Born, at Westport, Wilts, 5 April 1588. At school at Westport, 1592–96; thence to Malmesbury, 1596, and afterwards at another school at Westport. To Magdalen Hall, Oxford, 1603; B.A., 5 Feb. 1608. Tutor and secretary to William Cavendish, son of first Earl of Devonshire, 1608–28; travelled abroad with him, 1610. Travelling tutor to son of Sir Gervase Clifton, 1629–31. Tutor to third Earl of Devonshire, 1631–40. Travelled abroad with him, 1634–37. Fled to Paris at meeting of Long Parliament, Nov. 1640. Remained there till 1651, when he retreated to England in consequence of complications caused by publication of “Leviathan.” Resumed post of secretary to Earl of Devonshire, 1663. Pension of £100 from Charles II. at Restoration. Lived in London till 1675; remainder of life spent at country seats of Earl of Devonshire. Died, at Hardwick, Derbyshire, 4 Dec. 1679. Buried in Hault Hucknall Church. Works: “De Mirabilibus Pecci” [1636?]; “Elementorum Philosophiæ sectio tertia do Cive” (under initials: T. H.), 1642; “Tractatus Opticus” (in Mersenne’s “Cogitata Physico-Mathematica”), 1644; “Humane Nature,” 1650; “De Corpore Politico,” 1650; “Epistle to Davenant,” 1651; “Leviathan,” 1651; “Of Liberty and Necessity,” 1654; “Elementorum Philosophiæ sectio prima de Corpore,” 1655; “A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique” (anon.), [1655?]; “Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance,” 1656; “Στιγμαι Ἀγεωμετριας” 1657; “Elementorum Philosophiæ sectio secunda de Homine,” 1658; “Examinatio et Emendatio Mathematicæ Hodiernæ,” 1660; “Dialogus Physicus,” 1661; “Problemata Physica,” 1662; “Mr. Hobbes considered,” 1662; “De Principiis et Ratiocinatione Geometrarum,” 1666; “Quadratura Circuli,” 1669; “Rosetum Geometricum,” 1671; Three Papers presented to the Royal Society attacking Dr. Wallis, 1671; “Lux Mathematica” (under initials: R. R.), 1672; “Principa et Problemata aliquot Geometrica” (under initials: T. H.), 1674; “Decameron Physiologicum,” 1678; “Behemoth” (written, and suppressed, 1668), privately published, 1679; publicly (under initials: T. H.), 1680; “Vita, authore seipso,” 1679. Posthumous: “An Historical Narration concerning Heresie,” 1680; “T. H. Malmesb. Vita” (in “Vitæ Hobbianæ Auctarium”), 1681; “Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law,” 1681; “An Answer to … The Catching of the Leviathan,” 1682; “Hobbes’s Tripos,” 1684; “Historia Ecclesiastica,” 1688. He translated: “Thucydides,” 1629; Homer’s “Iliad and Odyssey,” 1675. Collected Works: “Opera Philosophica,” 1668; “Moral and Political Works,” ed. by J. Campbell, 1750; Complete Works, ed. by Sir W. Molesworth (16 vols.), 1839–45. Life: by G. C. Robertson, 1886.
Personal
In his youth unhealthy; of an ill yellowish complexion: wett in his feet, and trod both his shoes the same way…. From forty, or better, he grew healthier, and then he had a fresh, ruddy, complexion. He was sanguineo-melancholicus; which the physiologers say is the most ingeniose complexion. He would say that “There might be good witts of all complexions; but good-natured, impossible.” Head. In his old age he was very bald (which claymed a veneration); yet within dore, he used to study, and sitt, bare-headed, and sayd he never tooke cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was to keepe-off the flies from pitching on the baldness…. His skin was soft and of that kind which my Lord Chancellor Bacon in his “History of Life and Death” calles a goose-skin, i. e. of a wide texture…. Face not very great; ample forehead; whiskers yellowish-reddish, which naturally turned up—which is a signe of a brisque witt…. He had a good eie, and that of a hazell colour, which was full of life and spirit, even to the last. When he was earnest in discourse, there shone (as it were) a bright live-coale within it. He had two kind of looks:—when he laugh’t, was witty, and in a merry humour, one could scarce see his eies; by and by, when he was serious and positive, he ope’nd his eies round…. He was six foote high, and something better (quaere James [Wheldon]), and went indifferently erect, or rather, considering his great age, very erect.
