Hobbes

It is evident that the brilliant attempt of Hobbes to justify the absolute supremacy of the monarch could find little favor in England in the years of the Parliamentary struggle with Charles I. Hobbes, who was morbidly timid, believed that he stood in personal dan ger and betook himself, a voluntary exile, to Paris where he spent 11 years in the society, on the one hand, of French men of science and letters, and on the other hand, of the Eng lish royalists. In 1646 Hobbes became the tutor of the young prince, later Charles II. He pub lished in the meantime an epitome in Latin, Cive,) of his doctrine of government, and afterward the earlier work already referred to. In 1651 he brought out the work by which he is best known,

The metaphysical doctrine of Hobbes is expounded in two books published a few years after his return to England, (De Corpore,> which appeared in 1655, and a translation,

The metaphysical doctrine of Hobbes de serves it attention than it often receives, be cause t is so thoroughgoing and internally con sistent a system of materialism. The arguments, implicit rather than explicit, on which Hobbes bases it are none the less, in the view of the writer of this notice, unsound. In brief, Hobbes argues for materialism partly because of the untrustworthiness of consciousness, and part on the ground that physical motions are ad mitted to be cause of consciousness. °It is evident° he says, while describing the phe nomenon of vision, in the second chapter of 'Human Nature,' °that from all lucid .. . bodies, there is a motion produced to the eye, and through the eye to the optic nerve and so into the brain . . . and thus all vision bath its original from . . . motion .° From similar ob servations he concludes that ideas (or in his own • words, apparitions or phantasms) °are nothing really but motion . . . .° The reasoning that consciousness because conditioned by mo tion is, therefore, identical wills motion is evi dently illicit; and it is observable that Hobbes, when he tries to define body, motion and space, really conceives them in terms of ideal reality.

Just before the appearance of the metaphysi cal works, in 1654, an essay 'Of Liberty and Necessity,' written by Hobbes eight years be fore in the course of a private discussion with Bishop Bramhall, was published without the knowledge and consent of the author. It was

followed in 1656 by a longer and more polemical work, 'The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, clearly Stated and De bated between Dr. Bramhall . . . and Thomas Hobbes.' The unambiguous teaching of these works is a determinism grounded in psychology, the doctrine "that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes and are therefore necessitated.° Most of the works which Hobbes published from this time onward are, indeed, controver sial in character. Most bitter of them are the books and essays on mathematical subjects, maintaining against Wallis and Ward, Savilian professors in Oxford, the possibility of squar ing the circle. The titles of two of these works are an indication of the spirit in which Hobbes wrote them: 'Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics . . . in the chairs set up by . . . Sir Henry Savile in the University of Oxford' ; and or Marks of the Ab surd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politics and Barbarisms of John Wallis.) Hobbes. who was, after all, no trained mathe matician, was always worsted in these mathe matical contests, but never acknowledged him self defeated.

More serious than the justified criticisms of Ward and Wallis on the mathematics of Hobbes were the attacks upon the orthodoxy and the morality of his teaching. These attacks, and especially the abortive attempt to suppress 'Le viathan' by act of Parliament, caused Hobbes great uneasiness. In the Appendix which he added to his translation of 'Leviathan' into Latin (published 1668) he argued that the teach ing of 'Leviathan' is not heretical, and that be wrote at the same time a very vigorous 'Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall . . . called 'Catching of the Leviathan,' a book in which the bishop of Derry had maintained °that the Hobbian principles are destructive to Christianity and to all religion.° Nobody doubts to-day that these charges are unfounded. Hobbes, it is true, inculcated a materialistic philosophy and an egoistic and necessitarian ethics; but upon these doctrines he himself based both the philosophical conclusion that God exists, and an ethical system which ex horts to justice and social virtues, even while it derives these virtues from purely selfish In stincts. It is necessary to suppose that many of the men who decried Hobbes had never read him; and that the epithets "free-liver° and °atheist° which writers of his own and the fol lowing century heaped upon him were due, in part at least, to the fact that Hobbes remained throughout his life in some sense under the protection of his former pupil, Charles IL Very unjustly, therefore, he was held respon sible for the lax morals of the court. It should be added that from this time onward Hobbes failed to gain from the censor license to publish any work on a political or on an ethical sub ject. The chief of the works, written at this period but published after the death of Hobbes, is 'Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England . . . from the Year 1640 to the Year 1660.' Hobbes spent the last four years of his life with the family he had so long served, that of the Earl of Devonshire. In these later years he returned to the classical studies of his youth, publishing, when he was 87 years old, 'The Iliads, and Odysseys of Homer, translated out of Greek into English, with a large preface concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem.' In his very last year he wrote a sketch, in Latin metre, of his own life. He had feared many things, and death most of all, but he died quietly after a short illness, in 1679. See