No More Learning

1v, pp. 436–7; vol. VII, p. 117.


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284 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
two things—his introduction to the study of geometry, and his first
effort towards a philosophy. As regards the former, there is no
reason for doubting Aubrey's story, which throws light both on his
early education and on the controversies of his later years.
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 47 prop. lib. 1. So he reads the proposition, ‘By G
says he, 'this is impossible! ' So he reads the demonstration of it, which
referred him back to another, which also he read, et sic deinceps, that at last
he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with
geometry.
About this time also, or soon afterwards, his philosophical views
began to take shape. Among his manuscripts, there is a Short
Tract on First Principles', which has been conjectured to belong
to the year 1630 and cannot have been much later. It shows the
author so much impressed by his reading of Euclid as to adopt the
geometrical form (soon afterwards used by Descartes) for the
expression of his argument. It shows, further, that he had already
fixed on the conception of motion as fundamental for the explana-
tion of things, but, also, that he had not yet relinquished the
scholastic doctrine of species in explaining action and perception.
When Hobbes made his third visit to the continent, which
lasted from 1634 to 1637 and on which he was accompanied by the
young earl of Devonshire, he is found taking his place among
philosophers. At Paris, he was an intimate of Mersenne, who
was the centre of a scientific circle that included Descartes and
Gassendi; and, at Florence, he held discourse with Galileo. There
is an earlier record, in January 1633, of Hobbes searching the
shops in London for a copy of Galileo's Dialogue, and searching
vainly, as the small supply had been sold out. And now he seems
to have arrived at the view that not only is motion the fundamental
conception for explaining the physical world, but that man and
society also can be explained on the same mechanical theory.
After his return to England, he wrote, with a view to publication,
a sketch of his new theory, to which he gave the title Elements of
Law natural and politic. The physical doctrine of which he had
taken firm hold lies at the basis of this work, but it deals in detail
only with the mind of man and the principles of social order. The
introduction to his Thucydides had already shown his interest in
the latter subject, and the side of politics to which he leaned
himself, by the emphasis he laid on the historian's preference for
1 Printed as an appendix to Hobbes's Elements of Law, edited by Tönnies, F. , 1889.


## p. 285 (#301) ############################################

Hobbes in France
285
:
the monarchical form of government. In his dedication of The
Elements (dated 9 May 1640), Hobbes says that his object is to
reduce the doctrine of justice and policy in general to the rules
and infallibility of reason' after the fashion of mathematics. This
volume is the little treatise in English' to which he afterwards
referred as written in the days of the Short parliament.
Of this treatise, though not printed, many gentlemen had copies, which
occasioned much talk of the anthor: and had not his majesty dissolved the
parliament, it had brought him into danger of his life.
The treatise was never published by Hobbes, nor did it appear
as a connected whole until 1889, although, in 1650, probably with
his consent, its first thirteen chapters were issued with the title
Human Nature, and the remainder of the volume as a separate
work De Corpore Politico. In November 1640, when the Long
parliament began to show its activity, Hobbes fled to France,
where he remained for the next eleven years.
These years were fruitful in many ways. From the beginning,
he was in constant intercourse with Mersenne and the brilliant
group of men of science who frequented his monastery. Soon, too,
he was followed to Paris by other English emigrants of the royalist
party, among whom was the marquis of Newcastle, a member of the
Cavendish family, to whom the unpublished Elements of Law had
been dedicated. By his influence, Hobbes was appointed to teach
mathematics to Charles, prince of Wales, who arrived in Paris in
1646. His position in the exiled court was ultimately rendered
impossible by the suspicions of its clerical members; but Charles's
friendship was of importance to him in later years, after the
restoration of the monarchy. It was Newcastle's desire to hear
both sides of a question that led, during his residence in France, to
discussion, and, afterwards, to a somewhat acrimonious controversy
on the problem of free-will, with John Bramhall, bishop of Derry. Of
greater interest is another literary correspondence which followed
close upon his arrival in Paris. Mersenne was then collecting the
opinions of scholars on the forthcoming treatise by Descartes,
Meditationes de prima philosophia, and, in January 1641, Hobbes's
objections were ready and forwarded to his great contemporary in
Holland. These, with the replies of Descartes, afterwards appeared
as the third set of Objectiones when the treatise was published.
Further communications followed on the Dioptrique which had
appeared along with the famous Discours de la méthode in 1637.
Descartes did not discover the identity of his two critics; but
he did not approve of either; and, indeed, as regards the subject-


## p. 286 (#302) ############################################

286 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
matter of Meditationes, the thinking of the two philosophers
moved in such different worlds that mutual understanding was
almost impossible. To Descartes, mind was the primal certainty
and independent of material reality. Hobbes, on the other hand,
had already fixed on motion as the fundamental fact, and his
originality consisted in his attempt to use it for the explanation
not of nature only but, also, of mind and society. Two or three
years after his correspondence with Descartes, Hobbes contributed
a summary of his views on physics and a Tractatus Opticus to
works published by Mersenne.
At latest, by the beginning of his residence in Paris in 1640,
Hobbes had matured the plan for his own philosophical work. It was
to consist of three treatises, dealing, respectively, with matter or
body, with human nature and with society. It was his intention, he
says, to have dealt with these subjects in this order, but his country
‘was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion,
and the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an
approaching war,' and this cause, as he said, “ripened and plucked
from me this third part of the system-the book De Cive, pub-
lished at Paris in 1642. Hobbes's first political publication was
thus directly occasioned by the troubles of the time. Only
a small edition seems to have been printed. Gassendi spoke of
the difficulty of procuring a copy, and expressed his satisfaction
when the author allowed a new and enlarged edition to be printed
at the Elzevir press in Amsterdam in 1647. In this edition, the
description of the book as the third part of a philosophical system
was removed, at the publisher's request, from the title-page, and
a new preface was added in which the author explained his
plan. The book was a tract for the times as well as a philoso-
phical treatise; but it was not till four years later, when stable
government seemed to have been re-established by the common-
wealth, that he had it published in London, in an English version
from his own hand, as Philosophical Rudiments concerning Govern-
ment and Society. The same year, 1651, saw the publication, also
in London, of his greatest work, Leviathan, and his own return to
England, which now promised a safer shelter to the philosopher
than France, where he feared the clergy and was no longer in
favour with the remnant of the exiled English court. In the
case of De Cive and, still more, in that of Leviathan, the political
situation led to greater fulness of detail and, also, to a more fervid
manner of utterance than had been shown in his earliest treatise.
In particular, the danger arising from the claim to independence or