He fell sick about the middle of October last. His disease was the strangury, and the physitians judged it incurable by reason of his great age and naturall decay. About the 20th of November, my Lord being to remove from Chatsworth to Hardwick, Mr. Hobbes would not be left behind; and therefore with a fether bed laid into the coach, upon which he lay warme clade, he was conveyed safely, and was in appearance as well after that little journey as before it. But seven or eight days after, his whole right side was taken with the dead palsy, and at the same time he was made speechlesse. He lived after this seven days, taking very little nourishment, slept well, and by intervalls endeavoured to speake, but could not. In the whole time of his sicknesse he was free from fever. He seemed therefore to dye rather for want of the fuell of life (which was spent in him) and meer weaknesse and decay, then by the power of his disease, which was thought to be onely an effect of his age and weaknesse. He was born the 5th of Aprill, in the year 1588, and died the 4th of December, 1679. He was put into a wollen shroud and coffin, which was covered with a white sheet, and upon that a black herse cloth, and so carryed upon men’s shoulders, a little mile to church. The company, consisting of the family and neighbours that came to his funerall, and attended him to his grave, were very handsomely entertained with wine, burned and raw, cake, biscuit, etc. He was buried in the parish church of Hault Hucknall, close adjoining to the raile of the monument of the grandmother of the present earle of Devonshire, with the service of the Church of England by the minister of the parish. It is intended to cover his grave with a stone of black marble as soon as it can be got ready, with a plain inscription of his name, the place of his birth, and the time of that and of his death.
I have cursorily looked over Mr. Hobbs his life in Latine which I beleeve will be a very vendible booke both here and beyond sea, for ther is noe lover of learning but will have the curiosity to be particularly informed of the life of soe eminent a person. And truly the reading of it wase very satisfactory to me, for in my apprehension it is very well writ, but I cou’d have wish’d the author had more dilated upon some particulars; and because you intimate a designe to publish it in English I shall hint to you that the author of the life in Latine hath either not taken notice of at all, or too slightingly, some things very remarkeable, relating to the temper of Mr. Hobbs his mind or to the infirmity of his body, as his extraordinary timorousness which he himself in his Latine poem doth very ingeniously confess and attributes it to the influence of his mother’s dread of the Spanish invasion in 88, she being then with child of him. And I have been informed, I think by yourself, that Mr. Hobbs wase for severall yeares before he died soe paralyticall that he was scarce able to write his name, and that in the absence of his amenuensis not being able to write anything he made scrawls on a piece of paper to remind him of the conceptions of his mind he design’d to have committed to writing. But the author of his life in Latine only sa(i)th that about 60 yearse of age he wase taken with a trembling in his hands, the forerunner of the palsy; which in my apprehension deserves to be enlarg’d upon, for it is very prodigious that neither the timorousness of his nature from his infancy, nor the decay of his vital heat in the extremity of old age, accompagnied with the palsy to that violence, should not have chill’d the briske fervour and vigour of his mind, which did wonderfully continue to him to his last.
Mr. Joyner says that Mr. Hobbs used to say, that Mr. Selden understood nothing of mathematicks; which Mr. Selden being informed of, he replyed, that if Mr. Hobbs understood no more mathematicks than he did law, he understood nothing at all of them. And indeed Mr. Selden had such a mean opinion of that Malmsbury philosopher, that he used to say, All comers were welcome to his table, but Tho. Hobbes and one Rossingham.
Hobbs seems not to have been very amiable in his life; he was certainly incapable of true friendship, for the same cowardice, or false principle, which could instigate him to abandon truth, would likewise teach him to sacrifice his friend to his own safety. When young, he was voluptuous, when old, peevish, destitute alike of resolution and honour. However high his powers, his character is mean, he flattered the prevailing follies, he gave up virtue to fashion, and if he can be produced as a miracle of learning, he can never be ranked with those venerable names, who have added virtue to erudition, and honour to genius; who have illuminated the world by their knowledge, and reformed it by example.
