detailed criticism of Wal- 
 lis's works into the form of five Latin Dialogues, with 
 
The Latin Dialogues. 179 
 
 an appendix of some seventy propositions on the circle 
 and cycloid, labelled as a sixth Dialogue, because of 
 some interlocutory remarks (of more general interest) 
 at the close ; the whole bearing the title of ' Examinatio 
 et Emendatio Mathematics hodiernas, qualis explicatur in 
 Libris Johannis Wallisii, &C.' 1 /^Wallis afterwards pro- 
 tested that the interlocutors, called A and B, were 
 none other than "Thomas and Hobbes," and their dia- 
 logue but a way "wherein Thomas commends Hobbes, 
 and Hobbes commends Thomas, and both 'commend 
 Thomas Hobbes as a third person, without being guilty 
 of self-commendation;" also as a way in which, as he 
 could not bear contradiction from others, he might 
 give free rein to his habit of contradicting himself. 2 
 At the time, finding nothing in either part of the piece 
 that he had not met over and over again (though Hobbes 
 had attempted to urge somewhat deeper objections to 
 the algebraical treatment of geometrical questions), he 
 was not to be drawn into reply. Hobbes Avas then 
 driven upon trying another tack. 
 
 In the following year, 1661, having solved, as he 
 thought, one more of the ancient problems that had been 
 the despair of pure geometers, the duplication of the 
 cube, he had his solution brought out anonymously at 
 Paris in Erench, so as to put "Wallis or other critics off 
 the scent, and extort the judgment that apparently was 
 now to be denied to any mathematical work of his. 
 The artifice proved successful, and he could now again 
 
 1 L., iv. 1-232 ; but here (as noted above, in another connection, p. 
 31, n.) Molesworth follows Hobbes's reprint of 1668, which omits, at 
 the beginning of the sixth so-called dialogue, the propositions on the 
 circle, forty-six in number, shattered by Wallis in 1662. 
 
 2 'Hobbius Heautontimorumenos ' (1662), 15. 
 
180* Hobbes. 
 
 keep the ball rolling. Xo sooner had the solution, im- 
 ported from Paris, been publicly refuted by Wallis, 
 than he hastened to own it and went more perversely 
 than ever astray in its defence ; republishing it (still in 
 1661) in a modified form, with much self-gratulation, 
 at the end of a new Latin Dialogue which he had mean- 
 while written in support of another part of his scientific 
 doctrine, insidiously impugned by the enemy. A society 
 had just been founded for purposes of physical research, 
 with Wallis as one of its most active members and no 
 place for the author of [ De Corpore.' In point of fact, 
 the band of scientific workers among whom "Wallis was 
 foremost had as far back as 1645 formed an association 
 in London, not unlike that which Hobbes had known 
 in Paris around Mersenne, and through all the distrac- 
 tion of the civil troubles had maintained some semblance 
 of unity there or at Oxford, where Wallis, with Ward 
 and Wilkins, had been settled since 1649, joined later on 
 (in 1654) by Robert Boyle. On the Restoration, Boyle 
 and others, with such assistance as the Savilian professor 
 could still render from Oxford, drew together again in 
 the capital, at Gresham College, and afterwards acquired 
 incorporation as the Royal Society, in 1662. In the 
 new combination of 1660, there could have been no 
 thought among the chief movers of including an Ish- 
 mael like Hobbes, after the proof he had given of math- 
 ematical incompetence and of disinclination for the 
 laborious experimental work that was meant (in the spirit 
 of Bacon) to be pursued ; but it was not unnatural that 
 Hobbes should resent the exclusion, dictated, as he be- 
 lieved, by the spite of Wallis. Boyle's 'Xew Experi- 
 ments touching the Spring of the Air,' recording work 
 
'Hobbius ITeautontimoriimenos.' 181 
 
 with the air-pump carried on during recent years at Ox- 
 ford, having then just appeared, Hobbes was ready in his 
 chagrin to take it as a manifesto of the new " academi- 
 cians," and even to construe it as an attack upon his own 
 physical doctrine which was in fact pointed at here 
 and there. How so effectively expose the whole man- 
 oeuvre as by showing that the mass of facts obtained 
 with so much experimental trouble- by Boyle did, when 
 rightly interpreted, only confirm the conclusions he had 
 himself worked out years before from rational principles ? 
 This he now did in the 'Dialogus Physicus, sive de 
 JSTatura Aeris ; ' 1 warning Boyle and his associates that 
 they might meet as they liked and compare notes and 
 experiments, but, unless they started from where he him- 
 self left off, their labour would be all in vain. 
 
 To as much of this hostile diversion as concerned him- 
 self Boyle quickly replied, with . characteristic force and 
 dignity, in ' Examen of Mr Hobbes, his Dialogus, &c.' 
 (1662), returning to the subject also in a 'Dissertation 
 on Vacuum against Mr Hobbes ' twelve years later ; but 
 it was from Hobbes's old enemy that retribution came. 
 "Wallis, who had deftly steered his course amid all the 
 political changes of the time, managing ever to be on 
 the side of the ruling power, was now apparently stung 
 to fury by a wanton allusion in the ' Dialogus ' to his 
 old achievement of deciphering the defeated king's 
 papers, whereof he had boasted in his ' Inaugural 
 Oration,' as Savilian professor, in 1649, but after the 
 Restoration could not speak or hear too little. The re- 
 venge he took was crushing. Professing to be roused 
 by the attack on his friend Boyle, when he had scorned 
 iL., iv. 233-296. 
 
182 Robbes. 
 
 to lift a finger in defence of himself against the earlier 
 Dialogues, he tore them all to shreds, with a more con- 
 summate art than ever, in the scathing satire, ' Hobbius 
 Heautontimorumenos ' (1662). He got, however, upon 
 more uncertain ground when, coolly passing by the 
 political insinuation against himself, he roundly charged 
 Hobbes with having written ' Leviathan ' in support of 
 Oliver's title and deserted his royal master in distress. 
 Hobbes seems to have been fairly bewildered by the 
 rush and whirl of sarcasm with which Wallis drove him 
 anew from every mathematical position he had taken up 
 from first to last, and did not venture forth into the field 
 of scientific controversy again for some years, when once 
 he had followed up the Dialogue of 1661 by seven shorter 
 ones, on vacuum and other physical topics, entitled 
 * Problemata Physica,' in 1662. 1 But all the more 
 eagerly did he take advantage of Wallis's loose calumny 
 to strike where he felt himself safe. His answer to the 
 personal charges took the form of a letter about himself, 
 in the third person, addressed to Wallis in 1662, under 
 the title of ' Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, 
 Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes.' 2 In this 
 piece, which is of great biographical value, he told his own 
 and Wallis's " little stories during the time of the late 
 rebellion " with such effect, that Wallis, like a wise man, 
 attempted no further reply. So ended the second act, 
 
 1 L., iv. 297-384 ; including an appendix of sixteen propositions on 
 the magnitude of the circle, with a new exposition and defence of his 
 duplication of the cube. The work was at the same time put into 
 English (with appendix shortened) as ' Seven Philosophical Problems, 
 &c.' (E., vii. 1-68), and presented to the king, but was not published 
 in this form till twenty years later (1682). 
 
 2 K, iv. 409-440. 
 
Final Hostilities. 183 
 
 III. With Wallis. 
 
 After a pause, Hobbes took heart again ; and, keeping 
 Wallis always in f aee, did not finally cease from aggression 
 till lie was ninety. The pieces, more or less controversial, 
 that went on appearing at intervals through all these 
 closing years of his life, may be very briefly character- 
 ised. The first, published in 1666, 'De Principiis et 
 Eatiocinatione Geometrarum,' 1 was designed, as the sub- 
 title declared, to lower the pride of geometrical professors, 
 by showing that there was no less uncertainty and error 
 in their works than in those of physical or ethical writ- 
 ers. To this had come at length the philosopher who, in 
 his earliest work, had pointed the difference between 
 "mathematical" and "dogmatical" learning, and pro- 
 claimed that never was it " heard of that there was any 
 controversy concerning any conclusion " in mathematics ! 
 Now, as he had to confess, he stood on one side with 
 " almost all geometers " over against him, and could but 
 add, with a grim humour, " Either I alone am mad, or 
 I alone am not mad ; other alternative there is none, un- 
 less, perchance, some one may say that we are all mad 
 together." Some piquancy there was in his condensed 
 restatement of the old points, but they were only re- 
 stated. Wallis replied shortly in the ' Philosophical 
 Transactions' of August in the same year. 
 
 Next, in 1669, the octogenarian brought together his 
 three crowning solutions in a new compendious form, 
 ' Quadratura Circuli, Cubatio Sphaerse, Duplicatio Cubi,' 
 and, as soon as they were all once more refuted in a 
 pamphlet from Wallis, reprinted them, with an answer 
 i L., iv. 385-484. 
 
184 Hobbes. 
 
 to the objections, in compliment to the Grand Duke of 
 Tuscany who paid him attentions on a visit to England 
 in that year. 1 Wallis had declared that he would leave 
 him alone henceforward, but refuted him again, in an- 
 other pamphlet, before the year was out. 
 
 Two years more passed, and now the whole series of 
 his greater achievements was presented in ' Eosetum 
 Geometricum,' as a fragrant offering to the " geometrical 
 reader," the "algebraical reader" being, for his part, 
 confronted with a number of plain questions directed 
 upon the absurdity of Wallis's conception of infinite 
 quantities ; while an express criticism (' Censura brevis ') 
 was appended, at some length, on the first part of the 
 treatise ' De Motu' (1669), in which Wallis had just 
 made physical application of his analytical method. 2 
 Also in the same year (1671) he sent ' Three Papers' to 
 the Eoyal Society, treating very briefly of points selected 
 from those now in dispute, and when Wallis, still not 
 weary of confuting, shortly replied, published them 
 separately with triumphant ' Considerations upon the 
 Answer of Dr Wallis.' 3 so rejoinder following, he 
 could now believe that at last he had established himself 
 with the scientific authorities, and that the way was 
 open to complete the discomfiture of the foe by a public 
 memorial to the Society from R R (Eoseti Eepertor) on 
 all the questions at issue from the beginning ' Lux 
 Mathematica excussa collisionibus Johannis Wallisii et 
 ThomaB Hobbesii,' the light being now " increased by 
 many and most fulgent rays." 4 This was in 1672. 
 
 i L., iv. 485-522. L., v. 1-882. 
 
 3 E., vii. 429-448. 4 L., v. 89-150. 
 
Last Stroke at the Age of Ninety. 185 
 
 Wallis, so challenged, replied once more briefly in the 
 ' Transactions,' and then finally held his hand. 
 
 Not so Hobbes. In 1674, at the age of eighty-six, he 
 was again in the field with ' Principia et Problemata 
 aliquot Geometrica, ante desperata nunc breviter expli- 
 cata et demonstrata ; ' 1 managing even now, in the 
 chapters dealing with questions of principle, to throw 
 out some original observations of the kind that lie 
 strewn throughout the mathematical works ^nd re- 
 deem them from the reproach of utter waste, / His last 
 piece of all, ' Decameron Physiologicum,' 2 published 
 four years later, when he had completed his ninetieth 
 year, was a new set of dialogues on physical questions, in 
 the fashion of the earlier ones, but now with a stroke 
 added at Wallis's doctrine of gravitation in the 'De 
 Motu.' And a demonstration of the equality of a straight 
 line to the arc of a circle was, of course, thrown in at 
 the end, to show him true as ever to the desperate pur- 
 pose that had maintained the long quarter of a century 
 of strife. 3 
 
 i L., v. 151-214. E-j vii . 69-180. 
 
 3 This final demonstration has (with one or two before it) the merit 
 at least of brevity, which Hobbes ended by aiming at after he had 
 been convicted by Wallis of losing himself in the extreme complexity 
 of his earlier constructions. Among all Wallis's many exposures of 
 the incoherence and futility of his quadratures, the most brilliant, as 
 well as comprehensive, is given in ' Hobbius Heantontimorumenos,' 
 104 ff. Up to that time (1662), Wallis reckons twelve different at- 
 tempts at least, all more or less inconsistent with one another. 
 Wallis's contributions to the controversy, having done their work 
 (only too ruthlessly), were excluded from the collected edition of his 
 writings (1693-97) and have become extremely rare. 
 
186 
 
 CHAP TEE VIII. 
 
 LAST YEARS (1658-79). 
 
 The last years of Hobbes's long life were not so 
 engrossed with the labour of (as he fondly thought) 
 routing Wallis and the new experimenters from the 
 scientific field, that he did not find time and have spirit 
 to keep his pen going on other lines, which had interested 
 him in the years before he turned to science, or which had 
 claimed his chief regard even when he was busy with 
 the work of general philosophical construction. He 
 returned no more (except in polemical references) to 
 questions of general philosophy after satisfying himself, 
 at the age of seventy, with the ' De Homine ' as the 
 fulfilment, in some fashion, of his ambitious design; 
 but the deeper political interest was still to manifest 
 itself in a series of lighter writings, and the scholarly 
 interest of his early manhood was to be revived, after 
 the age of eighty, in no less ambitious a form than 
 an attempt at metrical translation of the ' Iliad ' and 
 'Odyssey.' 
 
 With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a new 
 experience opened for him. Till then, though he lived 
 mainly in the capital and mixed freely in the literary 
 
Under the Protectorate. 187 
 
 and scientific society gathered there, 1 he was too little 
 in sympathy with the ruling powers to seek or be drawn 
 into any kind of public association with them. He did 
 nothing indeed, all through the Protectorate, to mark 
 the least discontent with the existing Government. This 
 his political principles forbade ; and with Independency 
 he could at least sit down in peace, since it left him his 
 individual freedom of thought, as Presbyterianism on 
 principle could not leave it and Anglicanism was too 
 little content to leave it in practice. None the less, 
 after the time of unsettlement and anarchy following on 
 
 1 At this time he consorted chiefly with Seidell and Harvey, and 
 received from each, at their deaths, a legacy of ten pounds from 
 Selden in 1651 and from Harvey in 1657. Aubrey (' Life/ 628) says : 
 "When his Leviathan ' came out, he sent ... a copy of it well 
 hound to Mr John Selden in JSdibus Carmeliticis. Mr Selden told 
 the servant he did not know Mr Hohhes, but had heard much of his 
 worth, and that he should be very glad to be acquainted with him ; 
 whereupon Mr Hobbes waited on him, from which time there was 
 a strict friendship between them to his dying day." The curious 
 scene with Hobbes at Seidell's deathbed, reported by Aubrey (' Lives/ 
 ii. 532), is contradicted by another (but a later) report in the Raw- 
 linson MSS., quoted in Macray's 'Annals of the Bodleian' 77, n. 
 With Harvey, Hobbes's intimacy was of old date. Harvey (not Bacon) 
 is the one Englishman he mentions among his predecessors in the 
 Dedication of 'the 'De Corpore' "the only man I know that, con- 
 quering envy, hath established a new doctrine in his lifetime." 
 