## p. 287 (#303) ############################################

Hobbes's Later Years
287
<
to direction on the part of the ecclesiastical power gave occasion for
a much more comprehensive treatment of the subject of religion.
As early as 1641, he had expressed the opinion that the dispute
between the spiritual and civil power has of late more than any
other thing in the world, been the cause of civil wars in all places
of Christendom,' and had urged that all church government
depend on the state and authority of the kingdom, without which
there can be no unity in the church. This was not palatable
doctrine to any of the sects, and there was much more to cause
them alarm in the theological discussions contained in his
Leviathan. But, after the restoration, in a dedication to the
king, he was able to claim that all had been propounded with
submission to those that have the power ecclesiastical, holding
that he had not given any ground of offence 'unless it be for
making the authority of the church wholly upon the regal power;
which I hope your majesty will think is neither atheism nor
heresy'
The last twenty-eight years of Hobbes's long life were spent in
England; and there he soon returned to the house of his old pupil
the earl of Devonshire, who had preceded him in submitting to the
commonwealth, and, like him, welcomed the king on his return.
For a year or two after his home-coming, Hobbes resided in
London, busied with the completion of his philosophical system,
the long-delayed first part of which, De Corpore, appeared in
1655, and the second part, De Homine, in 1656. The latter work
contains little or nothing of importance that Hobbes had not said
already; but the former deals with the logical, mathematical and
physical principles which were to serve as foundation for the
imposing structure he had built. A new world had been revealed
to him, many years ago, when, at the age of forty, he had first
chanced upon Euclid's Elements. He had designed that his own
philosophy should imitate the certainty of mathematics. In the
dedication to his first treatise, he had called mathematics the one
branch of learning that is 'free from controversies and dispute. '
Yet, strangely enough, when we remember how provocative of
controversy were all his leading views, it was disputes about the
most certain of all subjects that filled and harassed the last five
and twenty years of his life.
The author of Leviathan could hardly have expected to escape
controversy, and he did not do anything to avoid it. The views of
human nature set forth in the book became, for generations, the
favourite battle-ground for contending philosophies; its political
theory was not fitted to please either party; and on its religious


## p. 288 (#304) ############################################

288 Hobbes ana Contemporary Philosophy
doctrine, the clergy would have something to say when they
came to their own again. His dispute with Bramhall on the
question of free-will began in his Paris days and has been already
recorded. But it was not allowed to be forgotten. In 1654, the
tract Of Liberty and Necessity, which he had written eight years
before in reply to the bishop's arguments, was published by some
person unnamed, into whose hands it had fallen. Not suspecting
Hobbes's innocence in the matter of the publication, Bramhall
replied with some heat on the personal question and much fulness
on the matter in hand in the following year; and this led to
Hobbes's elaborate defence in The Questions concerning Liberty,
Necessity, and Chance, published in 1656. By this time, however,
the storm of controversy had already broken out in another
quarter. Hobbes remembered Oxford as it was in his student days,
and made little allowance for altered manners and the reform of
studies. In the fourth part of Leviathan, which is devoted to "the
kingdom of darkness,' he had taken occasion to pronounce judg-
ment on the universities: they are a bulwark of papal power;
their philosophy is but ‘Aristotelity’; for them, 'till very late
times,' geometry was but an 'art diabolical. ' But Oxford had
undergone a change since the days when Hobbes could afford to
despise its learning. In particular, the Savilian professorships,
founded in the interval, were held by two men of eminence, Seth
Ward and John Wallis—the latter, a mathematician of the first
rank. They were acknowledged masters of a science in which
Hobbes seems to have been only a brilliant and capricious
amateur—the greatest of circle-squarers. The dispute began,
—
mildly enough, in a vindication of the university by Ward against
another critic, Hobbes being dealt with in an appendix. This was
in 1654; but, next year, Hobbes's own mathematical discoveries
were published with much parade in De Corpore. The opportunity
was then seized by Wallis, who, in a few months, was ready with a
a
reply in which the pretended demonstrations were torn to shreds.
From this time onwards, the war of pamphlets waged unremittingly.
Hobbes maintained his opinions with a tenacity which would have
been wholly admirable if they had been better grounded ; and he
was bold enough to carry the war into the enemy's camp, though
with unfortunate results, and to engage other adversaries, such as
Robert Boyle, but with no better success. It is unnecessary to
follow the controversy in detail, but, incidentally, it produced
1 A lucid and admirable sketch of its successive stages is given in Croom Robert-
son's monograph on Hobbes (1886). It should be added, however, that Tönnies
(Hobbes, 1896, p. 55) is of opinion that Robertson has dealt too hardly with Hobbes in
his account of the controversy.