His greatest imperfection was a monstrous egotism—the fate of those who concentrate all their observations in their own individual feelings. There are minds which may think too much, by conversing too little with books and men. Hobbes exulted he had read little; he had not more than half-a-dozen books about him; hence he always saw things in his own way, and doubtless this was the cause of his mania for disputation…. His little qualities were the errors of his own selfish philosophy; his great ones were those of nature. He was a votary to his studies: he avoided marriage, to which he was inclined; and refused place and wealth, which he might have enjoyed, for literary leisure. He treated with philosophic pleasantry his real contempt of money. His health and his studies were the sole objects of his thoughts; and notwithstanding that panic which so often disturbed them, he wrote and published beyond his ninetieth year. He closes the metrical history of his life with more dignity than he did his life itself; for his mind seems always to have been greater than his actions.
After the Restoration Charles II treated the philosopher with personal friendship, and gave him a pension. But the publication of the “Behemoth,” an historic dialogue in which Hobbes represented the occurrences of the last ten years from his own point of view, was forbidden by the King. For Hobbes stood in open antagonism to the religious ideas as they had taken form after the Restoration. As formerly the Presbyterian Parliament under Cromwell, so now also the Anglican Parliament threatened him with religious censure. From the two universities, which he had wished fundamentally to reform, he met with bitter hostility. Into the Royal Society, of which he approved, he still could not gain admittance; amongst its members also his paradoxes and violence had made him enemies. The King once remarked, Hobbes’ hand is against every man, and every man’s hand against him. Hobbes found a refuge in the family of Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, to which he had for many years been attached. His books are for the most part dedicated to one or other of its members; he accompanied them to their country houses, for instance to Chatsworth; there in the morning he took long walks over the neighbouring hills, in the afternoon be buried himself in his studies; he was supplied with all that he wanted, tobacco and lights, and then left alone. Hobbes attained the greatest age that nature grants to man; still every year he published something. But even in the Cavendish family he was looked upon as an eccentric character whose opinions no one shared.
The infinite complexity of human life is stretched on the Procrustean bed of simplicity, and truth is thereby sacrificed to system. Beginning from inadequate premises, unable or unwilling to credit human nature with social as well as with self-regarding instincts, he is forced by the very self-consistency of his logical intellect into conclusions that prove to be irreconcilable with the facts of a more universal experience. In these respects Hobbes resembles Bentham, as in his cynical pessimism he resembles La Rochefoucauld. His genius and tone of feeling have been compared with Swift, but there appears to us to be more point in the contrast than in the comparison, for Swift’s temperament was passionate, and his blood red-hot, while Hobbes is always phlegmatic and cold. The one despises, the other hates. Hobbes’ adversaries are cut asunder as with a steel edge, Swift’s are burnt up as with a consuming fire. Nowhere in the former’s life do we come across a Stella or a Vanessa, nor, even if all Hobbes’ private papers had come down to us, should we have been likely to discover such an entry as this of Swift’s: “Only a woman’s hair.” It would be difficult to quote any trait from his biographies more characteristic of him than his selection of his own monumental inscription: “This is the true philosopher’s stone.”
Leviathan, 1751
To my booksellers for “Hobb’s Leviathan,” which is now mightily called for; and what was heretofore sold for 8s., I now give 24s. at the second hand, and is sold for 30s., it being a book the bishops will not let be printed again.
The manner of writing which booke (he told me) was thus. He walked much and contemplated, and he had in the head of his staffe a pen and inke-horne, carried alwayes a note-booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it. He had drawne the designe of the booke into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come in.
Few books have occasioned more or fiercer controversy than this production of the philosopher of Malmsbury. It is an able, learned, but most paradoxical and irreligious performance. Its principles would justify all social disorder and all impiety. But the scales of the Leviathan are very hard to penetrate, and have injured most of the weapons which have been tried upon it. Lord Clarendon “surveyed” it, and Bishop Bramhall endeavoured to “catch” it; but the monster still lived, exercising the ingenuity and courage of many a successive combatant. The most formidable of his antagonists were—Cumberland, in his Work “De Legibus Naturæ,” and Cudworth, in the “Intellectual System.”