 Hobbes had no relations, now or later, with Milton, but there is 
 record of what each thought of the other. Milton's widow told 
 Aubrey (' Lives,' ii. 444) that " her husband did not like Mr 
 Hobbes at all, but he would acknowledge him to be a man of great 
 parts and a learned man." Hobbes, in ' Behemoth ' (E. , vii. 368), thus 
 pronounces on the two famous ' Defenstones of Salmasius and 
 Milton: "They are very good Latin both, and hardly to be judged 
 which is better ; and both very ill reasoning, hardly to be judged 
 which is worse, like two declamations, pro and con, made for exer- 
 cise only in a rhetoric school by one and the same man. So like is a 
 Presbyterian to an Independent ! " 
 
188 . Hobbes. 
 
 Cromwell's death, it was with a sense of real relief that 
 he welcomed back the old civil order. He had spent 
 the winter of 1659-60 * with his patron in Derbyshire, 
 and, coming up to London in the spring that saw the 
 revived Long Parliament finally dissolved under the 
 auspices of Monk and a new one summoned, he vented 
 his feeling in the last lines of his ' Six Dialogues,' 
 written just as the Convention was giving effect to the 
 foregone conclusion that the king should be recalled. 2 
 His interests and personal sympathies were all engaged 
 on the side of the legitimate ruler. What might he 
 not expect if the King of England, come to his own 
 again, should henceforth take ' Leviathan ' for a chart to 
 govern by as sovereign had never governed before ! 
 
 The restored prince was, in fact, well enough disposed 
 to accept principles that were now turned all in his own 
 favour, and to patronise their author whose lively wit 
 he had relished from the old time of the mathematical 
 lessons. Even when he had been so far worked upon 
 by his counsellors as to refuse to see Hobbes after the 
 publication of 'Leviathan' in 1651, his own feeling of 
 displeasure was so little enduring that he had had an 
 expression of his good opinion conveyed in the follow- 
 ing year to the philosopher in England, and he was 
 heard to declare "openly that he thought Mr Hobbes 
 never meant him hurt." 3 It was natural, then, that 
 now, when he had passed from adversity and exile to 
 power, he should warm to his old favourite. Aubrey tells 
 of their first meeting and what came of it : 4 " It hap- 
 
 1 ' Life,' 611 ; also the previous year, as appears from a letter in 
 Hardwick MSS. 
 
 2 L., iv. 231. s E., iv. 424. * ' Life,' 611. 
 
At the Restoration. 189 
 
 pened about two or three days after his Majesty's happy 
 return, that, as he was passing in his coach through the 
 Strand, Mr Hobbes was standing at Little Salisbury 
 House gate (where his lord then lived) j the king espied 
 him, put off his hat very kindly to him, and asked him 
 how he did. About a week after he had oral conferences 
 with his Majesty and Mr S. Cowper, where, as he [the 
 king] sat for his picture, he was diverted by Mr Hobbes's 
 pleasant discourse. Here his Majesty's favours were 
 redintegrated to him, and order was given that he should 
 have free access to his Majesty, who was always much 
 delighted with his wit and repartees. The wits at 
 Court were wont to bait him ; but he would make his 
 part good, and feared none of them. The king would 
 call him the Bear : Here comes the Bear to be baited. 
 He was marvellous happy and ready in his replies, and 
 that without rancour (except provoked)." Aubrey also 
 mentions that a portrait of Hobbes himself, by the same 
 painter, was at this time purchased by the king, who 
 kept it " as one of his greatest rarities in his closet at 
 Whitehall." And a substantial mark of the royal favour 
 was added in a yearly pension of 100 from the privy 
 purse, though the payment ceased when darker days 
 came, and apparently was never resumed. 1 
 
 The effect of such treatment upon Hobbes himself 
 may easily be conceived. It was not in him to think 
 ill of a king who, whatever his other shortcomings, could 
 give the author of ' Leviathan ' his due, and might 
 seriously apply its lessons in the true art of govern- 
 
 1 4 Vit. carm. exp.' (L., i. p. xcviii.) ; compare Hobbes's (undated) 
 petition, E., vii. 471, and the mention of arrears in his Will, 'Life,' 
 637. 
 
190 Hobbes: 
 
 nient. He had also been too hard pressed in the scien- 
 tific encounters of the last years, and too vehemently 
 denounced for his political and religious heresies, not 
 to be elated by the high countenance he now received, 
 and to welcome the support he might henceforth expect 
 against his foes. Foes he had at Court in the bishops 
 and Chancellor Hyde (whom it doubtless was no small 
 part of the king's pleasure in favouring him to be able 
 to shock) ; but he also had powerful friends who stood 
 by him when the need came. Foremost among them was 
 Sir Henry Bennet, made Secretary of State in 1662 
 and Lord Arlington in 1665, a concealed Catholic, like 
 the king himself, but willing, like him, from personal 
 sympathy with Hobbes's principles or from calculation, 
 to maintain the influence of the hardy thinker against 
 the traditional order of the English Church and State. 
 Crowds of lesser men, also, at such a time as that of 
 the Restoration, were only too ready to swear to the 
 words of a master whom the king delighted to honour, 
 and as "Hobbists" to appear not only as king's men 
 but as standing at the farthest remove from the prin- 
 ciples and ways of Puritanism. Xor was Hobbes, it 
 must be confessed, exactly the man to be particular as 
 to the quarter whence support might reach him, if it 
 seemed to help forward the practical realisation of his 
 long-cherished hopes. Whatever the gravity of his own 
 scientific purpose had been and always remained, there 
 is no evidence that his spirit revolted against any of 
 the disgraceful features of the restored monarchy. Amid 
 all the national disaster and shame he lived to see, he 
 betrays no dissatisfaction with the reckless voluptuary 
 who was always ready to shield him from harm ; and 
 
Friends and Foes. 191 
 
 there is even to be traced in his later writings an 
 exaggeration of absolutist sentiment foreign to the 
 reasoned demonstrations of his earlier time. 
 
 It was not long, even at that time of royalist enthu- 
 siasm, before he stood in need of protection. The - 
 Cavalier Parliament that succeeded the Convention in 
 1661 and prolonged its existence till 1679, the year 
 of Hobbes's death, preserved one fixed determination 
 through all its broken career to maintain the interests 
 of the episcopal order of the English Church against 
 every shade of Protestant nonconformity on the one J 
 hand and against Papacy on the other. It could go tluw 
 utmost length with Hobbes in protesting the inviolability 
 of the sovereign and the subject's duty of passive obedi- 
 ence, but this always upon an assumption that the king 
 could not be wanting to the Church that had suffered 
 with his father. That no man could be a true royalist 
 who was not a true Churchman this was the conviction 
 which the dire events of the Eevolution had wrought 
 into the minds of the main body of the English people, 
 represented once more by its ancient Parliament. Now 
 Hobbes, the religious free-thinker and indifferentist in 
 the matter of ecclesiastical forms, was certainly no true 
 Churchman ; while his royalism, though never so loudly 
 proclaimed, was tainted at its spring from a theory of 
 popular choice. It was also some consolation to faith- 
 ful Churchmen to be able to ascribe to such false teach- 
 ing as his that licence of king and Court which did not 
 gall the less because they were bound in duty to bear 
 with it as patiently as they might. Thus it happened 
 that just after the Eestoration, when " Hobbism " was 
 openly professed in high places and came into fashion 
 
192 Holies. 
 
 with a noisy band of adherents, the author of the scien- 
 tific system which lent itself to their superficial con- 
 struction or perversion was also more strenuously de- 
 nounced, as the arch-enemy of morality and religion, 
 than ever he had been before. 
 
 More especially after 1660 begins the series of 
 weightier attacks upon the principles of 'Leviathan,' 
 which, as they were mostly left unnoticed by Hobbes, 
 will be considered by themselves in a succeeding chap- 
 ter. What he felt at the time, under the charges and 
 insinuations brought against him, may be gathered 
 from two utterances belonging to the year 1662. One 
 is the bold and saucy reply (' Considerations upon the 
 Reputation, &c.') on which, as we have already seen 
 (p. 182), he judged that he could venture against such 
 a turncoat as AVallis. The other, contained in a dedi- 
 cation to the king of his 'Problemata Physica,' is very 
 different in tone. Here he is fain to take refuge under 
 the general amnesty proclaimed at the Restoration, and 
 seeks also to mitigate the effect of his enemies' invective 
 by pleading that he had never dogmatised on religious 
 points or repeated the expression of his opinions since 
 the Anglican Church had been again set up where no 
 authority was at the time of his writing. Against 
 Episcopacy itself he had not written, nor had he given 
 other ground for the attacks that bishops (as he heard) 
 had made upon ' Leviathan ' in Court-sermons ; while, if 
 some found fault even with the milder doctrine of 'De 
 Cive,' nothing could really be urged against him but that 
 he sought to make the authority of the Church dependent 
 on the royal power " which," he slily adds, "I hope your 
 Majesty will think is neither atheism nor heresy." 
 
Parliamentary Proceedings. 193 
 
 "But what" (he goes on) "had I to do to meddle with 
 matters of that nature, seeing religion is not philosophy but 
 law ? It was written in a time when the pretence of Christ's 
 kingdom was made use of for the most horrid actions that 
 can be imagined ; and it was in just indignation of that, that 
 I desired to see the bottom of that doctrine of the kingdom 
 of Christ which divers ministers then preached for a pre- 
 tence to their rebellion ; which may reasonably extenuate, 
 though not excuse, the writing of it. There is therefore no 
 ground for so great a calumny in my writing. There is no 
 sign of it in my life ; and for my religion, when I was at the 
 point of death at St Germain's, the Bishop of Durham can 
 bear witness of it, if he be asked. Therefore I most humbly 
 beseech your sacred Majesty not to believe so ill of me upon 
 reports that proceed often, and may do so now, from the dis- 
 pleasure which commonly ariseth from difference in opinion ; 
 nor to think the worse of me, if, snatching up all the weapons 
 to fight against your enemies, I lighted upon one that had a 
 double edge." l 
 
 The words have already more of fear than of assur- 
 ance in them, and when we come next upon his traces, 
 the fear has gained upon him, with reason. The Great 
 Eire of 1666, following upon the Great Plague of 
 the previous year, could not but seem to the common 
 mind a judgment on the nation that tolerated such licen- 
 tiousness as had now for six years run riot, in the Court 
 of Whitehall. Hardly was the fire got under when 
 Parliament, meeting (Sept. 21) to devise measures of 
 relief for the sufferers by its ravages, seized the oppor- 
 tunity to give expression to the uneasy conscience of the 
 people in a bill against atheism and profaneness. On^ 
 the 17th October, the 'Journal of the Commons' bears 
 the order " that the Committee to which the Bill against 
 
 1 English version in 'Seven Philosophical Problems' (E., vii. 5). 
 P. X. N 
 
194 Holies. 
 
 Atheism and Profaneness is committed be empowered 
 to receive information touching such books as tend 
 to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness, or against the 
 essence and attributes of God, and in particular the 
 . book published in the name of one White 1 and the book 
 of Mr Hobbes called the ' Leviathan,' and to report the 
 matter with their opinion to the House." What steps 
 were thereupon taken does not appear, but after repeated 
 delays the bill finally passed the Commons on the 31st 
 January following. Eef erred to a select committee in 
 the Lords, it was dropped in that session, nor, when re- 
 introduced next session in the Upper House, did it again 
 reach the Commons ; so that after a time Hobbes's fears 
 were lulled. At first the old man, now verging upon 
 eighty, was not a little terrified by the parliamentary 
 proceedings. It may have been earlier that, according to 
 
 1 Thomas White passing also under other English surnames and 
 in Latin as Albius or Anglus ex Albiis a Catholic priest, who, after 
 teaching at Douai and elsewhere, spent the latter part of his life 
 in England under ecclesiastical suspicion and even censure for the 
 opinions he had put forth in a variety of works. In his Grounds of 
 Obedience and Government,' published in 1655 under the Protectorate, 
 he had spoken still more boldly than Hobbes in favour of maintaining 
 the actual government ; but it was his book ' Of the Middle State of 
 Souls ' (translated in 1659 from the Latin of 1652) that now caused him 
 to be coupled with Hobbes, apparently on the ground of their common 
 denial of a natural immortality. They were friends, and Wood in ' Ath. 
 Ox.,' under the name of Glanvill (against whom White wrote), reports: 
 " Hobbes of Malmesbury had a great respect for him, and, when he 
 lived at Westminster, he would often visit him and he Hobbes, but 
 seldom parted in cold blood : for they would wrangle, squabble and 
 scold about philosophical matters like young sophisters, though either 
 of them was eighty years of age.; yet, Hobbes being obstinate and not 
 able to endure contradiction (though well he might, seeing White was 
 his senior), those scholars who were sometimes present at their wrang- 
 ling disputes held that the laurel was carried away by White. " White 
 died in 1676 at the age of ninety-four. 
 
Repels the Charge of Heresy. 195 
 
 Aubrey, 1 he sought to make himself safe by burning his 
 papers, but there is other evidence of his alarm. White 
 Kennet, reporting the gossip that lingered long after- 
 wards in the Devonshire household, says, the "terror 
 upon his spirits made them sink very much : he would 
 be confessing to those about him that he meant no harm, 
 and was no obstinate man, and was ready to make any 
 proper satisfaction." 2 With timidity, however, there al- 
 ways went in Hobbes a characteristic determination. 
 He set himself to inquire into the actual state of the law 
 of heresy in England and became satisfied that, from the 
 time when the High Commission was put down by the 
 Long Parliament, there remained no court of heresy in 
 England to which he was answerable, not to say that 
 even when it stood his doctrine was blameless, as not 
 being (he considered) at variance with the true reading 
 of the Mcene Creed. This plea he at once set forth, 
 first publicly in an appendix to the Latin translation of 
 
 i ' Life/ 612. 
 