## p. 289 (#305) ############################################

Hobbes's Later Works
289
one document of great personal interest-a defence of his own
reputation in the form of a letter to Wallis, written in 1662.
In addition to these and connected controversies, more serious
trouble threatened the philosopher's later years. After the
restoration, he was well received by the king, who took pleasure
in his conversation. But he had an enemy in the clergy; his
opinions were notorious; it was easy to connect them with the
moral licence shown in high places; and, after the great Plague
and the great Fire, at a time when recent disaster made men's
consciences sensitive and their desires welcome a scape-goat,
Hobbes was in no little danger. A bill aimed at blasphemous
literature actually passed the Commons in January 1667, and
Leviathan was one of two books mentioned in it. The bill never
got through both houses; but Hobbes was seriously frightened;
he is said to have become more regular at church and communion;
he studied the law of heresy, also, and wrote a short treatise on
the subject, proving that there was no court by which he could be
judged. But he was not permitted to excite the public conscience
by further publications on matters of religion. A Latin translation
of Leviathan (containing a new appendix bringing its theology
into line with the Nicene creed) was issued at Amsterdam in 1668.
Other works, however, dating from the same year, were kept back
-the tract on Heresy, the answer to Bramhall's attack on
Leviathan and Behemoth : the History of the Causes of the Civil
Wars of England. About the same time was written his Dialogue
between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of
England. His Historia Ecclesiastica, in elegiac verse, dates from
about his eightieth year. When he was eighty-four, he wrote his
autobiography in Latin verse. Neither age nor controversy
seemed to tire him. Although controversy had the last word—he
published Decameron Physiologicum at the age of ninety-he
turned in old age for solace and employment to the literature which
had been his first inspiration. In 1673, he published a translation
in rimed quatrains of four books of the Odyssey; and he had com-
pleted both Iliad and Odyssey when, in 1675, he left London for the
last time. Thereafter, he lived with the Cavendish family at one of
their seats in Derbyshire. He died at Hardwick on 4 December 1679.
Hobbes is one of a succession of English writers who are as
remarkable for their style as for the originality of their thought.
Bacon, Hobbes, Berkeley and Hume—to mention only the greatest
names-must be counted amongst the masters of language, wher-
ever language is looked upon as conveying a meaning. And, in
19
E. L. VII.
CH. XII.


## p. 290 (#306) ############################################

290 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
ance.
each case, the style has an individual quality which suits the
thought and the time. Bacon's displays a wealth of imagery and
a
allusion significant of the new worlds which man's mind was to
enter into and to conquer; it has the glamour not of enchantment
but of discovery; greater precision and restraint of imagery would
not have befitted the pioneer of so vast an adventure. The musical
eloquence of Berkeley is the utterance of a soul rapt in one
clear vision and able to read the language of God in the form
and events of the world. Hume writes with the unimpassioned
lucidity of the observer, intent on technical perfection in the way
of conveying his meaning, but with no illusions as to its import-
Hobbes differs from all three, and, in his own way, is
supreme. There is no excess of imagery or allusion, though both
are at hand when wanted. There is epigram; but epigram is not
multiplied for its own sake. There is satire; but it is always kept
in restraint. His work is never embellished with ornament: every
ornament is structural and belongs to the building. There is
never a word too many, and the right word is always chosen. His
materials are of the simplest; and they have been formed into
a living whole, guided by a great thought and fired by the passion
for a great cause.
Aubrey tells us something of his method of work:
He had read much, if one considers his long life, but his contemplation
was much more than his reading. He was wont to say, that if he had read as
much as other men, he should have continued still as ignorant as other men.
The manner of writing (Leviathan) was thus. He walked much and con-
templated, 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 otherwise might have lost it.
This careful forethought for idea and phrase was always controlled
by the dominant purpose, which was to convince by demonstration.
How the method worked may be seen from a characteristic
passage. Speaking of undesigned trains of thought, he says
And yet in this wild ranging of the mind, a man may oft-times perceive
the way of it, and the dependance of one thought upon another. For in a
discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more impertinent, than to
ask (as one did) what was the value of a Roman penny? Yet the coherence
to me was manifest enough. For the thought of the war introduced the
thought of the delivering up the king to his enemies; the thought of that
brought in the thought of the delivering up of Christ; and that again the
thought of the 30 pence, which was the price of that treason; and thence
easily followed that malicious question; and all this in a moment of time; for
thought is quick.
Here, the illustration strikes home; the sarcasm hits the party he
hated most; and the last four words clinch the whole and bring