One corner of his library was filled with a strange company of antiquated books of orthodox type; this he called “the condemned cell.” When looking at the “strange bedfellows” that slept on the shelves, the writer asked Huxley what author had most influenced a style whose clearness and vigour, nevertheless, seems unborrowed; and he at once named the masculine and pellucid “Leviathan” of Hobbes.
Poetry
Hobbes could construe a Greek author; but his skill in words must have been all derived from the dictionary: for he seems not to have known, that any one articulate sound could be more agreeable, or any one phrase more dignified, than any other. In his Iliad and Odyssey, even when he hits the author’s sense (which is not always the case), he proves, by his choice of words, that of harmony, elegance, or energy of style, he had no manner of conception. And hence that work, though called a Translation of Homer, does not even deserve the name of poem; because it is in every respect unpleasing, being nothing more than a fictitious narrative delivered in mean prose, with the additional meanness of harsh rhyme and untuneable measure.
Hobbes’s clearness and aptness of expression, the effect of which is like that of reading a book with a good light, never forsake him—not even in that most singular performance, his version of Homer, where there is scarcely a trace of ability of any other kind. There are said to be only two lines in that work in which he is positively poetical…. For the most part, indeed, Hobbes’s Iliad and Odyssey are no better than travesties of Homer’s, the more ludicrous as being undesigned and unconscious. Never was there a more signal revenge than that which Hobbes afforded to imagination and poetry over his own unbelieving and scoffing philosophism by the publication of this work. It was almost as if the man born blind, who had all his lifetime been attempting to prove that the sense which he himself wanted was no sense at all, and that that thing, color, which it professed peculiarly to discern, was a mere delusion, should have himself at last taken the painter’s brush and pallet in hand, and attempted, in confirmation of his theory, to produce a picture by the mere senses of touch, taste, smell, and hearing.
His verse is a mere curiosity, though a considerable curiosity. The chief of it (the translation of Homer written in the quatrain, which his friend Davenant’s “Gondibert” had made popular) is completely lacking in poetical quality, of which, perhaps, no man ever had less than Hobbes; and it is written on a bad model. But it has so much of the nervous bull-dog strength which, in literature if not in life, was Hobbes’s main characteristic, that it is sometimes both a truer and a better representative of the original than some very mellifluous and elegant renderings.
General
He thought interest and fear were the chief principles of society; and he put all morality in the following that which was our own private will or advantage. He thought religion had no other foundation than the laws of the land. And he put all the law in the will of the prince, or of the people: for he writ his book at first in favour of absolute monarchy, but turned it afterwards to gratify the republican party. These were his true principles, though he had disguised them for deceiving unwary readers. And this set of notions came to spread much. The novelty and boldness of them set many on reading them. The impiety of them was acceptable to men of corrupt minds, which were but too much prepared to receive them by the extravagances of the late times.
No English author in that age was more celebrated both abroad and at home than Hobbes; in our time he is much neglected: a lively instance how precarious all reputations founded on reasoning and philosophy!… Hobbes’s politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness. Though an enemy to religion he partakes nothing of the spirit of scepticism; but is as positive and dogmatical as if human reason, and his reason in particular, could attain a thorough conviction in these subjects. Clearness and propriety of style are the chief excellencies of Hobbes’s writings.
His style is incomparably better than that of any other writer in the reign of Charles I. and was, for its uncommon strength and purity, scarcely equalled in the succeeding reign. He has, in translation, done Thucydides as much justice as he has done injury to Homer: but he looked upon himself as born for much greater things than treading in the footsteps of his predecessors. He was for striking out new paths in science, government, and religion; and for removing the landmarks of former ages. His ethics have a strong tendency to corrupt our morals, and his politics to destroy that liberty which is the birthright of every human creature. He is commonly represented as a sceptic in religion, and a dogmatist in philosophy; but he was a dogmatist in both. The main principles of his “Leviathan” are as little founded in moral or evangelical truth, as the rules he laid down for squaring the circle are in mathematical demonstration. His book on human nature is esteemed the best of his works.
His success was not great, and the little which he had was principally among foreigners. Of the number of his impartial judges, was the Dutchman Lambert Velthuysen: and of his adversaries, Richard Cumberland and Robert Scharrock.