 2 ' Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish ' (1708), 15. Some other 
 touches are added that are not without an air of versimilitude : " It 
 is much to be doubted that upon this occasion he began to make a 
 more open show of religion and church communion. He now fre- 
 quented the chapel, joined in the service, and was generally a par- 
 taker of the holy sacrament. A.nd whenever any stranger, in conver- 
 sation with him, seemed to question his belief, he would always 
 appeal to his conformity in divine services and referred them to the 
 chaplain for a testimony of it. Others thought it a mere compliance 
 to the orders of the family, and observed that in city and country he 
 never went to any parish church, and even in the chapel upon 
 Sundays he went out after prayers and turned his back upon the 
 sermon ; and when any friend asked the reason of it, he gave 1,0 other 
 but this, 'They could teach him nothing but what he knew.'" He 
 spoke of the chaplain, Dr Jasper Mayne, at other times as " a very 
 silly fellow." Between them, says Wood (' Ath. Ox.,' iii. 971), " there 
 never was a right understanding" as may be readily supposed. 
 
196 Ilobbes. 
 
 his 'Leviathan/ 1 which came out in .1668, and also in 
 the tract, ' An Historical Narration concerning Heresy 
 and the Punishment thereof,' 2 kept back from this time 
 till 1680, after his death. 
 
 Arlington appears to have stood between him and 
 any possible harm from the parliamentary denunciation ; 
 while, in the last resort, he could always count upon the 
 indulgence of the king. In 1666, when publishing the 
 mathematical tract with which he reopened for the long 
 last time the strife with Wallis, he addresses the Secretary 
 of State as the special protector of his old age ; and there 
 is extant, besides, a letter, of June 1667, which conveys 
 thanks to Arlington and the Under-Secretary William- 
 son for " their mediation." 3 As for the king, it was not 
 to be supposed that he would suffer serious hurt to 
 Hobbes, but from this time forth he seems to have made 
 it a condition that the philosopher should not further 
 provoke the popular sentiment. Nothing more in Eng- 
 lish from Hobbes's hand that had any political or reli- 
 gious reference was permitted to see the light as long as 
 he lived. 4 Even for a collection of his writings in 
 Latin, he had not, since 1663, been able to procure the 
 necessary licence at home, but had had to resort to the 
 Amsterdam publisher Blaeu. The most remarkable 
 feature of this edition, when at last it appeared in 1668, 
 was the translation of an altered ' Leviathan.' 5 It was 
 
 l L., iii 539-559. 2 E., iv. 385-408. 
 
 3 ' Catalogue of State Papers,' Domestic, vol. cciv. 
 
 4 Pepys writes on Sept. 3, 1668 : " To my bookseller's, for Hobbes's 
 * Leviathan,' which is now mightily called for ; and what was hereto- 
 fore sold for 8s. I now give 24s. for at the second hand, and is sold for 
 30s., it being a book the bishops will not let be printed again." 
 
 5 'T. H. M. Opera Philosophica, qua? Latine scripsit, Omnia,' Part 
 
'Leviathan' in Latin 'Behemoth' . 197 
 
 only natural that the special references or allusions to 
 the state of political affairs as they stood in 1651 should 
 now be omitted, but otherwise the exposition was con- 
 siderably shortened and occasionally toned down in the 
 political and ecclesiastical sections. A few of the more 
 hazardous expressions on points of theology were aban- 
 doned in deference to the outcry they had excited ; though, 
 when they turned upon the interpretation of actual pas- 
 sages in Scripture, he was not afraid still to maintain his 
 most peculiar opinions. He gave, as the reason for his 
 Latin rendering now of a book originally written in such 
 different circumstances, that he wished its principles, of 
 lasting importance as they were, to be rescued from sup- 
 pression at the hands of those who most had profited by 
 their bold statement. At the end, in three short dia- 
 logues appended in place of the old tl Eeview and Con- 
 clusion/' besides bringing forward his historical view of 
 heresy in connection with his reading of the Nicene 
 Creed, he did his best to palliate when he could not 
 defend the more startling of his theological propositions. 
 Though he could not get them printed, it was about 
 this time (towards 1670) that he composed the more 
 important of his later works remarkable enough pro- 
 ductions from a man of his years. Besides the ' Heresy ' 
 tract and the 'Answer to Bishop Bramhall,' formerly 
 mentioned the latter of which can be definitely referred 
 to the year 1668 three works are to be noted, 'Behe- 
 
 iii.; in Molesworth, L., iii. Besides the three systematic works form- 
 ing Part i., the collection of 1668 included reprints also of the mathe- 
 matical and physical pieces from 1660 (Part ii.) Sorbiere was again 
 the intermediary, negotiating the publication on his return from a 
 visit to England in 1663, as appears by a letter in Hard wick MSS. 
 
198 Hobbes. 
 
 moth,' * The Common Laws,' and the metrical ' Historia 
 Ecclesiastica,' all in dialogue-form. ' Behemoth : the 
 History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, 
 and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were 
 carried on from the year 1640 to 1660,' was submitted 
 to the king on its completion, about the year 1668, and 
 was by him flatly proscribed. Hobbes was eager to 
 have it published, but bowed to the royal decision and 
 himself faithfully conformed to it. Some months, how- 
 ever, before his death in 1679, the book found its way 
 into print from a surreptitious and imperfect copy that 
 some one had taken of the MS. ; other spurious editions 
 following before the first authoritative impression in 
 1682. 1 It gives in extremely spirited style his whole 
 view of the social and religious conditions that led to 
 the Revolution, with the story of its course from first to 
 last; urging at the same time, in particular, the sovereign's 
 " right of militia," the denial of which, it seemed to him, 
 had originally wrought all the mischief, while its express 
 recognition by Parliament, after the Restoration, had 
 been the one gain accruing from the " bloody dispute." 
 Hobbes administers his censure pretty evenly to king's 
 friends and foes alike. None, he held, were more to 
 blame for the catastrophe than the half-hearted royalists 
 who " thought the government of England was not an 
 
 i R, vi. 161-418. The authority is that of W. Crooke, Hobbes's 
 publisher; but the examination by Dr F. Tonnies of a MS. in the 
 library of St John's College, Oxford, bearing the title ' Behemoth : or 
 the Long Parliament,' which may be the original of the work, has 
 disclosed many errors and defects in the text even of the 1682 edi- 
 tion. This MS. has a short dedication to Arlington (not given in 
 the printed editions), with the words : "I petition not to have it pub- 
 lished." For the different account (followed above) see E., iv. 411. 
 
'The Common Laws' ' 'Historia Ecclesiastical 199 
 
 absolute but a mixed monarchy," and foremost the con- 
 stitutional lawyers with their precedents and their lim- 
 itations on the royal prerogative. It was, accordingly, 
 against the chief of these, Sir Edward Coke (d. 1634), 
 that he was moved to enter the field in the (unfinished) 
 ' Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the 
 Common Laws of England,' which (as including still 
 another statement of his view of the heresy laws) may be 
 referred to the years just following on 1666. 1 Finally, in 
 the ' Historia Ecclesiastica ' he sought once more to expose 
 the arts by which Churchmen, with tools borrowed from 
 ancient philosophy, had sapped the foundations of civil 
 power. Aubrey mentions that he read Cluverius's 
 ' Historia Universalis ' for the purpose ; and the piece, 
 which runs to more than two thousand elegiac verses, 
 charged with many a quaint conceit, is referred by him- 
 self to about his eightieth year. 2 
 
 These works, then, were kept back, and for some time 
 Hobbes might not speak a word for himself, however 
 provoked. At Cambridge, in 1669, the academic au- 
 thorities seized the opportunity of discrediting him 
 given by a false-hearted disciple, one Daniel Scargil, 
 
 1 E., vi. 1-160. Abruptly broken off, and, according to Hobbes 
 himself ('Life,' 614 n.), unfinished; though the publisher (who 
 could not get his consent to print as late as 1679) announced it, 
 after his death, as having been "finished many years" (E., vi. 
 422). Aubrey ('Life,' 613) takes credit for having turned his mind 
 to the subject by presenting him with Bacon's 'Elements of the 
 Common Laws of England ' in 1664, and it was apparently from this 
 time that he began to turn over the statute-book (E. , vi. 1), though 
 he had used Coke's ' Commentary ' before (E. , iii. 256). 
 
 2 L., v. 341-408. First published in 1688, with an anonymous 
 preface by Thomas Rymer. A loose metrical translation by some 
 one, entitled ' A True Ecclesiastical History from Moses to the Time 
 of Martin Luther,' appeared in 1722. 
 
200 Jlobbes. 
 
 fellow of Corpus Christi College, who had impudently 
 maintained in the schools some theses torn out of their 
 reasoned context in ' Leviathan.' Known for a disrepu- 
 table character, this Scargil, before being cast out of the 
 University, was brought to act an edifying part in a pub- 
 lic recantation, declaring that he had gloried in being a 
 Hobbist and atheist, and that it was in accordance with 
 Hobbes's principles he had lived viciously. 1 Hobbes 
 could only protest in private to his friends against the 
 injurious imputation. Five years later, however, when 
 at Oxford the Dean of Christ Church, Dr John Fell (of 
 epigrammatic memory), took advantage of his position, 
 in bringing out a Latin translation of Anthony Wood's 
 'History and Antiquities,' to strike out the tribute to 
 Hobbes's learning and personal character contained in 
 the notice of the philosopher and to insert various un- 
 complimentary clauses instead, Hobbes did obtain per- 
 mission from the king to make public protest in a dig- 
 nified letter, which he had previously addressed to the 
 friendly Wood, and which, on being shown to Fell, had 
 from him evoked only a fresh expression of contempt. 
 The matter did not rest there ; for, as soon as the letter 
 was published (under the express condition imposed by 
 the king, that it should contain no reflection upon the 
 University), Fell took his revenge by appending to the 
 book an additional note, in which he did not scruple 
 to call Hobbes " irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmes- 
 buriense animal," and, pretending that the original 
 notice had been written not by Wood but by Aubrey 
 or by Hobbes himself, heaped upon his head the coarsest 
 abuse. To this Hobbes did not deign to reply. " My 
 1 The recantation is given at length in the Somers Tracts,' vii. 370-2. 
 
Translation of Homer. 201 
 
 fame, such as it is," he had truly said in the letter, 
 " has long ago flown on wings abroad, not to be recalled " 
 by any Dr Pell. In like strain, to Bramhall's earlier 
 description of his works as " a heap of misshapen errors 
 and absurd paradoxes vented with the confidence of a 
 juggler and the brags of a mountebank," he could reply 
 in 1668 : "What my works are he was no fit judge. 
 But now he has provoked me, I will say this much 
 of them, that neither he, if he had lived, nor I, if I 
 would, could extinguish the light which is set up in the 
 world by the greatest part of them." 1 The boast was 
 not unfounded. No Englishman of that day stood in 
 the same repute abroad ; and foreigners, noble or learned, 
 when they came to England, were ever forward to pay 
 their respects to the old man whose freshness and vigour 
 of intellect no progress of the years seemed able to 
 quench. Strangers who came to him with honest intent 
 he received with cheerful courtesy, and he had an un- 
 feigned pleasure in pouring out wealth from his mental 
 store ; but he would be impatient enough with those 
 who came to carp or to play with his hasty temper. 
 
 He amused himself at the age of eighty-four by throw- 
 ing off his autobiography in Latin verse, 2 with its playful 
 humour, occasional pathos, and sublime self-compla- 
 cency. At the close he spoke of his course as nearly 
 run; but the next year (1673) did not pass before his 
 energy had carried him into a new line or back into an 
 old one. He then issued a rhymed translation, in quat- 
 rains, of Books ix.-xii. of the ' Odyssey,' and, encouraged 
 by the favourable" reception of this ' Voyage of Ulysses/ 
 finished within the next year or two the complete trans- 
 
 1 E., iv. 382. 2 L., i. pp. lxxxi-xcix ; see above, p. 2, n. 
 
202 Holies. 
 
 lation of both 'Odyssey' and 'Iliad.' Prefaced by a 
 dissertation " Concerning the Virtues of an heroic Poem," 
 showing his unabated interest in questions of literary 
 style, the version is less open to the imputation of bald 
 ruggedness than as Pope, who declares the poetry " too 
 mean for criticism," otherwise objects to the charge that 
 particulars and circumstances are constantly lopped off, 
 to the sacrifice often of the most beautiful. It was the 
 pastime of an old man of eighty-six, and, when all is 
 said, no slight evidence of the power and vigour of 
 expression that still remained to him. 1 
 
 But the end was at last drawing on. In 1675, when 
 the translation was done, he left London, where he had 
 spent most of his time since the Eestoration, first " at 
 Little Salisbury House, then Queen Street, lastly ^New- 
 port House," and returned no more. Thenceforth his days 
 were passed between Hardwick and Chatsworth, the two 
 Derbyshire seats of the Devonshire family, distant from 
 one another some fifteen miles or more. So far as his 
 strength allowed, he clung still to the regular habits of his 
 life j and it was at the age of ninety, only the year before 
 his death, that he produced, as we have seen, the ' Decam- 
 eron Physiologicum.' 2 Kennet was told afterwards that 
 
 1 E., x. " Why did I write it ? Because I had nothing else to do. 
 Why publish it 1 Because I thought it might take off my adversaries 
 from showing their folly upon my more serious writings, and set them 
 upon my verses to show their wisdom " (p. x. ) 
 
 2 The.'Vit, Auct.' (L., i. p. lxvi) refers to 1676 a 'Letter to 
 William Duke of Newcastle on the Controversy about Liberty and 
 Necessity, held with Benj. Laney, Bishop of Ely.' In that year there 
 did appear a (confused) little tract written by Laney against Hobbes's 
 concluding statement of his own "Opinion" in the 'Liberty and 
 Necessity' of 1654 (1646), but I can find no trace of any further 
 writing by Hobbes on the subject. 
 
Death. 203 
 
 " the winter before he died he made a warm greatcoat, 
 
 which he said must last him three years, and then he 
 would have such another." It is certain that, as late as 
 August 1679, he was "writing somewhat" for his pub- 
 lisher "to print in English." 1 Whatever they were, his 
 hopes and plans were near their term. About the middle 
 of October he had an attack of strangury, from which at 
 his age there could be no recovery ; 2 but he would not be 
 left behind at Chatsworth when the family made the 
 move to Hardwick before the end of November. Though 
 he bore the journey well enough at the time, he was 
 smitten by paralysis of the right side, with loss of 
 speech, a few days later. He lingered in a somnolent 
 state till the 4th of December; then his life quietly 
 went out. A black marble slab, bearing a simple Latin 
 inscription, 3 covers his remains in the chancel of the small 
 parish church of Hault Hucknall, lying across the park 
 from Hardwick Hall. 
 