## p. 291 (#307) ############################################

Elements of Law and De Cive
291
back the discourse to the matter in hand. Attention is arrested,
not diverted, so that the single paragraph in which these sentences
occur may be taken as having started the line of thought which
issued in the theory of association, for a long time dominant in
English psychology.
To understand the underlying ideas of Hobbes's philosophy,
portions of his Latin work De Corpore must be kept in view ; but
his lasting fame as a writer rests upon three books : Elements of
Law, Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and
Society (the English version of De Cive) and Leviathan. The first of
these books is a sketch, in clear outline and drawn with unfaltering
hand, of the bold and original theory which he afterwards worked
out and applied, but never altered in substance. It contains less
illustration and less epigram than the later works, but it yields to
neither of them in lucidity or in confidence. The circumstances
which led to its issue in two fragments, arbitrarily sundered from
one another, have hindered the general recognition of its greatness.
Nor did it appear at all till De Cive was well known and Leviathan
ready for press. The latter works are less severe in style: they
have a glow from the 'bright live coal' which (we are told) seemed
to shine from Hobbes's eye when he spoke. De Cive is restricted
to the political theory; but his whole view of human life and the
social order is comprehended in Leviathan.
The title-page of this book depicts its purpose. The upper
half of the page has, in the foreground, a walled town with tall
church spires; behind, the country rises towards a hill out of
which emerges the figure of a man from the waist upwards ; a
crown is on his head; his right hand wields a sword, his left grasps
a crosier; his coat of mail consists of a multitude of human figures,
with their faces turned to him, as in supplication. On the lower
half of the page, on either side the title, are represented a castle
and a church, a coronet and a mitre, a cannon and lightning,
implements of war and weapons of argument, a battle-field and
a dispute in the schools. Over all runs the legend Non est
potestas super terram quae comparetur ei. This is the design of
that great Leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that
mortal God,' whose generation and power Hobbes sets out to
describe.
The figure of the leviathan dominates the whole book, and
Hobbes argues over and over again that there is no alternative
between absolute rule and social anarchy. Its lurid picture of
the state of nature, contrasted with the peace and order instituted
1942


## p. 292 (#308) ############################################

292 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
by sovereign power, undoubtedly reflects the troubles and emotions
of the time; but it is no mere seventeenth century version of In
darkest England and the way out. Far less is Hobbes's whole
philosophy to be put down to the fear of civil tumult and the
desire to think out a theory of government adequate to its
restraint. Leviathan is a work of great and enduring importance
just because it is not a mere political pamphlet. It owes life and
colour to the time at which it was written; but another force also
contributed to its making—a conception of larger scope, which
gives it the unity of a philosophical masterpiece.
This underlying conception and all the author's most striking
ideas are to be found in the treatise completed in 1640—when politi-
cal troubles were obviously at hand, but, as yet, no personal danger
threatened. In logic and lucidity, this earlier treatise is not surpassed
by the later work, though it fails to give the same constant impression
of reality. It is a text-book such as philosophers have sometimes
written for statesmen, to instruct them in the principles of their craft;
and it did not entirely escape the usual fate of such efforts. Before
Hobbes set about writing it, the fundamental idea of a philosophy had
taken root in his mind; and this idea he owed to the new mechanical
theory, and, in particular, to Galileo's teaching. Motion, he came to
think, was the one reality; all other things are but ‘fancies, the off-
spring of our brains. He did not now, or, indeed, afterwards, work
out a mechanical theory of the physical universe, as Descartes, for
instance, was doing. But he had a bolder—if an impossible-project.
Descartes restricted mechanism to the extended world, maintained
the independence of mental existence and held the latter to be of
all things most certain. Hobbes did not thus limit the applications
of his new idea. He thought he could pass from external motions
to the internal motions of men,' and, thence, to sovereignty and
justice. This is his own account, and it agrees with what we know
otherwise. Neither the mechanical theory, nor the psychology, is
an afterthought introduced to bolster up a foregone political con-
clusion. They have their roots too deep in Hobbes's mind. It is
true, the desired transitions could not logically be made, and
Hobbes found out the difficulty later. But, when civil disturbance
forced his hand and led to the elaboration of his ethical and
political doctrine, this doctrine was found to be in harmony with
the idea from which his view of the universe started. The external
and mechanical character of the political theory is an indication of
its unreality, but it bears witness, also, to the unity of conception
that dominates the whole philosophy.
6


## p. 293 (#309) ############################################

Leviathan
293
All things, according to Hobbes, ‘have but one universal cause,
which is motion. But, for him, as for other writers of his day,
'
'motion' is not a merely abstract conception; it includes move-
ment of masses or of particles. From geometry, which treats of
abstract motion, he thus passes, without a break, to physics, and,
thence, to moral philosophy; for the 'motions of the mind' have
physical causes. And, by this synthetical method, proceeding from
principles, we 'come to the causes and necessity of constituting
commonwealths. This method he always kept in view, and it gives
unity to his theory. But he never carried out the impossible task
of applying it in detail. He admits that there is another and an
easier way:
For the causes of the motions of the mind are known, not only by ratio-
cination, but also by the experience of every man that takes the pains to
observe those motions within himself.
If he will but examine his own mind,' he will find
that the appetites of men and the passions of their minds are such that, unless
they be restrained by some power, they will always be making war upon one
another.
By adopting this method, Hobbes thinks he can appeal to each
man's experience to confirm the truth of his doctrine.
Leviathan is divided into four parts, which treat, respectively, of
Man, of a Commonwealth, of a Christian Commonwealth and of the
Kingdom of Darkness. Man comes first, for he is both the matter
and the artificer of the Leviathan; and, at the outset, he is considered
alone, as an individual thing played upon by external bodies; 'for
there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first,
totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. '
Diverse external motions produce diverse motions in us; and, in
reality, there is nothing else; 'but their appearance to us is fancy,'
though this name is commonly restricted to 'decaying sense. ' The
thoughts thus raised succeed one another in an order sometimes
controlled by a 'passionate thought, sometimes not. By
the most noble and profitable invention of speech, names have been given to
thoughts, whereby society and science have been made possible, and also
absurdity: for words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them;
but they are the money of fools.
Reason is but reckoning; addition and subtraction are its pro-
cesses; logic is 'computation. So far, man is regarded as if he
'
were a thinking being only. But he is also active. The internal
motions set up by the action of objects upon the senses become
reactions upon the external world; and these reactions are all of
6