The genius of Hobbes was of the first order; his works abound with the most impressive truths, in all the simplicity of thought and language, yet he never elevates nor delights. Too faithful an observer of the miserable human nature before him, he submits to expedients; he acts on the defensive; and because he is in terror, he would consider security to be the happiness of man.
Philosophy, on the whole, gradually deteriorated during the latter half of the seventeenth century. The example of Hobbes testifies to the facility of transition from Bacon’s new method of philosophising—without reflecting any blame on that great man—to the most decided infidelity and materialism.
Before dismissing the system of Hobbes, may be worth while to remark that all his leading principles are traced by Cudworth to the remains of the ancient sceptics, by some of whom, as well as by Hobbes, they seem to have been adopted from a wish to flatter the uncontrolled passions of sovereigns.
Hobbes having thus struck the affections out of his map of human nature, and having totally misunderstood the nature even of the appetites, it is no wonder that we should find in it not a trace of the moral sentiments. Moral good he considers merely as consisting in the signs of a power to produce pleasure; and repentance is no more than regret at having missed the way; so that, according to this system, a disinterested approbation of and reverence for virtue are no more possible than disinterested affections towards our fellow-creatures.
In his magnificent grounds he erected, at a cost of ten thousand pounds, a retreat to which he repaired when he wished to avoid all visitors, and to devote himself wholly to study. On such occasions, a few young men of distinguished talents were sometimes the companions of his retirement. And among them his quick eye soon discerned the superior abilities of Thomas Hobbes. It is not probable, however, that he fully appreciated the powers of his disciple, or foresaw the vast influence, both for good and for evil, which that most vigorous and acute of human intellects was destined to exercise on the two succeeding generations.
Hobbes seems to have been one of the first who had any thing like a distinct perception of the real source of wealth.
With Hobbes, shall we say that all our thoughts are begotten by, and are the representatives of, objects exterior to us; that our conceptions arise in material motions pressing on our organs, producing motion in them, and so affecting the mind; that our sensations do not correspond with outward qualities; that sound and noise belong to the bell and the air, and not to the mind, and, like color, are only agitations occasioned by the object in the brain; that imagination is a conception gradually dying away after the act of sense, and is nothing more than a decaying sensation; that memory is the vestige of former impressions, enduring for a time; that forgetfulness is the obliteration of such vestiges; that the succession of thought is not indifferent, at random, or voluntary, but that thought follows thought in a determinate and predestined sequence; that whatever we imagine is finite, and hence we can not conceive of the infinite, nor think of any thing not subject to sense?
The amount of thought contributed by him to deism was small; for his influence on his successors was unimportant. The religious instincts of the heart were too strong to be permanently influenced by the cold materialist tone which reduced religion to state craft. With the exception of Coward, a materialist who doubted immortality about the end of the century, the succeeding deists more generally followed Herbert in wishing to elevate religion to a spiritual sphere, than Hobbes, who degraded it to political expedience. A slight additional interest however belongs to his speculations, from the circumstance that his ideas, together with those of Herbert, most probably suggested some parts of the system of Spinoza.
At the very period when the principle of toleration was first established in England by the union of the spirit of scepticism with the spirit of Christianity, the greatest living anti-christian writer was Hobbes, who was perhaps the most unflinching of all the supporters of persecution. It was his leading doctrine that the civil power, and the civil power alone, has an absolute right to determine the religion of the nation, and that, therefore, any refusal to acquiesce in that religion is essentially an act of rebellion.
All ornament, all emotions, are excluded from the style of Hobbes; it is a mere aggregate of arguments and concise facts, united together by deduction, as by iron bands. There are no tints, no fine or unusual word. He makes use only of words most familiar to common and lasting usage; there are not a dozen employed by him which, during two hundred years, have grown obsolete; he pierces to the root of all sensation, removes the transient and brilliant externals, compresses the solid portion which is the permanent subject-matter of all thought, and the proper object of common intelligence. He curtails throughout in order to strengthen; he attains solidity by expression. Of all the bonds which connect ideas, he retains but one, and that the most stable; his style is only a continuous chain of the most stubborn description, wholly made up of additions and subtractions, reduced to a combination of certain simple processes, which, added on to or diminishing from one another, make up, under various names, the totals or differences, for which we are for ever either studying the formation or unravelling the elements.