 Several excellent portraits have been preserved of 
 Hobbes, the most accessible being that in the National 
 Portrait Gallery and the two in the rooms of the Eoyal 
 Society at Burlington House. The faithful Aubrey has 
 
 iR,iv. 412. 
 
 2 Wood and Kennet both have it that, on hearing the trouble was 
 past cure, he exclaimed, "I shall be glad then to find a hole to creep 
 out of the world at." 
 
 3 'Vit. And.' (L., i. p. lxxx) : "Vir probus et fama eruditionis 
 domi forisque bene cognitus. " Kennet, in ' Mem. ' added to the life 
 of Hobbes in Wood's 'Ath. Ox.' (Bliss, iii. 1218), says: "He used 
 to be thinking of his epitaph while he was living, and would suffer 
 some friends to dictate inscriptions for him, among which he was 
 best pleased with this humour for a gravestone This is the true 
 Philosopher's Stone." 
 
204 Hdbbes. 
 
 given, besides, a circumstantial account of his looks and 
 ways, more than rambling but too graphic not to be 
 quoted at some length in preference to any other attempt 
 at delineation. Having noted (as above, p. 12) that " in 
 his youth he was unhealthy and of an ill complexion 
 (yellowish)," Aubrey goes on : 
 
 " From forty he grew healthier, and then he had a fresh, 
 ruddy complexion. ... In his old age he was very 
 bald, yet within doors he used to study and sit bareheaded, 
 and said he never took cold in his head, but that the 
 greatest trouble was to keep off the flies from pitching on 
 his baldness. His head was of a mallet form. . . . His 
 face was not very great, ample forehead, yellowish-reddish 
 whiskers, which naturally turned up ; below he was shaved 
 close, except a little tip under his lip ; not but that nature 
 would have afforded him a venerable beard, but, being mostly 
 of a cheerful and pleasant humour, he affected not at all 
 austerity and gravity and to look severe. . . . 
 
 " He had a good eye, and that of a hazel colour, which 
 was full of life and spirit even to his last ; when he was in 
 discourse there shone (as it were) a bright live coal within it. 
 He had two kinds of looks : when he laughed, was witty, 
 and in a merry humour, one could scarce see his eyes ; by- 
 and-by, when he was serious and earnest, he opened his eyes 
 round his eyelids : he had middling eyes, not very big nor 
 very little. 
 
 " He was six feet high and something better, and went 
 indifferently erect, or rather, considering his great age, very 
 erect. His sight and wit continued to his last. He had a 
 curious sharp sight as he had a sharp wit ; which was also so 
 sure and steady that I have heard him oftentimes say that, in 
 multiplying and dividing, he never mistook a figure, and 
 so in other things. . . . 
 
 " He seldom used any physic. He was wont to say that 
 he had rather have the advice or take physic from an ex- 
 perienced old woman that had been at many sick people's 
 
Characteristics. 205 
 
 bedsides, than from the most learned but unexperienced 
 physician. 
 
 " It is not consistent with an harmonious soul to be a 
 woman-hater ; neither had he an abhorrence to good wine, 
 but he was even in his youth (generally) temperate, both as 
 to wine and women (et tamen hose omnia mediocriter. Homo 
 sum ; nihil humani a me alienum puto). 1 I have heard him 
 say that he has been drunk in his life a hundred times, 
 which, considering his great age, did not amount to above 
 once a-year. When he did drink, he would drink to excess, 
 to have the benefit of vomiting, which he did easy, by 
 which benefit neither his wit was disturbed nor his stomach 
 oppressed ; but he never was, nor could endure to be, habit- 
 ually a good fellow i.e., to drink every day wine with com- 
 pany, which, though not to drunkenness, spoils the brain. 
 
 " For his last thirty years or more his diet, &c, was very 
 moderate and regular ; after sixty, he drank no wine ; his 
 stomach grew weak, and he did eat mostly fish, especially 
 whitings, for he said he digested fish better than flesh. He 
 rose about seven, had his breakfast of bread and butter, and 
 took his walk, meditating till ten ; then he did put down 
 the minutes of his thoughts. His dinner was provided for 
 him exactly by eleven, for he would not stay till his lord's 
 hour sc., about two. After dinner he took a pipe of tobacco, 
 and then threw himself immediately on his bed, with his 
 band off, and slept about half an hour. In the afternoon he 
 penned his morning thoughts. 2 . . . 
 
 " Besides his daily walking, he did twice or thrice a-year 
 
 1 Kennet (quoted in 'Ath. Ox.,' iii. 1218) says: "He had one 
 natural daughter, whom he called his delictum juventutis, and pro- 
 vided for her." 
 
 2 Kennet, picking up the stories current some thirty years later, 
 gives an order of the day considerably different. There is a fine 
 mythical development in the account of the afternoon (' Ath. Ox.,' I. c.) : 
 ' ' Soon after dinner he had his candle and twelve pipes of tobacco lay- 
 ing by it ; then, shutting his door and darkening some part of his win- 
 dows, he fell to smoking and thinking and writing for several hours." 
 
206 Hohbes. 
 
 play at tennis (at about seventy-five he did it), then went to 
 bed and was well rubbed. In the country, for want of a 
 tennis-court, he would walk uphill and downhill in the park 
 till he was in a great sweat, and then give the servant some 
 money to rub him. . . . 
 
 " He had always books of prick-song lying on his table 
 e.g., of H. Lawes, &c, songs which at night, when he was 
 abed and the doors made fast and was sure nobody heard 
 him, he sang aloud, not that he had a good voice but for his 
 health's sake ; he did believe it did his lungs good and con- 
 duced much to prolong his life. 
 
 " He had the shaking palsy in his hands, which began in 
 France before the year 1650 and has grown upon him by 
 degrees ever since ; so that he has not been able to write 
 legibly since 1665 or 1666, as I find by some of his letters to 
 me that he honoured me withal. 
 
 " His love to his kindred hath already been spoken of. 
 He was very charitable (e suo modulo) to those that were 
 true objects of his bounty. One time, I remember, going in 
 the Strand, a poor and infirm old man begged his alms ; he, 
 beholding him with eyes of pity and compassion, put his 
 hand in his pocket and gave him 6d. Said a divine (sc, Dr 
 Jasper Mayne) that stood by, ' Would you have clone this 
 if it had not been Christ's command ? ' ' Yea,' said he. 
 1 Why 1 ' quoth the other. ' Because,' said he, ' I was in pain 
 to consider the miserable condition of the old man ; and now 
 my alms, giving him some relief, doth also ease me.' " 1 
 
 1 ' Life,' 619-24. For a less favourable picture, from the unfriendly 
 hand of Hooke, when he met Hobbes on one occasion in 1663, see the 
 letter in Boyle's ' Works,' vi. 486 (ed. 1772). Hooke was at the time 
 curator of experiments to the newly incorporated Royal Society. 
 Prof. Masson, in ' Life of Milton,' vi. 289, gives the passage at length, 
 and also sums it up in a vigorous somewhat too vigorous sentence. 
 
 Sorbiere (who had translated the ' De Cive ' and the ' De Corpore 
 Politico ' into French) visited England shortly after the Restoration, 
 and gives some interesting particulars about Hobbes in his ' Voyage 
 en Angleterre ' (1664), 65, 96, 98. 
 
207 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 . ANTI-HOBBES. 
 
 When death at last overtook Hobbes, 1 the clamour of 
 opposition that had attended all his declining years was 
 far from spent. If not more vehement, his foes had 
 been many more in number and kind than has yet 
 appeared, and they were now to continue at work long 
 after he was there to front them with agressive reprisals 
 or the disdainful unconcern that in general he displayed. 
 Few men have so deeply stirred the minds of their 
 fellows. His more positive influence will be briefly 
 considered in the final chapter; a prior task is some 
 attempt to bring into view the various strains of antag- 
 onism which his ideas, for at least three generations 
 after their first utterance, did not cease to evoke. Hardly 
 
 1 His protracted age had struck the popular imagination, and his 
 death, when it came, was sung in a broadside (Luttrell, i. yr. 1679), 
 consisting of an ' Elegy,' not uncomplimentary (which begins " Is he, 
 then, dead at last ? "), followed by a scurrilous ' Epitaph, ' thus ending : 
 
 " In fine, after a thousand Shams and Fobbs, 
 Ninety years' eating and immortal Jobs, 
 Here matter lies, and there's an end of Hobbes ! " 
 Aliud 
 
 " Here lies Tom Hobbes, the Bugbear of the Nation, 
 Whose death hath frightened Atheism out of fashion ! " 
 
208 Holies. 
 
 has there been seen again such a ferment of popular 
 feeling and learned opinion round the thought of one 
 man, till; in these days, Darwinism touched the same 
 human interests in a manner not wholly rUssimilar. 
 
 " The philosopher of Malmesbury," wrote Warburton 
 in 1741, 1 "was the terror of the last age, as Tindal and 
 Collins have been of this. The press sweat with con- 
 troversy ; and every young Churchman militant would 
 needs try his arms in thundering upon Hobbes's steel- 
 cap." Some notion of the nutter in ecclesiastical and 
 other circles may be gathered from the (fairly complete) 
 catalogue of the polemical literature given in the ' Vitse 
 Auctarium ' down to the time of the philosopher's death ; 
 the heap of sermons and pamphlets and treatises being 
 added to with every year that followed. Nor, later on, 
 did the deistic movement tosay nothing of Hobbes's 
 own part in starting it so engross the attention of the 
 champions of religious orthodoxy throughout the first 
 decades of the eighteenth century, that they could over- 
 look his deeper attempt on the foundations of morality, 
 an attempt so serious that deists themselves, like 
 Shaftesbury, were among the foremost to rally to the 
 defence. Even Locke's new theory of knowledge, which 
 wrought such a transformation of thought all over 
 Europe, and began in England the first continuous 
 movement of philosophical and psychological inquiry, 
 had at first the effect of bringing only into stronger 
 relief the sharp utterances in which the elder thinker 
 seemed to its opponents to have anticipated some of its 
 most exceptionable features. Not, indeed, till about the 
 
 1 Preface to books iv. -vi. of the ' Divine Legation of Moses ' (Hnrd's 
 edition, 1811, iv. 31). 
 
The Opposition mainly on Practical Grounds. 209 
 
 middle of the century do we find such calmer references 
 to Hobbes as those in which Hume lets it be seen that 
 the crisis is past, and that henceforth the venue of 
 discussion is,. changed. 
 
 As it had been a practical purpose that first made 
 Hobbes a thinker, so it was mainly the practical issues 
 of his thought, and these more especially as drawn out 
 for all the world in the imposing rhetoric of ' Leviathan,' 
 that from the first arrayed the host of enemies against 
 him. Even Wallis's detailed exposure of his mathemat- 
 ical pretensions in the ' De Corpore ' had for its object 
 the discrediting of his authority in matters of more im- 
 mediate human concern. Otherwise, after Seth Ward's 
 joint polemic, there was no criticism to speak of directed 
 expressly against the fundamental treatise; Cudworth 
 and More alone, among his major assailants, having the 
 speculative interest so strong as to go back freely to 
 its demonstrations from the compendious reference to 
 philosophical principles in 'Leviathan' (or 'Human 
 Nature'). The limited view of others is the less sur- 
 prising as the superstructure had been mostly reared 
 before the foundation was laid ; but neither was the 
 practical doctrine, at all points, seriously contested. By 
 the side of the ethical criticism, conducted on grounds 
 of principle that render it ever memorable, the political 
 may be dismissed as of small account. There is one name 
 of note if Filmer's, saved by Locke from oblivion, may 
 hardly be so called attached to a special handling of the 
 political theory, which the moralists in general stopped 
 short of touching (when they did not, like Cudworth, find 
 here at least something to commend) ; but, strenuous as 
 Clarendon's invective is, more especially against Hobbes's 
 
 p. x. o 
 
210 Holies. 
 
 naked assertions of the practical irresponsibility of the 
 sovereign power (wherever resting) in any state, his own 
 political action had too well exemplified the theory to 
 leave it open to him to take effective ground against 
 it, were any such to be found. His ' Brief View and 
 Survey of the dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church 
 and State in Mr Hobbes's book entitled Leviathan' 
 passes accordingly into the same kind of indignant protest, 
 without discrimination, as was vented by the crowd of 
 objectors, mostly clerics, against the paradoxes with 
 which Hobbes loved to shock the common-sense of his 
 readers, seeking rather to cow than to persuade them 
 into acceptance of his clear-cut scheme of thought and 
 practice. 
 
 /Nothing, it may at once be allowed, could be more 
 natural than the revolt of common -sense against the 
 general spirit and tendency of the scheme. The most 
 cherished convictions of humanity had been ruthlessly 
 trampled under foot by Hobbes in his determination to 
 reduce to absolute simplicity the account of man's place 
 in the universe, and so to get rid of everything that 
 might be represented as factitious, cause of social dis- 
 order. No sooner had his late-born interest in the new 
 mechanical philosophy suggested to him the thought 
 of seeking for a physical expression of the mental pro- 
 cesses and human relations of which he had long before 
 been a careful and anxious observer, than he had fallen 
 into the way of regarding all that he could not so express 
 as mere figment or shadow. \ Seeing then his country- 
 men parted into hostile camps by what he could only 
 regard as vain distinctions of the religious imagination, 
 and ready, as they clutched at each other's throats, to 
 
The Revolt of Common-sense. 211 
 
 cast away the hard-won fruits of past social effort, he 
 had desired to make a clean sweep of all such unrealities. 
 Hence his uncompromising rejection in one or other 
 form of that notion of incorporeal spirit which had 
 worked its way to the first place in the consciousness of 
 Christendom. Hence, also, his refusal to allow of any 
 such idea of inward relation between creature and Creator 
 as had given the Catholic Church its power over the 
 faithful, so long as the relation was held to be by way of 
 intermediary, and now, since Protestantism had asserted 
 a direct personal relation, was rending the body politic 
 into a multitude of warring sects. While maintaining 
 a Divine government of the world and professing to 
 accept the Scriptural revelation, he had given an expres- 
 sion to his thought of Deity and to his view of Christian 
 doctrine which could not but scandalise the pious soul 
 of whatever confession. And, for justification of his on e 
 practical principle of political absolutism, he had drawn 
 a picture of the selfish and anarchic tendencies in man 
 that either was too plainly exaggerated by design or 
 only proved himself to be, by temperament, incapable of 
 entering into the nobler sides of human nature. There 
 was thus much genuine feeling and sometimes no want 
 of intellectual point in the protests that came forth in 
 shoals from the champions of the traditional order in 
 religion and morals ; and if they failed to discern the 
 serious purpose practical as well as scientific, in a word, 
 philosophic that had really prompted his long-protracted 
 effort of thought, his aggressive tone and his habit 
 (whether reckless or calculated) of extravagant state- 
 ment went far to explain the result. 
 