## p. 294 (#310) ############################################

294 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
the nature of tendencies towards that which helps the vital
motion,' that is, ministers to the preservation of the individual, or
tendencies away from things of an opposite nature. Thus, we have
appetite or desire for certain things, and these we are said to love,
and we call them good. In a similar way, we have aversion from
certain other things, which we hate and call evil. Pleasure is
'the appearance or sense of good’; displeasure, “the appearance or
sense of evil. Starting from these definitions, Hobbes proceeds to
describe the whole emotional and active nature of man as a
consistent scheme of selfishness.
The following characteristic
summary comes from Elements of Law :
The comparison of the life of man to a race, though it holdeth not in every
point, yet it holdeth so well for this our purpose, that we may thereby both
see and remember almost all the passions before mentioned. But this race we
must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost;
and in it: To endeavour, is appetite. To be remiss, is sensuality. To consider
them behind, is glory. To consider them before, humility. To lose ground
with looking back, vain glory. To be holden, hatred. To turn back, repen-
tance. To be in breath, hope. To be weary, despair. To endeavour to over-
take the next, emulation. To supplant or overthrow, envy. To resolve to
break through a stop foreseen, courage. To break through a sudden stop,
anger. To break through with ease, magnanimity. To lose ground by little
hindrances, pusillanimity. To fall on the sudden, is disposition to weep. To
see another fall, disposition to laugh. To see one out-gone whom we would
not, is pity. To see one out-go we would not, is indignation. To hold fast by
another, is to love. To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity. To hurt
one's-self for haste, is shame. Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Con-
tinually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to
die.
Out of this contention of selfish units, Hobbes, in some way, has
to derive morality and the social order. Yet, in the state of nature
there are no rules for the race of life--not even the rule of the
strongest, for Hobbes thinks that there is little difference between
men's faculties, and, at any rate, 'the weakest has strength enough
to kill the strongest. ' Thus, for gain, for safety and for reputation
(which is a sign of power), each man desires whatever may preserve
or enrich his own life, and, indeed, by nature, 'every man has a right
to everything, even to one another's body. ' Thus, the natural state
of man is a state of war, in which 'every man is enemy to every
man. ' In this condition, as he points out, there is no place for
industry, or knowledge, or arts, or society, but only "continual fear
and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short. ' Nor, in this state, is there any difference
of right and wrong, mine and thine; ‘force and fraud are in war
the two cardinal virtues. '


## p. 295 (#311) ############################################

Leviathan
295
Hobbes betrays some hesitation in speaking of the historical
reality of this state of universal war. But the point, perhaps, is not
fundamental. What is essential is the view of human nature as so
constituted as to make every man his neighbour's enemy. The
view was not entirely new; he was not the first satirist of the
'golden age. His originality lies in the consistency of his picture
of its anarchy, and in the amazing skill with which he makes the
very misery of this state lead on to social order: the freedom of
anarchy yields at once and for ever to the fetters of power.
The transition is effected by the social contract-an instrument
familiar to medieval philosophers and jurists. So long as the state
of nature endures, life is insecure and wretched. Man cannot
improve this state, but he can get out of it; therefore, the
fundamental law of nature is to seek peace and follow it; and,
from this, emerges the second law, that, for the sake of peace, a
man should be willing to lay down his right to all things, when other
men are, also, willing to do so. From these two are derived all the
laws of nature of the moralists. The laws of nature are immutable
and eternal, says Hobbes, and, in so saying, conforms to the tradi-
tional view—but with one great difference. Hooker, who followed
the older theory, had said that the laws of nature 'bind men abso-
lutely, even as they are men, although they have never any settled
fellowship, never any solemn agreement amongst themselves. But
Hobbes holds that their authority, for any man, is not absolute; it
is strictly conditional on other men being willing to obey them; and
this requires an agreement of wills—a contract. Contracts, again,
require a power to enforce them: 'covenants of mutual trust where
there is a fear of not performance on either part are invalid’; and
the only way to obtain such a common power is for all men to give
up their rights to one man, or one assembly of men, and to acknow-
ledge his acts as their own ‘in those things which concern the
common peace and safety. This man, or assembly, will thus bear
the 'person' of the whole multitude. They have contracted with
one another to be his subjects. But the sovereign himself is under
no contract: he has rights but no duties.
From this, it follows, logically, that sovereignty cannot be limited,
divided, or forfeited. The conduct of the commonwealth in peace
and war, and the rights of subjects against one another, are decided
by the sovereign. He is sole legislator, supreme ruler and supreme
judge. And this holds, whether the sovereignty lies in one man or
in an assembly. Hobbes always maintained the superiority of
monarchy to other forms of government; but he never thought