Undoubtedly Hobbes took great pains to be simple and precise. He makes an effort to express himself in familiar words, explains his general positions by examples, and his order of exposition is such as can be easily followed. Having a deep sense of the evils of ambiguous language, he is careful to define his terms. Further, he has great powers of terse and vigorous statement, his figures are studied and apt, and his didactic strain is enlivened by ingenious and occasionally sarcastic point. Yet he is far from being a perfect expositor, as he is by no means always a consistent thinker. When he enters upon details, he is often perplexed, does not keep his main subject prominent, and introduces statements out of their proper order.
Hobbes was a genuine child of his age in everything save the conclusions of his philosophy. He was a radical in the service of reaction. His mind was revolutionary in its vigour and directness, its hardihood and self-assertion, its freedom from pedantry, and contempt for the wisdom of the ancients. There is no one of all the thinkers of the century who has dealt to the old scholasticism such hearty and fatal blows. His clear and subtle, if sometimes coarse analysis, may be said to have laid the foundation of psychological science which has been so fruitful since his day; and to his organising conception political philosophy owes its creation, whatever we may think of the character of the creation in his hands. But behind all his great gifts there was no spiritual insight—no eye for any truths deeper than those of the sense or the intellect. Not only had he no appreciation of such truths, but apparently he had no perception of their existence. He was honestly ignorant of them. In the compass of his own keen and powerful mind he found no trace of them. Accordingly be judged human nature and human society as if they were not. All that he saw, he saw with a rare clearness; but there was a side of human life which he did not see at all—to which he turned an eye wholly blind.
Hobbes was the first great English writer who dealt with the science of government from the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treatment of man in the stage of human development which he supposed to precede that of society that he came most roughly into conflict with the accepted beliefs. Men, in his theory, were by nature equal, and their only natural relation was a state of war. It was no innate virtue of man himself which created human society out of this chaos of warring strengths. Hobbes, in fact, denied the existence of the more spiritual sides of man’s nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human custom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demonstrations of a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense of social utility to one another. The so-called laws of nature, such as gratitude or the love of our neighbor, were in fact contrary to the natural passions of man, and powerless to restrain them. Nor had religion rescued man by the interposition of a divine will.
“As God is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no conception or image of the Deity; and consequently all his attributes signify our inability or defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same excepting only this, that there is a God.” In spite of statements of this kind, which are obviously capable of being taken in a good sense, it has been customary to regard Hobbes as an atheist. The cause is found in the complete inadequacy of his system of morals to make good what might be wanting in his speculative tenets. It is not the omissions and one-sidedness of his metaphysics alone, but it is these, coupled with the perversions in his moral philosophy, which have affixed to his name a reputation for atheism. The doctrine of the existence of God, even attenuated to the form which we have seen above, might have been sufficiently integrated by a sound doctrine respecting the human conscience, the best witness for God, according to the general belief, that it is in man’s power to appeal to. But when we examine Hobbes’s teaching on moral matters, we find it full of paradox and absurdity.
Called “the Atheist Hobbes” as long ago as 1646,… had become more and more “the atheist Hobbes,” with all who found advantage in that style of epithet, by his “Human Nature” and “De Corpore Politico” of 1650, his all-comprehensive “Leviathan” of 1651, and some subsequent writings, while this dreadful fame of his for general Atheism had been fringed latterly by a special reputation for mathematical heterodoxy.
Hobbes was not a great philosopher, and yet he occupies an important place in the history of modern, and especially English, thought. His reduction of all phenomena, including those of mind in their physical relations, to modes of motion, was a rather remarkable declaration of a scientific view, now, at least, universally accredited.
Hobbes had, in early life, been Bacon’s secretary, but, though he wrote a work expressly on “Computation or Logic,” there is no mention in it of Induction, of the Baconian method, or of Bacon himself. It is, perhaps, still more singular that there is no mention of Bacon in the Epistle Dedicatory to the “Elements of Philosophy,” where he refers to Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Gassendi, Mersenne, &c. Bacon’s name, in fact, so far as I am aware, occurs only twice in the whole of Hobbes’ works, and there without any epithet of praise or blame. From the extent of Hobbes’ writings and the intimate personal relations which had formerly existed between him and Bacon, I can hardly refer this silence to mere accident. It may have been due to sorne personal pique, or the abstract character of Hobbes’ mind may have rebelled against the concrete and inductive spirit of Bacon’s philosophy. For, it may be noticed that there are few writers on moral and political questions, in whose works the historical spirit is more conspicuously absent than in Hobbes.