 With so much justification, and, here and there, argu- 
 
212 Holies. 
 
 mentative force, it cannot, however, on the whole be 
 said that the Anti-Hobbian writings of the more popular 
 sort are not sufficiently commemorated in the mere 
 catalogue of the - Vitae Auctarium.' Besidfia.^ramhairs 
 ' Catching of Leviathan,' which has an interest as the 
 one piece that Hobbes singled out for answer having, 
 as it seemed, a peculiar zest in tossing his old Episco- 
 pal foe and Clarendon's - Brief Survey,' both already 
 noted, express mention need only be made of (1) ' The 
 Creed of Mr Hobbes, examined in a feigned Conference 
 between him and a Student of Divinity,' the work in 
 1670 of Thomas Tenison, afterwards Tillotson's succes- 
 sor in the see of Canterbury, but then holding a clerical 
 charge in Cambridge ; (2) ' Mr Hobbes's State of Nature 
 considered in a Dialogue between Philautus and Timo- 
 thy/ published in 1672 by Dr John Eachard, later on 
 Master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, and followed next 
 year by - Some Opinions of Mr Hobbes considered in 
 a Second Dialogue.' These, like Clarendon's ' Sur- 
 vey' (penned in 1670), date from about the time when 
 the licence of the Bestoration period had settled down 
 into a- fixed social habit, and might be plausibly asso- 
 ciated with the fashionable profession of Hobbian prin- 
 ciples. A livelier style of attack than had yet been 
 employed against the arch-enemy (except by Wallis, with 
 such effect, in the mathematical conflict) seemed called 
 for. Tenison, bracing himself for the occasion, takes 
 a number of articles strung together by some one under 
 the title of * The Hobbist's Creed,' and makes them the 
 subject of conversation between Hobbes, who expounds 
 them at length for the most part in words collected* 
 from his different works, and the Student (Tenison him- 
 
Tenison Eachard. 213 
 
 self), who rebuts them to the best of his power. 1 His 
 art consists in finding, as was easy, a number of more 
 or less contradictory statements in such a variety of 
 occasional works, and in mocking at the unhesitating 
 confidence with which they were all alike uttered. The 
 piece, accordingly, is not without polemical merit. Pos- 
 sibly it may have suggested to Eachard (who had already 
 won some reputation as a humorist by his ' Grounds 
 and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and 
 Eeligion') the vein in which he, too, might best cope 
 with the dictatorial thinker. Though described after- 
 wards by Swift as " a great instance " of men he had 
 known "happy enough at ridicule who upon grave 
 
 1 The articles may be quoted as a specimen of the kind of inter- 
 pretation that was, more or less plausibly, put upon Hobbes's 
 unguarded dicta: 
 
 "I believe that God is almighty matter ; that in Him there are 
 three Persons, He having been thrice represented on earth ; that it is 
 to be decided by the civil power whether He created all things 
 else ; that angels are not incorporeal substances (those words imply- 
 ing a contradiction), but preternatural impressions on the brain 
 of man ; that the soul of man is the temperament of his body ; that 
 the liberty of will, in that soul, is physically necessary ; that the 
 prime law of nature in the soul of man is that of self-love ; that the 
 law of the civil sovereign is the obliging rule of good and evil, just 
 and unjust ; that the books of the Old and New Testament are 
 made canon and law by the civil powers ; that whatsoever is written 
 in these books may lawfully be denied even upon oath (after the 
 laudable doctrine and practice of the Gnosticks) in times of persecu- 
 tion, when men shall be urged by the menaces of authority ; that 
 hell is a tolerable condition of life for a few years upon earth, to 
 begin at the general resurrection ; and that heaven is a blessed estate 
 of good men, like that of Adam before his fall, beginning at the 
 general resurrection, to be from thenceforth eternal upon earth in 
 the Holy Land" (p. 8). / 
 
 __Compare, in the ' Somers' Tracts,' vii. 368, " The Last Sayings or 
 Dying Legacy of Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury," issued as a 
 broadside (by C. Blount), with hostile intent, on his death. 
 
/ 
 
 i/ 
 
 2H Holies. 
 
 subjects were perfectly stupid," Eachard was able to 
 work the vein so effectively that his ' Dialogues ' went 
 through many editions, and probably did more than 
 any laboured refutations to weaken the effect of Hobbes's 
 imposing manner. They show, by incidental allusions, 
 the extent to which the philosopher's unqualified say- 
 ings had been wrested by the frivolous and vicious to 
 an application that was as far as possible from his 
 serious thought ; and, in fastening upon his rhetorical 
 device of using phrases of direst import, like "state 
 of war," to express what was at bottom a harmless 
 enough meaning, Eachard displays true controversial 
 tact. 
 
 But, leaving all such combatants of the hour, we may 
 now turn to the more powerful thinkers who were stirred 
 by Hobbes to an opposition that did not pass off in mere 
 heat. As, with a certain reservation for Grotius before 
 him, it is allowed that he led the way in modern times 
 as an ethical philosopher, seeking a rule of conduct in 
 the demonstrable conditions of human life and expe- 
 rience, so (as noted already by Adam Smith) all further 
 advance in ethical inquiry, at least in England, took place 
 with reference to his sharply denned positions. Cum- 
 berland, Cudworth and Clarke, who, next to himself, 
 are the first important figures in English moral philo- 
 sophy, had each in view the establishment of principles 
 directly antagonistic to principles of his ; and, while in 
 the case of Clarke the opposition was not declared till 
 almost a generation after his death, Shaftesbury, Butler 
 and the others who followed up the inquiry with a novel 
 pertinacity of purpose, continued for at least one genera- 
 tion more to find at the same spring the motive of their 
 
The Ethical Movement in English Philosophy. 215 
 
 search giving to English thought an ethical direction 
 and to English ethical thought a psychological cast which 
 it has never since lost. The two salient features of 
 Hobbes's morality, impressed on it by the reaction of 
 a timorous spirit and calculating intellect against the 
 anarchy and enthusiasm of his time, were its arbitra- 
 riness and its selfishness. To show that the rule of 
 right was no wilful prescription of an irresistible power, 
 whether human or divine, and that it had its source and 
 warrant in quite another disposition of man towards 
 man than Hobbes had alone seen evidence of in human 
 nature, was the task taken in hand by his more serious 
 opponents. 
 
 The priority in purpose, if not also in performance, 
 belongs to the group of divines known as the Cam- 
 bridge Platonists, who carried on in the third quarter 
 of the century a tradition of enlightenment within the 
 English Church that dated back to the time of Hooker. 
 Becoming aware of the new philosophical position taken 
 up by Descartes, and finding in the spiritualism joined 
 with his naturalism much that was not irreconcilable 
 with the Platonic (or Neo-Platonic) principles which 
 they had adopted as a rational basis for their religious 
 faith, they were the more turned against Hobbes's 
 thorough-going materialism, which ignored, when it did 
 not deny, the ideal side of man and nature. Cudworth, 
 the ablest thinker though not the most genial member 
 of the band, had early descried the portent appearing on 
 the horizon of English thought. As far back (appa- 
 rently) as 1644, when Hobbes had begun to circulate his 
 ideas only in a private or at most a semi-public manner, 
 he took the occasion of a graduation exercise to assert 
 
216 Hobbes. 
 
 the eternal and absolute distinction of good and evil, 
 and the existence of immaterial and naturally immor- 
 tal substances. The theses seem obviously pointed at 
 Hobbes, and to maintain them by every resource of 
 thought and learning, in a series of writings, became 
 from that time forth the occupation of Cudworth's 
 life. His chief work 'The True Intellectual System 
 of the Universe ' was conceived on a scale so vast 
 that only one volume saw the light, in 1678, before 
 Hobbes's death, but this extended to a length of 900 
 folio pages; and before his own death, which fol- 
 lowed in 1688, or in the earlier years (for the 'Intellec- 
 tual System,' so far as afterwards published, had been 
 written by 1671), he had filled some thousand pages 
 more of manuscript, concerned always more or less 
 directly with Hobbes, besides the 'Treatise concerning 
 Eternal and Immutable Morality,' which found an 
 editor in 1731, and the short 'Treatise of Freewill' 
 (directed against Hobbes's 'Liberty and Necessity'), 
 which did not find one till 1838. No other of Hobbes's 
 opponents took so much pains to connect his practical 
 doctrine in all its developments with the mechanical 
 principles in which, if it had not its first origin, it came 
 to be formally grounded ; and the labour of overturning 
 the system, root and branch, was not achieved without 
 that burrowing aside into every recess of ancient lore 
 which makes Cudworth's refutation of the " reason and 
 philosophy" and demonstration of the "impossibility" 
 of " Atheism " the most erudite (as erudition at its time 
 was understood) of philosophical works. But second 
 only to Cudworth's in thoroughness was Henry More 's 
 criticism of Hobbes's general principles, though limited 
 
Cudworth More. 217 
 
 by him to the particular question of the existence and 
 nature of spirit; and as More, in his treatise 'On the 
 Immortality of the Soul,' first published in 1659^ took 
 the metaphysical field earlier, so again he anticipated the 
 slow-moving Cudworth with his ' Enchiridion Ethicum,' 
 in 1666. This latter work, however, though meant to 
 stem Hobbes's influence, makes but one direct reference 
 to him, and is of interest here only as showing how the 
 hardy path-breaker had drawn his contemporaries into 
 the way of thinking-out a rational theory of human 
 conduct. It is Cudworth that, in ethical as in meta- 
 physical regard, presents the full front of antagonism 
 to Hobbes, with a spirit, too, of bitterness not to be 
 traced in the expressions, sometimes even half-admir- 
 ing, used of the adversary by the gentler More. 1 
 
 Cudworth's position as against Hobbes, which even 
 in the treatise on ' Morality ' never gets beyond general 
 statement, is that good and evil are there fixed for ever 
 in the nature of things, as directly apprehensible by a 
 faculty of intellect that is purely spiritual and in no 
 way bound down by the material conditions of the 
 mind's sense-experience. Hampered as he was by an 
 antiquated metaphysic and unable to work out his idea 
 into anything that can be called an ethical system, he 
 
 1 In connection with the Cambridge school though he hailed from 
 Oxford mention should not be omitted of Joseph Glanvill, who 
 first in his ' Vanity of Dogmatising ' (1661) and then in the modified 
 second edition of this work, entitled ' Scepsis Scientifica ' (1665), had 
 shrewd objections to urge against several of Hobbes's characteristic 
 positions. The whole movement of the school in its antagonism to 
 Hobbes has been effectively treated by Principal Tulloch in vol. ii. 
 " The Cambridge Platonists " of his Rational Theology and \^ 
 Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century ' (187 1). 
 
218 Holies. 
 
 yet brought thus into clear view that aspect of univer- 
 sality and permanence in moral distinctions which even 
 Hobbes himself had not been able always to leave in 
 shadow. The same thing was done over again, a 
 generation later, by Samuel Clarke, under other con- 
 ditions. Locke had meanwhile taken new philosophical 
 ground, from which, while giving no account of human 
 impulses much differing from Hobbes's, he conceived of 
 morals as a system of intuitively clear notions like those 
 of mathematics, admitting of logical development into pro- 
 positions that are valid just because they do not profess 
 to have more than a nominal import. If Clarke had an 
 analogy between mathematical and moral truth thus sug- 
 gested to him, he was also not less disposed, by his New- 
 tonian sympathies, to give a mathematical interpretation 
 of any facts with which he had to deal. Accordingly, 
 after having in his first Boyle Lectures, of 1704, on 'The 
 Being and Attributes of God,' argued to some extent 
 against Hobbes's doctrine of cosmical necessity, he in 
 his second course, next year, on 'The Unchangeable 
 Obligations of Natural Beligion, &c.,' sought to prove, 
 against Hobbes more expressly (and taking full advantage 
 of Hobbes's own casual allowances), that men as agents 
 in the universe stand in fixed relations that involve lines 
 of action as directly seen to be fit and due as mathe- 
 matical propositions, expressing other fixed relations 
 among things, are seen to be true. Arrived thus far, 
 Clarke, hardly more than Cudworth, conceived that 
 anything else had to be done for ethical philosophy in 
 the way of providing natural motives for right-doing. 
 Yet in the prominence he gives to benevolence as a 
 principle of human action, as also by direct citation, we 
 
Clarke Cu mberland Shaftesbury. 219 
 
 have evidence of the effect that had begun to be wrought 
 by another of Hobbes's critics, properly the first, in 
 point of time, among those of them who have left their 
 mark on the development of ethical theory. 
 
 Cumberland (Bishop of Peterborough from 1691), in 
 his { De Legibus Naturae Disquisitio Philosophica ' 
 published in 1672, stands much nearer to Hobbes in 
 method of inquiry than any other of his opponents, and it 
 is probably for this reason (rather than for any other, as 
 suggested by the friend who, in a preface, excuses him 
 for not treating Hobbes roughly enough) that he con- 
 ducts his opposition, however pronounced, in a spirit 
 of unwonted consideration. He, more than Cudworth or 
 Clarke, is the true successor of Hobbes upon the modern 
 path of ethical inquiry, by regard to the constitution of 
 human nature and the facts of human life. But, unlike 
 Hobbes, he finds in man's physical and mental consti- 
 tution clear evidence of sociability as the most funda- 
 mental and far-reaching of human impulses; and this 
 leads him to propound " the common good of all " not 
 self-satisfaction or self-preservation as the proper end 
 of conduct (under theological sanctions) for a rational 
 creature. For the rest, he moves so naturally within 
 the circle of the conceptions borrowed by Hobbes from 
 philosophical tradition, that he is able to contest, in 
 minutest detail, the free personal rendering which 
 Hobbes had given of them. The result is Hobbism made 
 altruistic no small difference truly. There is also the 
 difference that Cumberland, by his discursiveness and 
 confused handling, falls as much below the level of en- 
 durable philosophical style as Hobbes rises above it. 
 