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296 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
that this superiority was capable of the demonstrative proof that
he claimed for his general theory. There is a story that, before
leaving Paris, Hobbes told Edward Hyde (afterwards earl of
Clarendon) that he was publishing Leviathan because he ‘had
a mind to go home. If he was serious in making the remark
reported by Clarendon, he must have been referring to the ‘Review
and Conclusion, with which the work closes, and in which he speaks
of the time at which submission to a conqueror may lawfully be
made. The book in no way modifies his earlier views on the merits
of monarchy.
A man cannot serve two masters: 'mixed government' is no
government; nor can the spiritual power be independent of the
temporal. The doctrines that every private man is judge of good
and evil actions,' and 'that whatsoever a man does against his
conscience is a sin,' are seditious and repugnant to civil society.
By living in a commonwealth, a man takes the law for his conscience.
These positions may seem to complete the political theory, and few
readers now care to pursue the matter further. But Hobbes's
commonwealth professes to be a Christian commonwealth. He
must show the place which religion occupies in it, and also expose
the errors which have led to nations being overshadowed by the
spiritual power. His theory is Erastianism pushed to its extremest
limits. The inner life-the true home of religion for the religious
man-shrinks to a point; while its external expression in doctrine
and observance is described as part of the order that depends on
the will of the sovereign. Hobbes can cite Scripture for his
purpose; he anticipates some of the results of modern Biblical
criticism; and he has theories about God, the Trinity, the atone-
ment and the last judgment all of them in harmony with his
general principles. His doctrine of God is, in modern phrase,
agnostic. The attributes we ascribe to Him only signify our desire to
honour Him: 'we understand nothing of what he is, but only that
he is. ' In this, Hobbes follows the doctrine of negative attributes,
worked out by some medieval theologians. But his doctrine of
the Trinity is, surely, original. It is
in substance this: that God who is always one and the same was the person
represented by Moses, the person represented by his Son incarnate, and the
person represented by the apostles.
Again, the kingdom of God is a real kingdom, instituted by covenant
a
or contract: which contract was made by Moses, broken by the
election of Saul to the kingship, restored by Christ and proclaimed
by the apostles. But the kingdom of Christ “is not of this world';
6


## p. 297 (#313) ############################################

Leviathan
297
6
it is of the world to come after the general resurrection; "therefore
neither can his ministers (unless they be kings) require obedience
in his name. '
There are two things specially opposed to this theory. On
the one hand, there is the enthusiasm which results from the claim
either to personal illumination by the spirit of God or to private
interpretation of Scripture. On the other hand, there is the claim
to dominion on the part of the organised spiritual power. Both
claims were rampant in Hobbes's day, and he seeks to undermine
them both by criticism. There is no argument, he says, by which
a man can be convinced that God has spoken immediately to some
other man, 'who (being a man) may err, and (which is more) may
lie. ' And, as regards Scripture, it is for sovereigns as the sole
legislators to say which books are canonical, and, therefore, to
them, also, must belong the authority for their interpretation. Of
all the abuses that constitute what Hobbes calls the Kingdom of
Darkness, the greatest arise from the erroneous tenet 'that the
present church now militant on earth is the kingdom of God. '
Through this error, not only the Roman, but, also, the presbyterian,
clergy have been the authors of darkness in religion, and encroached
upon the civil power. The Roman church alone has been thorough
in its work. The pope, in claiming dominion over all Christendom,
has forsaken the true kingdom of God, and he has built up his
power out of the ruins of heathen Rome. For the papacy is no
other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof. '
Taken as a whole, Hobbes's Leviathan has two characteristics
which stamp it with the mark of genius. In the first place, it is a
work of great imaginative power, which shows how the whole
fabric of human life and society is built up out of simple elements.
And, in the second place, it is distinguished by a remarkable logical
consecutiveness, so that there are very few places in which any lack
of coherence can be detected in the thought. It is true that the social
order, as Hobbes presents it, produces an impression of artificiality;
but this is hardly an objection, for it was his deliberate aim to show
the artifice by which it had been constructed and the danger which
lay in any interference with the mechanism. It is true, also, that
the state of nature and the social contract are fictions passed off as
facts; but, even to this objection, an answer might be made from
within the bounds of his theory. It is in his premises, not in his
reasoning, that the error lies. If human nature were as selfish and
anarchical as he represents it, then morality and the political order


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298 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
could arise and flourish only by its restraint, and the alternative
would be, as he describes it, between complete insecurity and
absolute power. But, if his view of man be mistaken, then the
whole fabric of his thought crumbles. When we recognise that
the individual is neither real nor intelligible apart from his social
origin and traditions, and that the social factor influences his
thought and motives, the opposition between self and others
becomes less fundamental, the abrupt alternatives of Hobbism
lose their validity and it is possible to regard morality and the
state as expressing the ideal and sphere of human activity, and
not as simply the chains by which man's unruly passions are kept in
check,
The most powerful criticism of Hobbes's political theory which
appeared in his lifetime was contained in the Oceana of James
Harrington, published in 1656; and the criticism gained in effec-
tiveness from the author's own constructive doctrine. This he set
forth under the thin disguise of a picture of an imaginary common-
wealth. The device was familiar enough at the time. More and
Bacon in England, and Campanella in Italy, had already followed
the ancient model by describing an ideal state, which both More
and Bacon placed in some unknown island of the west. The Utopia
of Sir Thomas More was published in 1516 and Englished by Ralph
Robynson in 1551. The work is a political romance. The spirit of
the renascence was still fresh when the author wrote, and it made
him imagine a new world to which the old order might conform,
and, by conforming, escape the evils of its present condition. There
is not any attempt at a philosophical analysis of the nature of the
state, but only an account of a government and people devoted to the
cause of social welfare. Supreme power is in the hands of a prince,
but he and all other magistrates are elected by the people; and
it is in its account of the life of the people that the interest of the
work lies. They detest war 'as a thing very beastly' and 'count
nothing so much against glory as glory gotten in war. ' Their life
is one of peace and freedom, of justice and equality. There is not
any oppression, industrial or religious; but work and enjoyment
are shared alike by all:
6
In other places, they speak still of the commonwealth, but every man pro
cureth his own private gain. Here where nothing is private, the common
affairs be earnestly looked upon. . . . Nothing is distributed after a niggish
sort, neither there is any poor man or beggar. And though no man have any
thing, yet every man is rich.