Hobbes stands in sharp contrast to Bacon both in disposition and in doctrine. Bacon was a man of a wide outlook, a rich, stimulating, impulsive nature, filled with great plans, but too mobile and desultory to allow them to ripen to perfection; Hobbes is slow, tenacious, persistent, unyielding, his thought strenuous and narrow. To this corresponds a profound difference in their systems, which is by no means adequately characterized by saying that Hobbes brings into the foreground the mathematical elements neglected by his predecessor, and turns his attention chiefly to politics. The dependence of Hobbes on Bacon is, in spite of their personal acquaintance, not so great as formerly was universally assumed. His guiding stars are rather the great mathematicians of the Continent, Kepler and Galileo, while Cartesian influences are not to be denied. He finds his mission in the construction of a strictly mechanical view of the world.
Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speaking philosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or in literary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression, perhaps the superior of both his companions…. Hobbes never “pays himself with words,” never evades a difficulty by becoming obscure, never meanders on in the graceful allusive fashion of many philosophers,—a fashion for which the prevalent faults of style were singularly convenient in his time. He has no ornament, he does not seem to aim at anything more than the simplest and most straightforward presentation of his views. But this very aim, assisted by his practice in writing the terse and clear, if not very elegant, Latin which was the universal language of the literary Europe of his time, suffices to preserve him from most of the current sins.
Hobbes produced a fermentation in English thought not surpassed until the advent of Darwinism. While, however, the opponents of Hobbes were countless, his biographer could discover only a single supporter. “Hobbism” was an occasional name of reproach until the middle of the eighteenth century (he is mentioned on the title-page of “Deism Revealed,” 1751), although his philosophy had long been eclipsed by Locke’s “Essay.” He is one of Kortholt’s “three imposters” (1680) along with Spinoza and Herbert of Cherbury. In Farquhar’s “Constant Couple,” 1699, the hypocritical debauchee carries Hobbes in his pocket; and among “Twelve Ingenious Characters,” 1686, is a dissolute town-fop who takes about “two leaves of Leviathan.”… Atterbury holds him up as a warning in a sermon “on the terrors of conscience.”… He was reviled on all sides as the typical atheist, materialist, political absolutist, and preacher of ethical selfishness. Hobbes was in truth a product of the great intellectual movement distinguished by such names as Bacon (1561–1629), Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), Harvey (1578–1657) and Descartes (1596–1650).
Hobbes’s fame as a political writer and moralist has somewhat obscured his merit as an ontologist and psychologist. And unjustly so; for he is the forerunner of materialism, criticism, and modern positivism…. Hobbes occupies a position between pure empiricism and Cartesian rationalism.
Hobbes’s political system is based, as has been said, on his view of human nature. Men are by nature, according to Hobbes, in a state of war—that is, of anarchy, being impelled by their egoistic impulses to contend against each other for all kinds of advantages. To the natural reason of men the advantage there would be to each if certain rules of justice were observed is, indeed, evident; but it is also evident that these can only be observed in a state of peace. The dictate of natural reason accordingly is to escape from the state of war and establish articles of peace. This can only be done by the institution of a Commonwealth or body politic, having a sovereign power entitled to exercise coercive authority over its members. To this sovereign power men give up their natural rights of self-defence in return for protection. They thus contract with one another to obey the sovereign power. This may be either one man, or a few, or the whole people assembled at stated times, the form of government being called monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy as the case may be. The sovereign power in the Commonwealth, wherever it may be situated, is absolute. The dictate at once of natural law and of self-interest is that the sovereign should aim at the safety and good government of the people: under the term “safety” being understood all that distinguishes civilised life from the savagery of the state of nature. Of the possible forms of government, monarchy, according to Hobbes, is to be preferred as being the most efficient in action, the most constant, and, on the whole, the most just. His theory, however, he maintains, is applicable to all forms of government.
Hobbes’ style has deservedly received high praise. He writes as a man whose one object was to be clearly understood.