 If Cumberland's particular note of protest was echoed 
 
220 Hobbes. 
 
 even by Clarke, whose philosophical method was so 
 different, it was taken np and developed with abund- 
 ant effect by Shaftesbury. Locke's private pupil, who 
 learned from him the habit of psychological observation, 
 and used it to discredit some of his master's most confi- 
 dent assertions regarding human nature and experience, 
 found equal or greater satisfaction in dealing his rapier- 
 thrusts at the more dogmatic egoist of the previous 
 generation. With Shaftesbury ethical thought in Eng- 
 land passes definitively into the phase of seeking the 
 ground of right conduct in a relation of harmony among 
 the mental impulses natural to man; and these being 
 found by him to include " social affections " to such a 
 degree that their play gives the very meaning of 
 " virtue " or " goodness," his contention with Hobbes 
 becomes narrowed to the most definite issue. It is not 
 waged in any sustained fashion, and when it does 
 become express in one or other of the essays brought 
 finally together in the * Characteristicks ' (1711-13), it 
 is urged in a tone of airy assurance which it needs all 
 Hobbes's manifest exaggeration of the anti-social element 
 in human nature to justify or excuse. 
 
 Nearly thirty years after Shaftesbury had, first in his 
 'Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit' (1697), com- 
 mitted ethical thought to the psychological method, 
 Butler was working it with an earnestness of his own, 
 and succeeded in completing or appearing to complete 
 the demonstration of Hobbes's psychological shortcom- 
 ing, when not error. 1 Butler, with the pastoral aim of 
 
 1 Hutcheson also, who was busy at the same time upon the same 
 track, is to be mentioned for his ' Thoughts on Laughter,' contributed, 
 with 'Observations on the Fable of the Bees,' in the form of letters 
 
Butler. 221 
 
 his ' Sermons (1726), had other free-thinkers besides 
 Hobbes in view, and is distinguished by his readiness to 
 press any and every kind of philosophical argument into 
 the service of religion without much care for theoretic 
 consistency ; but his peculiar strength lay certainly in 
 the line of psychological analysis, and it is expressly as 
 well as tacitly conveyed that Hobbes's estimate of the 
 motive powers in man remains with him, even after so 
 long a time, the great stumbling-block to be removed 
 from the way of the faithful. This he essayed chiefly 
 in the continuous argument of the three discourses (i.-iii.) 
 1 Upon Human Nature,' and in the two others (iv. v.) 
 1 Upon Compassion.' The quality of his effort is attested 
 by the praises that have ever since been lavished upon 
 his main thesis by moralists of different schools ; 
 though, when Hume, in particular, speaks of its having 
 "been proved beyond all controversy that even the 
 passions commonly esteemed selfish carry the mind 
 beyond self directly to the object," he proceeds to give 
 the doctrine a turn that was certainly not in Butler's 
 thought, and throws considerable doubt upon his own 
 seriousness. 1 But, in any case, it has hardly remained 
 in serious question since that there is a principle of pro- 
 perly disinterested action in the human system, and that 
 Hobbes, if he had good reason for dwelling upon the 
 
 to a Dublin periodical within the years 1725-27 (see Prof. Fowler's 
 ' Shaftesbury and Hutcheson,' 173). Directed specially against 
 Hobbes's well-known theory of Laughter as springing from sudden 
 sense of personal superiority, the ' Thoughts ' are meant to have also 
 general application against his whole doctrine of human nature. 
 
 1 The note to sec. i. of the ' Inquiry concerning Human Under- 
 standing ' in which the remark occurs was, besides, afterwards with- 
 drawn. 
 
<v 
 
 222 Holies. 
 
 might of the selfish tendencies in man and showed true 
 psychological insight in tracking them through the 
 transformations they assume, gave an essentially one- 
 sided and distorted view of human activity. CWhat his 
 opponents, in their contention, never did him the justice 
 to remember, was that, if he did exaggerate or bring ex- 
 clusively into view the egoistic impulses in man, it was 
 yet in order to bar out their anarchic consequences by 
 the most effective agency of which he could think. ) 
 And if this was nothing but the strong hand of the 
 civil power, let it not be forgotten amid what a 
 welter of social strife a peace-loving student in the 
 middle of the seventeenth century was doomed to pass 
 his days. 
 
223 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 INFLUENCE. 
 
 If a man's influence is to be measured not least by the 
 opposition that he arouses, we have already had proof 
 that few thinkers have left a deeper trace upon their 
 time than Hobbes. It remains to note, with the brief- 
 ness imposed by present limits, in what directer way he 
 was able to affect those who came after. This is the 
 point of chief importance. Were it only a question of 
 the recognition he received in his day, it would be easy 
 and it would suffice to set over against the execrations 
 heaped upon his head panegyric like that of Cowley's 
 ecstatic verses, or such ungrudging admiration as a rival 
 political theorist like Harrington was ready to express. 1 
 
 1 To Cowley (d. 1667) Hobbes is the "great Columbus of the golden 
 lands of new philosophies." His ode, 'To Mr Hobbes,' which has 
 many other fine single lines, is given at the beginning of L. i. 
 ^Harrington, who in 'Oceana' (1656) had many objections to urge 
 against the doctrine of ' Leviathan,' in a later discourse on 'The Pre- 
 rogatives of Popidar Government' (c. vii.), justifies his opposition, 
 but adds : " Nevertheless in most other things I firmly believe 
 that Mr Hobbes is, and will in future ages be accounted, the best 
 writer at this day in the world. And for his treatises of ' Human 
 Nature ' and of Liberty and Necessity,' they are the greatest of new 
 lights, and those which I have followed and shall follow. "\ 
 
224 Holies. 
 
 So racy as they were of the soil, it is in England that 
 we are to look for the proper effect or development of 
 Hobbes's ideas : but it may first be observed that it was 
 not only at home that he either exerted influence or 
 called forth strenuous hostility. The age had not yet 
 come of separate national philosophies ; and Hobbes, 
 who composed his systematic trilogy in Latin, and 
 made shift to appeal from the heated denunciations of 
 his countrymen to the impartial judgment of the learned 
 in all countries by a translation even of 'Leviathan,' 
 became, from the first, an active factor in European as 
 well as in English thought. Some, indeed, of the very 
 earliest and not the least passionate protests against his 
 practical philosophy came from over sea; while his 
 theoretic basis obtained from foreign critics more detailed 
 consideration than, in general, it received at the hands 
 of his compatriots. Theologians like G. Cocquius, J. A. 
 Osiander, Christian Kortholt 1 and other such champions 
 of the faith, are not of more account than the homebred 
 Sharrocks and Parkers already passed over ; but it is of 
 interest to note that as early as 1660, and again in 1672, 
 a publicist of the rank of Puffendorf, in his constructive 
 works, did not oppose Hobbes on certain fundamental 
 points of legal theory without acknowledging many and 
 
 1 Kortholt (d. 1694), professor at Kiel, at least followed a line of 
 his own in 'De Tribus Impostoribus Magnis' (1680). Whatever, said 
 he, might be the truth about the infamous book under that title, re- 
 ported to have been smuggled into the world by some agent of the 
 infernal dragon in the previous century [after troubling the mediaeval 
 soul long previously], three great impostors there but too surely were, 
 at that present time, working their evil purpose upon the Christian 
 world to wit, Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, Spinoza. He pro- 
 ceeded accordingly, with much fury, to rend all three to pieces : 
 Herbert in ninety, Hobbes in fifty, and Spinoza in seventy pages. 
 
Spinoza Leibniz and Others. 225 
 
 varied obligations to him. And a greater than Puffen- 
 dorf, Spinoza, showed in his 'Tractatus Theologico- 
 Politicus,' published in 1670, as afterwards in the post- 
 humous 'Tractatus Politicus' (1677), how thoroughly a 
 mind of the highest originality could steep itself in the 
 thought of another; there being little in the way of / 
 general political principle that Spinoza was not content 
 to accept and pass on, tacitly, as Hobbes had established 
 it, if only he might vindicate more expressly than 
 Hobbes had done the indefeasible right of the subject to 
 individual liberty of thought. Leibniz also, before the 
 death of Hobbes, was able to record in some of his 
 earliest writing the impression made upon his eager 
 intellect by the "more than Nominalist" whom he 
 reckoned among the profoundest spirits of the new 
 philosophic era j 1 and, many years afterwards, in ap- 
 pending to the repeated mention of Hobbes in the 
 'Theodicee' (1710) a special review of the Eramhall 
 controversy, still found that he reasoned to whatever 
 extreme lengths " avec son esprit et sa subtilite 
 ordinaire." 
 
 After such recognition by the greatest, it is hardly 
 surprising that Hobbes should have continued to be 
 regarded in Germany; but it has not been generally 
 known to what an extent his theoretic conceptions, as 
 well as his practical doctrine, remained a subject of con- 
 cern to the multitude of active minds who throughout 
 the eighteenth century were laying the foundations of 
 the later fame of the German professoriate. Though not 
 followed by a succession of professed adherents like those 
 who, on the basis of Locke's ' Essay,' maintained an im- 
 
 i ' De Stilo Philosophico Nizolii ' (1670, ed. Erdm. p. 69). 
 P. x. p 
 
226 Holies. 
 
 posing front against the speculative dogmatism of Leib- 
 niz and Wolff till Kant appeared, he was made to do 
 service in the cause of experientialist philosophy and of 
 positive investigation in all departments of humanistic 
 science ; nor even after the Kantian revolution in philo- 
 sophy did he cease to attract an amount of attention that 
 might vie with that accorded to Hume himself. 1 In 
 France, after those had passed away with whom he had 
 personal relations in his lifetime, his influence as a philo- 
 sophical thinker was more slow to become active, though 
 Bayle and others kept the memory of his work alive. 
 Cartesianism had first to fall before the ideas of Newton 
 and of Locke, as introduced by Voltaire j but, as soon as 
 the ground was cleared from the middle of the eighteenth 
 century for the manifestation of the revolutionary spirit 
 in every channel of thought and practice, the vigour of 
 Hobbes's written word began to tell. Diderot's ' Ency- 
 clopaedia' article, "Hobbisme," which appeared in 1765, 
 though very careless in its facts, set out in striking form 
 
 1 G. Zart, in ' Einfluss der englisclien Philosophie seit Bacon auf 
 die deutsche Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts ' (Berlin, 1881), has 
 been the first to show how extensive and prolonged was Hobbes's 
 influence. It was previously known what a warm (yet not undiscern- 
 ing) defender Hobbes had in the Halle professor, N. J. Gundling(1671- 
 1729), most voluminous of writers or writer of hugest volumes. Many 
 of Zart's authors were professors, but not all : among those who con- 
 tinued after Kant to acknowledge the English influence, and not 
 least that of Hobbes, E. Platner (1744-1818) may specially be men- 
 tioned. Later on, Hobbes has continued to receive his full share of 
 attention from German writers, and has been often made the subject 
 of monographic study, mostly, however, only on his ethico-political 
 side. ' Leviathan ' (translated into Dutch as early as 1678) did not 
 receive a German rendering and then from the Latin till 1794, from 
 an anonymous hand (' Des Englanders Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, 
 &c. ,' Halle, 2 vols.) ; < De Give,' not till 1873, from J. H. v. Kirchmann. 
 
Diderot Rousseau. 227 
 
 the most characteristic of Hobbes's opinions ; and a later 
 appendix to the article (from the hand of " Citoyen " 
 Naigeon, in 1792), giving an analysis of the 'Human 
 Nature/ reports his enthusiastic outburst on .first be- 
 coming acquainted, in 1772, with this work, which had 
 just been translated by D'Holbach. 1 Before Diderot, 
 Eousseau had come under Hobbes's influence, though he 
 took up a position, first in the discourse ' De l'lnegalite ' 
 (1754) and later in the 'Contrat Social' (1762), that 
 had chiefly the appearance of antagonism to him. And 
 if Hobbes could thus, in different ways, affect the in- 
 surgent spirits who, by rationalist criticism or sentimen- 
 tal appeal, were preparing the downfall of social order in 
 France, he could also, when the time of reaction came 
 following upon the deluge, be pressed into the support of 
 the revived principle of authority, even when it got an 
 expression as alien as possible from his. De Maistre's 
 brilliant plea for Ultramontanism, in the treatise 'Du 
 Pape'(18l7), may be described as an argument con- 
 ducted throughout on Hobbist lines only turned to 
 account of the very cause of papal over-lordship in 
 
 1 Diderot's words should be given : " J'en suis sorti de ce 'Traite 
 de la Nature Humaine ' : quel dommage que le traducteur n'ait pas 
 reuni l'elegance et la clarte du stile a l'evidence et a la force des 
 idees ! Que Locke me parait diffus et lache, La Bruyere et La Roche- 
 foucauld pauvres et petits, en comparaison de ce Tlio. Hobbes ! C'est 
 un livre a lire et commenter toute sa vie. " 
 
 D'Holbach reissued his translation of the 'Human Nature' in 
 1787, joining with it the translations of the ' De Cive ' and 'De Cor- 
 pore Politico ' made by Sorbiere as far back as 1649 and 1652, under 
 the general title, ' Les GEuvres philosophiques et politiques de Th. 
 Hobbes' (Neufchatel, 2 vols.) A rendering of the first section, 
 ' ' Computatio sive Logica," of the ' De Corpore ' was included by Des- 
 tutt de Tracy in his 'Elemens d'Ideologie' in 1804, with some not 
 well-directed eulogy of the author in a preliminary discourse. 
 
228 Holies. 
 
 Christendom with which Hobbes had his main wrestle in 
 the interest of a self-contained national life. 
 
 As to Hobbes's influence on English thought, the ques- 
 tion of prime importance is to determine what effect he had 
 upon the next philosophical thinker, Locke, who like him- 
 self had more than an English reputation, and, through 
 or apart from Locke, upon any of those who have later 
 maintained that tradition of a national way of thinking that 
 
 yhad already begun to be established before his own time. 
 Though nothing could seem farther removed, whether 
 in form or matter, from Hobbes's rounded-off and all- 
 comprehensive system of philosophy than Locke's mere 
 ' Essay ' to discover the nature and import of the human 
 faculty of knowledge, there is yet (as before suggested) 
 a point of contact between them. Hobbes's effort, at a 
 time when knowledge was broadening and widening in 
 a manner unknown before, to maintain command over 
 the whole in principle, process, and result, was not itself 
 so satisfactory nor has it since been repeated with such 
 success : as that anything but credit is due to Locke's 
 sagacity for limiting as he did the philosopher's func- 
 tion. Neither, happily, was the worse than waste of 
 Hobbes's energy (despite occasional flashes of insight) 
 in the field of mathematical and physical science imitated 
 in any degree by the sober thinker who was content to 
 become as in his excess of modesty he chose to phrase 
 it an " under-labourer " by the side of the scientific 
 "master-builders." But Hobbes had, after all or before 
 I all, found in the mental and moral nature of man the 
 field that gave true exercise at once to his scientific habit 
 of mind and to his speculative ambition ; and it was 
 upon just such a basis of psychological consideration and 
 
Locke. 229 
 
 ethical interest that Locke founded his work of philoso- 
 phical criticism. 
 