## p. 299 (#315) ############################################

New Atlantis and Oceana
299
Bacon's fable New Atlantis (1627) is only a fragment, and has
little of the charm that distinguishes More's romance. Its interest
lies in the description of Solomon's house, which may be taken as
Bacon's ideal of the public endowment of science. We are told
that his lordship thought also in this present fable to have com-
posed a frame of laws, or of the best state or mould of a common-
wealth’; but, unfortunately, he preferred to work at his natural
history, so that we learn nothing about the government of his ideal
community, and little about the social characteristics of the people,
though he descants on the dignity of their manners and on the
magnificence of their costumes.
Harrington's Oceana is a work of a different kind. It has none
of the imaginative quality of Utopia or even of New Atlantis.
Much of it reads like a state paper or the schedules of a budget.
The reference to present affairs is too thinly disguised for any
artistic purpose. 'Oceana' is, of course, England, and the lord
Archon pervades the book as his prototype, Oliver, pervaded the
English government. In all the councils of Oceana, he has always
the last word, and his speeches are long, convincing and wearisome;
he will even digress into sketching the history of the world. The
author was probably ill-advised when he threw his work into the
romantic form. He has a real insight into politics, and can see
some things which were concealed from Hobbes's vision. He never
loses sight of the important fact that government is only one factor
in social life. The form of government will follow the distribution
of property: 'where there is inequality of estates there must be
inequality of power; and where there is inequality of power there
can be no commonwealth. ' The commonwealth should exhibit
equality both in its foundation and in the superstructure. The
former is to be secured by an agrarian law limiting the amount of
property which can be held by one man, so that'no one man or number
of men, within the compass of the few or aristocracy, can come to over-
power the whole people by their possessions in land’; and Harrington
explained the recent change in the government of the country by
the gradual shifting of the balance of property from king and lords
to the commons. Equality in the superstructure will be attained
by means of a rotation or succession to the magistracy secured by
the suffrage of the people given by the ballot. ' In this way will
'
be constituted the three orders: 'the senate debating and proposing,
the people resolving, and the magistracy executing. ' The need for
distinguishing the orders is emphasised in Harrington's Political
Aphorisms, where he says that ‘a popular assembly without a senate


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300 Hobbes ana Contemporary Philosophy
6
cannot be wise,' and that a 'senate without a popular assembly will
not be honest. ' A commonwealth thus rightly instituted, so he thinks,
can never swerve from its principles, and has in it no 'principle of
mortality. Yet the constitution which he proposed comes short of
consistent democracy, and falls in with the spirit of the time. The
function of the one great man is recognised: 'a parliament of
physicians would never have found out the circulation of the
blood, nor would a parliament of poets have written Virgil's
Aeneis. ' Thus, the great man is right to aim at the sovereignty
when the times are out of joint, so that he may set them right and
establish the reign of law; and the book ends with his proclamation
as lord Archon for life. The nobility or gentry have, also, their
place:
there is something first in the making of a commonwealth, then in the govern-
ing of it, and last of all in the leading of its armies, which . . . seems to be
peculiar only to the genius of a gentleman.
Like Milton, Harrington argues for liberty of conscience in
matters of religion—though he would disallow 'popish, Jewish, or
idolatrous' worship. Unlike Milton, however, he does not exclude
the state from the sphere of religion:
a commonwealth is nothing else but the national conscience. And if the con-
viction of a man's private conscience produces his private religion, the
conviction of the national conscience must produce a national religion.
Sir Robert Filmer was also among the critics of Hobbes's
politics, though he owes his fame to the circumstance that he
was himself criticised by Locke. He maintained the doctrine of
absolute power as strongly as Hobbes did, and, like him, thought
that limited monarchy meant anarchy; and he had written on these
topics in king Charles's time. But he would not admit that this
power could rest on contract, and, in his Originall of Government
(1652), attacked Hobbes as well as Milton and Grotius. His own
views are set forth in his Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of
Kings, first published in 1680, twenty-seven years after his death.
Filmer was by no means devoid of critical insight. He saw that
the doctrine that all men are by nature free and equal is not true
historically and, therefore, is no good ground for making popular
consent the origin of government.
Late writers (he says] have taken up too much upon trust from the subtle
schoolmen, who to be sure to thrust down the king below the pope, thought it
the safest course to advance the people above the king.
He thinks that a great family, as to the rights of sovereignty, is a


## p. 301 (#317) ############################################

Critics of Hobbes's Politics
301
little monarchy,' and Hobbes had said the same; but Filmer traces
all kingship to the subjection of children to their parents, which is
both natural and a divine ordinance. There has never been a more
absolute dominion than that which Adam had over the whole world.
And kings are Adam's heirs. In developing this thesis, the author
diverges into a reading of history more fantastic than anything
suggested by Bellarmine or Hobbes, and delivers himself up an
easy prey to Locke's criticism.
Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, is also to be counted among
the critics of Hobbes's political theory. His Brief Survey of
the dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State in
Mr Hobbes's book (1674) is a protest against the paradoxes of
Leviathan, but is lacking in any element of constructive criticism.
John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, and, afterwards, archbishop of
Armagh, was one of the most vigorous and persistent of Hobbes's
critics. His first work was in defence of the royal power (1643).
Afterwards he engaged in a discussion of the question of free-will
with Hobbes when they were both in France. When the con-
troversy was renewed and became public, he wrote A Defence of
the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent and Ex-
trinsicall Necessity (1655). Hobbes replied, and Bramhall followed,
in 1658, with Castigations of Mr Hobbes, to which there was
an appendix called “The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale. '
In this appendix, more famous than the rest of the treatise, he
attacked the whole religious and political theory of Hobbes, and
gave rise to the complaint of the latter that the bishop
hath put together diverse sentences picked out of my Leviathan, which stand
there plainly and firmly proved, and sets them down without their proofs, and
without the order of their dependance one upon another; and calls them
atheism, blasphemy, impiety, subversion of religion, and by other names of
that kind.
Two younger polemical writers may be mentioned along with
Bramhall. Thomas Tenison, a future archbishop of Canterbury,
was one of the young churchmen militant who must needs try
their arms 'in thundering upon Hobbes's steel-cap. ' In The Creed
of Mr Hobbes examined (1670), he selected a number of Hobbes's
confident assertions and set them together so as to show their
mutual inconsistencies. In two dialogues, published in 1672 and
1673, John Eachard, afterwards master of St Catharine's hall,
Cambridge, adopted a similar method, and showed no little wit
and learning in his criticism.
These writers are the most notable of a number of early critics