 It is accordingly not difficult to discover agreements 
 between the two thinkers in spirit or detail ; and it has 
 been natural to suppose them due to direct influence of 
 the elder upon the younger. . Yet a closer examina- 
 tion leaves little doubt that the impulse to think as 
 he did came no more upon Locke from Hobbes than, 
 as we have before seen, it came upon Hobbes from 
 Bacon. It was Descartes who, having founded a great 
 dogmatic construction of the universe upon a basis 
 of subjective consideration, started Locke upon that 
 other psychological " way of ideas " that was to limit 
 philosophy thenceforth to general theory of knowledge 
 and leave free scope for the positive sciences; exclud- 
 ing, therefore, all such dogmatic construction as either 
 Descartes himself or, in another way, Hobbes had at- 
 tempted. When, then, we find Locke protesting his 
 ignorance of Hobbes's opinions even on points where 
 the. agreement between them is almost verbal, we may 
 well suppose him in no material respect impressed by 
 one whose general philosophical method and whose 
 practical aims were alike abhorrent to him. 1 And in so 
 far as Locke, by entering on a path not before trodden 
 either in England or out of it, determined the course of 
 philosophical thought from his time onward, we are not 
 
 1 Locke's chief disclaimers of familiarity with Hobbes occur in his 
 'Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester,' i. 566 (fol. ed., 1714), and 
 in ' Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity,' ii. 669. 
 Warburton, who piqued himself on his readiness to do Hobbes the 
 justice that was generally denied him, was perhaps the first who 
 definitely formulated the charge of plagiary ('Tracts by Warburton, 
 &c.,' 1789, p. 70), often repeated since (by Hazlitt and others). 
 
230 Hobbes. 
 
 to look for special influence from Hobbes upon those who 
 plied the psychological method. Berkeley and Hume, to 
 whatever achievements their original power might have 
 led them of themselves, unquestionably thought as they 
 did because of Locke who went before them, and, so 
 far as appears, not at all because of Hobbes who went 
 before Locke. Even in their more pronounced Nomi- 
 nalism, where they stand much nearer to Hobbes than to 
 Locke, there is no sign that they were affected by the 
 earlier thinker. Hence, if at a later time we find the 
 English school, while maintaining the Lockian tradition, 
 affiliating itself also upon Hobbes, the fact must have 
 some special reason of a more accidental character ; and 
 this is to be found in James Mill's revival of the Asso- 
 ciationism of Hartley. Not that Hartley, any more than 
 his contemporary Hume, in working out a psychological 
 theory of Association with philosophical consequences, 
 had Hobbes in his eye; but he certainly came to his 
 more developed doctrine of Association from the same 
 physical or physiological starting-point as had led Hobbes 
 to his. It is not surprising, then, that James Mill, being 
 attracted to Hobbes on his practical side and finding in 
 him a more express anticipation of the Associationist 
 doctrine than in Locke, should, without renouncing 
 allegiance to Locke whom Hartley had proclaimed his 
 master, have brought Hobbes into a consideration he 
 had not enjoyed before, and that this consideration 
 should have later been maintained among the represent- 
 ative members of the English school. 
 
 The result is that, as far as Hobbes has exerted an 
 influence in philosophy proper, it has been of the 
 indirect kind wrought through psychological science. 
 
Character of his Political Thought. 231 
 
 As psychology has a voice in the determination of ulti- 
 mate philosophical notions that belongs to no other 
 positive science, Hobbes has done more for philosophy 
 by promoting the positive investigation of mental 
 functions than by the abstract definitions of his own 
 First Philosophy, acutely conceived as these always are. 
 "We have already seen how his influence told in a 
 similar sense, but much more directly, upon the philoso- 
 phical theory of action in ethics; and neither has it 
 been otherwise as regards political theory, with the 
 history of which his name is as intimately connected. 
 If here he spoke a language which is in part not mode'rn, 
 he was certainly not enslaved like Grotius by the fictions 
 they both still employed for the purposes of rational 
 construction. Actual facts of human nature and unde- 
 niable human conditions are alone suffered to shape 
 and determine his thought of the possibilities of the 
 human lot. lie was, indeed, in politics a thinker of 
 so positive a cast that it may be said he erred chiefly in 
 not taking account of the useful purpose that fiction 
 is fitted to subserve in human practice. Consider only 
 his central idea of the irresponsibility of the sove- 
 reign power. So perfectly plain, when it is once 
 stated, that there is room only for marvel at the kind 
 of objections that have been urged against it, the 
 idea was yet put forward in a way that took no ac- 
 count, or no sufficient account, of the instinctive repug- 
 nance which men do well to cherish against it. If there 
 is no power on earth that can prevent the State from 
 disposing as it lists of the individual in all his external 
 relations, and if there come times in history (like 
 Hobbes's own) when the truth needs plain statement 
 
232 Hobbes. 
 
 over against the fancies and sentiments that resist it, 
 yet have these not less their part to play in the 
 normal conduct of social life. It is not meet that the 
 ruling power in any community should have its irre- 
 sponsibility first present to mind ; but, on the contrary, 
 it is surely well, so far as it can be done without pre 
 judice to the efficiency of State - action, that checks 
 be imposed upon the arbitrary action of a power that 
 has to be directed by uncertain human volition and 
 wielded by erring human hands. Nor does history con- 
 firm the timorous thought of Hobbes, that all the woes 
 of anarchy are instantly present as the inevitable alter- 
 native to tame endurance of the most arbitrary acts of 
 rulers. When men are driven out of the state of patient 
 quiescence, which has become, if it was not originally, as 
 natural to them as any " state of war of all against all," 
 they are not obliged to abjure every consideration that 
 makes for progress under fear of immediate social 
 collapse. 
 
 When the accidental features of Hobbes's ethico- 
 political ideas due to time and circumstances and per- 
 sonal temperament are discounted, it is not difficult to 
 understand how it should have been philosophical radicals 
 of the school of Bentham that first gave them effective 
 currency. Bentham himself, for whatever reason, makes 
 hardly any reference to Hobbes. Though, unlike Hume 
 who, in a calm scientific argument against the notion 
 of a social compact, had made some advance towards the 
 consideration of historical origins which was about to 
 sweep away all such fictions from political theory he 
 worked by as abstract a method as Hobbes, it was yet a 
 different method, and was directed towards objects of 
 
The Philosophical Radicals. 233 
 
 practical reform so different that it is possible he had 
 only aversion for the great absolutist. But Bentham's 
 followers, beginning with James Mill, were able to 
 pierce through the veil of accident and to see in Hobbes 
 what he actually was a man who had the same regard 
 that they had to common weal as the true aim of human 
 action and the same faith in intelligence as the one 
 means of realising it. Through James Mill, Grote and 
 Austin, in particular, were fired with admiration for the 
 most clear-headed and logical of political thinkers ; and 
 from Grote, as Molesworth has left on record, came the 
 first suggestion of doing homage to his power and in- 
 creasing' its effect by the publication of a complete and 
 accessible edition of his works. Nothing was wanting 
 to the spirit of munificence and devotion that Moles- 
 worth brought to the execution of the task he undertook, 
 though something more might have been done, by edi- 
 torial care, for the text of the stately volumes. It was, 
 however, Molesworth's intention to follow up his edition 
 of the works with a critical survey of Hobbes's whole 
 philosophical performance ; and if he had not been 
 diverted, by the exigencies of the active political life 
 that opened for him, from continuing the preparations 
 for it which he is known to have begun, he might have 
 made up for the only drawback upon the merits of his 
 service to Hobbes's fame, 1 
 
 1 See above, p. 3 n. , for Molesworth's edition of the ' Works ' and 
 'Opera.' From the eighteenth century there has only to he men- 
 tioned the fine folio edition of ' The Moral and Political Works of T. 
 H. of Malmesbury,' issued in 1750 with Life, by Dr Campbell of the 
 ' Biographia Britannica ' ; including, in order, ' Human Nature,' ' De 
 Corpore Politico,' Leviathan,' Answer to Bramhall's Catching of the 
 Leviathan,' ' Narration Concerning Heresy,' 'Of Liberty and Neces- 
 
234 Hobbes. 
 
 It should, finally, be said that, with enemies and. with 
 friends alike, Hobbes's power has been due not least to 
 the rare excellence of his literary style. Adversaries 
 
 sity,' 'Behemoth,' 'Dialogue of the Common Laws,' Introduction 
 to the ' Thucydides,' ' Letter to Davenant ' and two others, Pre- 
 face to the 'Homer,' 'De Mirabilibus Pecci' (with English trans.), 
 ' Considerations on the Reputation, &c. , of T. H.' In 1812 the ' Human 
 Nature ' and the ' Liberty and Necessity ' (with supplementary ex- 
 tracts from the ' Questions ' of 1656) were reprinted in a small edition 
 of 250 copies (London), with an interesting memoir (based on Camp- 
 bell) and dedication to Home Tooke, by Philip Mallet. 'Leviathan,' 
 reprinted separately in 1680, has again lately been twice reproduced 
 (1) at Oxford (J. Thornton), 1881, in handsome form, with re- 
 duced frontispiece ; (2) as one of the cheap volumes of ' Morley's 
 Universal Library,' London, 1885. 
 
 Reprints have been for some time announced (by J. Thornton, 
 Oxford) of (1) 'The Elements of Law, Natural and Politique' (i.e. 
 * Human Nature ' and ' De Corpore Politico '), and (2) ' Behemoth,' 
 edited upon careful collation of MSS. by Dr F. Tb'nnies (referred to 
 above, pp. 35 n., 198 n.); the former to have added to it the (MS.) 
 tract mentioned at p. 35 n., with some other previously unpublished 
 (optical) matter. Dr Tonnies has found much to amend in Moles- 
 worth's text. Both ' Elements ' and 'Behemoth,' it will be remem- 
 bered, were written out long before they were printed, and the copies 
 taken in the interval numerous in the case of the ' Elements ' were 
 not at all carefully made. In Molesworth, the text of 'Human 
 Nature' is the most seriously at fault. Perhaps the worst example 
 is at the beginning of c. 12 3 (E., iv. 68), where the words run : 
 "Voluntary actions and omissions are such as have beginning in the 
 will; all others are involuntary, or mixed voluntary; involuntary, 
 such as he doth by necessity of nature ; . . . mixed, such as partici- 
 pate of both," &c. Here "mixed voluntary" is nonsense, and the 
 "he" that follows is not accounted for. The passage, as correctly 
 given in the original edition of 1650 (followed by Mallet), should 
 read: ". . . all others are involuntary, or mixed: voluntary, such 
 as a man doth upon appetite or fear ; involuntary, such as he doth," 
 kc. The second edition of 1651, though professing to be "augmented 
 and much corrected by the author's own hand," introduces the error 
 "mixed voluntary" by omitting the all-important colon, but retains 
 the words "such as a man," &c. ; being followed in the third edition 
 (included with ' De Corpore Politico ' and ' Liberty and Necessity ' in 
 
His Style. 235 
 
 have been forward to urge that, in any less brilliant and 
 piquant setting than he was able to give them, his ideas 
 would at once have been recognised as a mere renewal of 
 antiquated and long exploded errors ; while less unsym- 
 pathetic readers have yielded themselves to the charm 
 of a diction as direct and vivid as writer ever had at 
 command. The terms of Diderot's admiration for the 
 pregnant thought so pointedly expressed have already 
 been quoted, and it is useless to single out other voices 
 from the chorus of praise. Setting himself, as we saw, 
 long before he ventured forth in print, to acquire a style 
 (in Latin) that should marry words to thought, he had, 
 and maintained a hold of, the significant function of 
 speech that no one has ever surpassed ; while his expo- 
 sition is ever lighted up by the gleams of a most pic- 
 turesque fancy. Not from 'Leviathan' only, though 
 most readily, perhaps, from that masterpiece, whole pages 
 might be made up of bright and pithy sayings that strike 
 the understanding with unerring effect ; and, but for a 
 certain quaintness in the turns of expression, the reader, 
 as he follows the even, limpid flow of the well-constructed 
 sentences and paragraphs, has it hardly suggested to him 
 that he is dealing with a writer of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury when poetry was better than prose, and the most 
 powerful minds were apt, in exposition, to be more the 
 slaves than the masters of speech. If in the foregoing 
 pages no attempt has been made to give an adequate 
 representation of Hobbes as a writer, it is because it was 
 thought that this was least of all necessary. To seek 
 
 the so-called Hobbes's Tripos') of 1684, and also in the folio edition 
 of 1750. Molesworth unaccountably goes on to make the second 
 omission. 
 
236 Hobhcs. 
 
 some understanding of the full range of his manifold 
 and prolonged activity as a thinker in relation to the 
 circumstances in which he lived and moved as it had 
 never before been fairly essayed seemed the more 
 imperative task. 
 
 Note on the Hardmck MSS. 
 
 At various places above (indicated in the following Index), 
 the more important of the Hardwick MSS. have been men- 
 tioned ; but it should be added that they include also a copy 
 of the Latin autobiography in verse (p. 201 above), with 
 tremulous corrections in Hobbes's own hand, and a large 
 number of letters received by him, chiefly from French 
 correspondents, after his return in 1651. They are doubt- 
 less the same as are referred to by Kennet in the Mem. 
 appended to Wood's ' Ath. Ox.' (Bliss, iii. 1218), where he 
 speaks of seeing at " Chatsworth," however " some MSS. 
 copies of Hobbes's own books, very fairly written, and the 
 dedications subscribed by his own hand ; " adding : " Mons. 
 Huet told me there was an old box of his papers in the 
 house, containing chiefly the correspondence between him 
 and foreigners." Du Verdus (see p. 62 n.) contributes most 
 largely to the correspondence ; beginning early to write long 
 letters full of stories (more and more suggestive of mono- 
 mania) concerning the persecution to which he was sub- 
 jected by his family, in league with the ecclesiastical autho- 
 rities at Bordeaux. His proper name was De Bomieau, 
 Seigneur du Verdus, and some few years ago representatives 
 of the family were still flourishing in the region. As Hobbes 
 had been very regular in his replies, search was desired and 
 was kindly undertaken for any letters of his that might have 
 been preserved ; but none could be found. The other Hard- 
 wick correspondents, except Sorbiere and the Dutch pub- 
 lisher Blaeu (see p. 196), are of no account. 
 