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302 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
6
of Hobbes who made no independent contributions of their own to
philosophy. And their criticism dealt with results rather than with
principles. A satisfactory criticism of Hobbes has to penetrate to
the principles of the mechanical philosophy which he adopted, and
to the view of human nature which he set forth in conformity with
those principles. Criticism of this more fundamental kind was
attempted by certain of the Cambridge Platonists-, especially by
Cudworth and More; and they were fitted for the task by their
sympathetic study of the spiritual philosophy of Plato in the
ancient world and of Descartes in their own day-two thinkers for
whom Hobbes had no appreciation.
Joseph Glanvill was intimately associated with some members of
the Cambridge school-in particular, with Henry More—but he was
himself educated at Oxford, and he was not a Platonist. He had,
however, many points of sympathy with them. He was attracted
by the new philosophy of Descartes—he calls it the 'best philo-
sophy'—whereas he had nothing but criticism for the Aristotelianism
that still ruled the schools of Oxford. He was in sympathy, also,
with the broad and reasonable tone that distinguished the theology
of the Cambridge Platonists from the prevailing attitude of the
puritan divines. Glanvill's mind was sensitive to all the influences
of the time: the new science, the human culture, the contending
doctrines in philosophy and theology. The result was a distrust of
all dogmatic systems, combined with a certain openness of mind-a
readiness to receive light from any quarter. His first and most
famous book was The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), and a revised
edition of the same was published in 1665 with the title Scepsis
scientifica: or Confest Ignorance the way to Science. This was
dedicated to the Royal Society, of which he had become a fellow
in 1664. In philosophy, Glanvill professed himself a seeker. He
discoursed on the defects in our knowledge even of the things
nearest to us, such as the nature of the soul and the body: he
held that reason is swayed by the emotions, so that most of the
contests of the litigious world pretending for truth are but the
bandyings of one man's affections against another's. His chief
censures were for the dogmas of the Aristotelians, and this in-
volved him in controversy with the learned Mr Thomas White,'
a priest of Douay, collaborator with Sir Kenelm Digby, and a
voluminous author, who answered The Vanity of Dogmatizing in
a Latin treatise entitled Sciri, sive sceptices et scepticorum a jure
a
1 A chapter on the Cambridge Platonists will appear in the next volume of this
work.


## p. 303 (#319) ############################################

Joseph Glanvill
303
2
disputationis exclusio. It is in his reply to this writer that
Glanvill defines his scepticism as a 'way of enquiry, which is not
to continue still poring upon the writings and opinions of philo-
sophers, but to seek truth in the great book of nature. ' The Royal
Society, realising Bacon's prophetic scheme of Solomon's house,
had adopted this method, and had done more for the improvement
of useful knowledge than all the philosophers of the notional way
since Aristotle opened his shop in Greece. ' Glanvill himself ven-
tured upon a 'continuation of the New Atlantis' in his essay
Antifanatick Theologie, and Free Philosophy. His openness of
mind and his conviction that authority and sense are our only
evidence on such matters led to his belief in supernatural appear-
ances. He thought that 'the testimony of all ages' established
their reality. And he distrusted the dogmatism of what he called
'modern Sadducism': to him, it was a 'matter of astonishment
that men, otherwise witty and ingenious, are fallen into the conceit
that there's no such thing as a witch or apparition. '
Other writers of the period showed the influence of the new
ideas. From the scholastic point of view, Samuel Parker, bishop
of Oxford, criticised both Hobbes and Descartes, a treatise on
Cartesianism having been published in England in 1675 by Antoine
Legrand, of Douay, a Franciscan friar and member of the English
mission. In his Court of the Gentiles (1669–77), Theophilus
Gale traced all ancient learning and philosophy to the Hebrew
scriptures. John Pordage wrote a number of works, the mysticism
of which was inspired by Jacob Boehme. The treatise De legibus
naturae, published in 1672, by Richard Cumberland, afterwards
bishop of Peterborough, is much more than a criticism of
Hobbes. It is a restatement of the doctrine of the law of nature
as furnishing the ground of the obligation of all the moral virtues.
The work is heavy in style, and its philosophical analysis lacks
thoroughness; but its insistence on the social nature of man, and
its doctrine of the common good as the supreme law of morality,
anticipate the direction taken by much of the ethical thought of
the following century.


## p. 304 (#320) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
SCHOLARS AND SCHOLARSHIP, 1600—60
THE starting-point of English scholarship and learning in the
seventeenth century is not the humanism of the early renascence.