237 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Aeris, Dialogus Physicus cle Na- 
 
 tura, 181. 
 Algebra, 105. 
 Archimedes, 41. 
 Aristotle, 9, 14, 17, 41, 78, 80. 
 Arithmetic, 105. 
 'Arithmetica Infmitorum,' 175, 
 
 177. 
 Arlington (Lord), 190, 196, 198 n. 
 Arminius, 165. 
 Associationism, 130, 230. 
 Atheism and Profaneness, Bill 
 
 against, 193. 
 Atomists, 42, 120. 
 Aubrey, 2 n., and often quoted. 
 Austin, 233. 
 Ayton (R.), 22. 
 
 Bacon, 1, 17, 46, 91, 157, 199 n. 
 Bathurst (R.), 2 n. 
 Bayle, 226. 
 Behemoth, 198. 
 Berigardus, 36 n. 
 Berkeley, 128, 230. 
 Biblical criticism, 156. 
 Blackbourne (R.), 2 n. 
 Blaeu (P.), 196, 236 n. 
 Blount (C), 213 n. 
 Body, 45, 79, 90. 
 Body, Concerning, 174. 
 Boyle, 180, 206 n. 
 Bramhall, 133, 163, 212. 
 
 Bramhall, Answer to, 166, 197, 
 
 212. 
 Bruno, 14. 
 Butler, 214, 220. 
 
 Cambridge Platonists, The, 215. 
 Cambridge, University of, 199. 
 Campbell (J.), 233 n. 
 Oartesii Meditationes, Objectiones 
 
 ad, 54. 
 Casaubon, 16. 
 Cavalieri, 60, 75. 
 Cavendish, see Devonshire. 
 Charles I., 23, 48. 
 Charles II., 63, 188. 
 Circle-squaring, 60, 110, 171 ff., 
 
 185 n. 
 Cive, Be, 45, 50, 56, 58, 61, 62 n., 
 
 152, 171, 227 n. 
 Civil Philosophy, 44, 79, 93. 
 Clarendon, 49, 68, 72, 161 n., 
 
 190, 216. 
 Clarke, 214, 218. 
 Cluverius, 199. 
 Cocquius (G.), 224. 
 Coke, 199. 
 Collins, 208. 
 Common Laws, A Dialogue of 
 
 the, 198. 
 Computation, 82, 105. 
 Comte, 45. 
 Contract, Social, 146. 
 
238 
 
 Index. 
 
 Copernicus, 14, 118, 171. . 
 Corpore, De, 45, 47, 75, 160, 171. 
 Corpore Politico, De, 51, 67, 
 
 170, 227 n. 
 Cosina (Bp.), 64, 193. 
 Cowley, 2 n., 223 n. 
 'Creed, The Hobbist's,' 212. 
 Cromwell, 71, 161, 177. 
 Crooke (W.), 198 n. 
 Cudworth, 209, 214, 215. 
 Cumberland, 214, 219. 
 
 Davenant's Preface to Gondibert, 
 
 Answer to, 68 n. 
 Decameron Physiologicum, 185. 
 Deistic movement, 21, 208. 
 Dell, 169. 
 Democritus, 42. 
 Descartes, 9, 13, 16, 28, 37, 40, 
 
 53, 58, 64 n., 76. 
 Devonshire family, 11, 26, 27, 
 
 49, 60, 74, 195, 202. 
 Dialog i, Sex, 179. 
 Dialogus Physicus de Natura 
 
 Aeris, 181. 
 Diderot, 227. 
 Disraeli (I.), 73. 
 Dowel (J.), 161 n. 
 * Due Correction for Mr Hobbes, 
 
 &c.,' 176. 
 Duns Scotus, 9 n. 
 'Dying Legacy of T. H., The,' 
 
 213 n. 
 
 Eachard, 212. 
 
 Edwards (J.), 134. 
 
 Elements of Law, Natural and 
 
 Politique, 51, 235 n. 
 ' Elenchus Geometric Hobbi- 
 
 ame,' 172. 
 Endeavour, 109, 111. 
 Epicurus, 42, 64 n. 
 Euclid, 31, 35, 106. 
 
 Falkland (Lord), 29, 49, 60. 
 Fell (J.), 200. 
 Filmer, 162, 209. 
 
 First Philosophy, 44, 76, 92, 95. 
 Fischer (K.), 20. 
 
 Galen, 123. 
 
 Galileo, 13, 21 n., 28, 35, 36, 40, 
 42, 80, 112. 
 
 Gassendi, 58, 64, 171. 
 
 Gcometrarum, De Principiis et 
 Ratiocinatione, 183. 
 
 Geometry, 31, 76, 93, 104, 108. 
 
 Glanvill, 194 n., 217. 
 
 Godolphin (8.), 60, 68. 
 
 Government and Society, Philoso- 
 phical Rudiments concerning, 
 67. 
 
 Grote (G.), 233. 
 
 Grotius, 30, 143, 162, 214. 
 
 Gundling, 226. 
 
 Habit, 112. 
 
 Hamilton (Sir W.), 36 n. 
 
 Hampden, 48. 
 
 " Hard wick, Bess of," 11. 
 
 Hardwick MSS., 3 n., 27 n., 
 29 n., 51, 188 n., 197, 236 n. 
 
 Harrington, 223 n. 
 
 Hartley, 230. 
 
 Harvey, 21 n., 123, 171, 187 n. 
 
 Hazlitt, 229 n. 
 
 Herbert of Cherbury, 21. 
 
 Heresy, <kc. , An Historical Nar- 
 ration concerning, 196. 
 
 Heylin (P.), 30. 
 
 Historia Ecclesiastica, 199. 
 
 Hobbes, Considerations upon the 
 Reputation, &c, of, 51, 180, 
 192. 
 
 ' Hobbiani Puncti Dispunctio,' 
 178. 
 
 'Hobbist's Creed, The,' 212. 
 
 ' Hobbius Heautontimorumenos, 
 179, 182, 185 n. 
 
 Holbach, D', 227. 
 
 Homer, Translation of, 186, 201. 
 
 Homine, De, 45, 75, 122, 178. 
 
 Hooke, 206 n. 
 
 Hooker, 147, 215. 
 
Index. 
 
 239 
 
 Human Nature, 51, 67, 122, 227, 
 
 233 n. 
 Hume, 209, 221, 226, 230. 
 Humphrey (L.), 6. 
 Hussee (J.), 6. 
 Hutcheson, 220 n. 
 Hyde (E.), see Clarendon. 
 
 Induction, 21 n., 91. 
 
 Jansenius, 164. 
 Jonson (Ben), 22. 
 
 Kant, 226. 
 
 Kennet, 75 n., 195, 203 n., 205 n., 
 
 236 n. 
 Kepler, 13, 21 n., 118, 171. 
 Kirchmann (J. H. v. ), 226 n. 
 Knowledge, theory of, 81. 
 Kortholt, 224. 
 
 Laney (Bp.), 202 n. 
 
 'Last Sayings of T. H, The,' 
 
 213 n. 
 Latimer (R. ), 4. 
 Laud, 5, 29, 48. 
 
 Law, Natural and Politique, Ele- 
 ments of, 51, 235 n. 
 Laws, Dialogue of the Common, 
 
 198. 
 Leibniz, 225. 
 Lessons to the Professors of the 
 
 Mathematics, <L'C, Six, 175. 
 Leviathan, 61, 67, 69. 153, 159. 
 
 160, 194, 198, 209,235. 
 Liberty and Necessity, Of, 62,163. 
 Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 
 
 Questions concerning, 166. 
 1 Life ' (by Aubrey), 2 n. 
 Locke, 1, 46, 77, 126, 147, 157, 
 
 228. 
 Logic, 44, 76, 81. 
 Longomontanus, 59. 
 Lux Mathematica, &c, 184. 
 
 Magnitude and Motion, 98, 103. 
 Maistre, Be, 227. 
 
 Mallet (P.), 234 n. 
 
 Man, 122. 
 
 Manwaring (R.), 24. 
 
 Maries of the Absurd Geometry, 
 
 &c., of John Wallis, 177. 
 Mathematicce Hodiernce,Examin- 
 
 atio et Emendatio, 31 n., 179. 
 Mathematics, 32, 104. 
 Mayne (Jasper), 195 n. 
 Mechanical Philosophy, The, 41. 
 Mersenne, 37, 53, 59, 63, 65, 171. 
 Mersenni BaUisticam, Pnefatio 
 
 in, 59. 
 Mill (Jas.), 230, 233. 
 Milton, 162, 187 n. 
 Molesworth, 3 n., 233. 
 Montaigne, 15. 
 Moral Philosophy, 44, 93. 
 More (H.), 209, 216. 
 Motion, doctrine of, 33, 93, 110. 
 
 Naigeon, 227. 
 
 Natural Philosophy, 44, 79. 
 Nature, 43, 45, 79, 113. 
 New Philosophy, The, 41. 
 Newcastle (Earl, &c), 51, 61, 
 
 64 n., 163, 202 n. 
 Newton, 77, 80, 119. 
 
 Opticus, Tractatus, 59. 
 Optiques, A Minute or First 
 
 Draught of the, 59 n. 
 Osiander (J. A.), 224. 
 Oxford, University of, 4, 32, 168, 
 
 200. 
 
 Papacy, 5, 154, 158, 191. 
 Parker (S.), 224. 
 Patin (Guy), 73 n. 
 Pecci, De Mirabilibus, 26 n. 
 Pell (J.), 59. 
 Pepys, 196 n. 
 Peter the Lombard, 9 n. 
 Platner (E.), 226 n. 
 Plato, 14, 17. 
 
 Philosophical Problems, Seven, 
 182 n., 193. 
 
240 
 
 Philosophical Rudiments con- 
 cerning Government, &c, 67. 
 
 Philosophy, 77. 
 
 Physics, 93, 114, 124. 
 
 Priestley, 134. 
 
 Principia et ProblemakL aliquot 
 Geometrica, 185. 
 
 Problemata Physica, 182 n., 192. 
 
 Psychology, 76, 124, 230. 
 
 Puffendorf, 224. 
 
 Puritanism, 5, 190. 
 
 Quadratura Circuli, &c, 183. 
 Questions concerning Liberty, Ne- 
 cessity and Chance, 166. 
 
 Eavaillac, 12. 
 
 Eeasoning and Method, 81, 90. 
 Religion, 137, 154. 
 Revival of Letters, The, 14, 42. 
 Revolution, The, 46, 48, 161. 
 Rhetoric, The Whole Art of, 29 n. 
 Richelieu, 28. 
 Roberval, 60. 
 
 Rosetum Geometricum, 184. 
 Ross (A.), 162. 
 Rousseau, 227. 
 
 Royal Society, 177, 180 n., 203. 
 Royal Society, Three Papers pre- 
 sented to the, 184. 
 Rymer (T.), 2 n., 199 n. 
 
 Salmasius, 187 n. 
 Savile (H.), 32. 
 Scaliger, 16. 
 Scargil (D.), 199. 
 Scholasticism, 9, 14, 142. 
 Selden, 30, 187 n. 
 Shaftesbury, 208, 214, 220. 
 Sharrock (R.), 224. 
 Smith (A.), 214. * 
 Society, 43, 45, 138. 
 Sorbiere, 62, 197 n., 206 n., 227 
 n., 236 n. 
 
 R-A.. 
 
 Index. 
 
 on- Speech, 83, 131. 
 '. Spinoza, 225. 
 
 Spirit, 99, 122, 211." 
 | Stubbe (H.), 177 n. 
 
 Suarez, 9 n. 
 
 Swift, 213. 
 
 Tenison (T.), 212. 
 
 Thomas Aquinas, 9 n. 
 
 Thucydides, Translation of, 17, 22. 
 
 Tindal, 208. 
 
 Tonnies (F.), 35 n., 198 n., 234 n. 
 
 Torricelli, 116. 
 
 Tractatus Opticus, 59. 
 
 Tripos, 235 n. 
 
 Tulloch (J.), 217 n. 
 
 Universities, 5, 167. 
 
 Verdus, Du, 62 n., 236 n. 
 
 Vieta, 109. 
 
 Vindex (Ward), 172. 
 
 ' Vindicise Academiarum,' 169. 
 
 Vita, 2 n. 
 
 Vita carmine expressa, 2 n., 
 
 201, 236 n. 
 1 Vita) Auctarium Hobbianse,' 
 
 2n. 
 Voltaire, 226. 
 
 Waller (E.), 64 n., 67 n. 
 Wallis, 109, 162, 168, 209. 
 Warburton, 208, 229 n. 
 Ward (Seth), 162, 168, 209. 
 Warner, 170. 
 Webster (J.), 169. 
 White (T.), 194 n. 
 Wilkins (J.), 168. 
 William of Ockham, 157. 
 Williamson (Under-Sec), 196. 
 Wolsey, 32. 
 Wood (Anth.), 4, 200. 
 
 Zart (G.), 226 n. 
 
 '> >E %F EI trTF> VILLI 
 
 DIVERSITY, 
 
 / 
 
 KWOOD AND SONS. 
 
,p \i 
 
 
 .5* 
 
 

1 
 
 14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 JflN26'66-l? M 
 
 APR 3 - 1966 3 2 
 
 &WH 
 
 .'^JuL 
 
 '6^x 
 
 m 
 
 g-.'sPB 2 8 19668^ 
 
 M17-66 9R C0 
 
 JUL 5-1966^ 9 
 
 M 5 66 9 ({CO 
 
 HLCUL APR 11 '78 
 
 OEC lb 1993 
 
 RfigP * T 
 
 APR 19 Mb * 
 
 library use only 
 
 JUN V 1995 
 
 URCULATION DEPT. 
 
 iECMOFFITT JUN 21'95 
 
 #* 
 
 <;> 
 
 3* 
 
 LD 21A-60m-10,'65 
 (F7763sl0)476B 
 
 General Lib 
 University of C 
 Berkeley 
 
U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 <ZDMblbEfl7b 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY