George Croom Robertson

“ The 'History' had been received from the first, by all thinkers and scholars with any elevation of view, as the work of a master, not more conversant with his subject by direct and independent study of all the available sources of information than able, by an exceptional philosophical training and political experience, to interpret the multiform phases of Greek life with more than the bare scholar's insight. The first-published volumes, while hardly breaking ground at all with the story of historic Greece, gave the more opportunity for philosophical consideration of the Greek mythopœic faculty ”

“ A certain shyness of manner was the outward token of an unaffected modesty that was beautiful to see in one whose work of its kind, for quantity and quality taken together, has never been surpassed. Consideration for others, on a full equality with self, was his guiding principle of action. It made him, as he was in private the most conscientious and methodical of workers, a man who could be absolutely relied upon in association, punctual and regular to a proverb in everything that he undertook with others, and scrupulously fairminded in all his judgments. ”

“ When the first storm of opposition from smaller men had begun to die down, thinkers of real weight, beginning with Cumberland and Cudworth, were moved by their aversion to his analysis of the moral nature of man to probe anew the question of the natural springs and the rational grounds of human action; and thus it may be said that Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole of that movement of ethical speculation that, in modern times, has been carried on with such remarkable continuity in England. ”

“ Above all he was impressed by the fact that the Greek thinker appeared often to be more concerned in Socratic fashion about mere exercise of the dialectical faculty than about any particular conclusions at all. The 'Plato' brings out aspects of Greek thought in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. which philosophical historians have generally thrust into the background, and is thus not likely to lose its importance. Before it was out the aged scholar had betaken himself without a moment's pause to his more congenial occupation with Aristotle. ”

“ It would be difficult even to prove any ground of affinity among them beyond a desposition to take sense as a prime factor in the account of subjective experience: their common interest in physical science was shared equally by rationalist thinkers of the Cartesian school, and was indeed begotten of the time. Backwards, Hobbes’s relations are rather with Galileo and the other inquirers who, from the beginning of the 17th century, occupied themselves with the physical world in the manner that has come later to be distinguished by the name of science in opposition to philosophy. ”

“ Grote's business-experience contributed to the great success in raising money for the undertaking at its first start; while he ably seconded Mill, who led the education-committee, in planning a professoriate of unexampled width of range, and in securing men of real distinction to fill the numerous chairs. One only of the appointments led to a difference between master and disciple. There were to be two philosophical chairs, one of 'moral and political philosophy' and another of 'philosophy of mind and logic,' according to a scheme that bears evident traces of Mill's hand. ”

“ His scheme was first to work out, in a separate treatise De corpore, a systematic doctrine of Body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, as motion or mechanical action was then (through Galileo and others) understood—the theory of motion being applied in the light of mathematical science, after quantity, the subject-matter of mathematics, had been duly considered in its place among the fundamental conceptions of philosophy, and a clear indication had been given, at first starting, of the logical ground and method of all philosophical inquiry. ”

“ The first professor retiring in 1866, it became at once Grote's earnest desire to procure a successor who might treat the subjects of the chair with direct regard to modern requirements, as they had come through his own influence to be recognised in the examinations of the now independently constituted University of London. He held if possible more strongly than ever to his old opinion that the professor of philosophy should not be a minister of religion, committed before the world to a body of fixed doctrine on subjects coming within the scope of philosophic inquiry. ”

“ Ward was to occupy himself with the philosophical and physical sections, which he did in leisurely fashion, bringing out his criticism in the course of next year (In Th. Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica) . Wallis was to confine himself to the mathematical chapters, and set to work at once with characteristic energy. Obtaining an unbound copy of the De corpore, he saw by the mutilated appearance of the sheets that Hobbes had repeatedly altered his demonstrations before he issued them at last in their actual form, grotesque as it was, rather than delay the book longer. ”

“ Another schoolfellow, who turned like himself to Greek history, Connop Thirlwall, was also an attached friend in later life; but, Grote being elder by some three years, they were not thrown together as boys. The school-work was wholly classical, except for an English theme; mathematics not being introduced till some time after Grote had left (private letter from Thirlwall to Professor Bain, 1872) . It sufficed, however, to beget a genuine love of learning, which survived the plunge into business-life at the bank imposed on him by his father at the age of sixteen. ”

“ The construction was, of course, utterly premature, even supposing it were inherently possible; but it is Hobbes’s distinction, in his century, to have conceived it, and he is thereby lifted from among the scientific workers with whom he associated to the rank of those philosophical thinkers who have sought to order the whole domain of human knowledge. The effects of his philosophical endeavour may be traced on a variety of lines. Upon every subject that came within the sweep of his system, except mathematics and physics, his thoughts have been productive of thought. ”

“ He had a character as open and winning as it was upright and high-principled, with a lively humour that in youth was apt to brim over and later was sometimes rather caustic but which grew mellow with age. Through life he was an omnivorous reader, and amid the greatest press of work he always found time for the pursuits and interests of a highly cultivated mind. He married Caroline, fourth daughter of Thomas Fletcher, a Liverpool merchant, in 1832, and left four sons and three daughters. ”

“ The State, it now seemed to Hobbes, might be regarded as a great artificial man or monster (Leviathan) , composed of men, with a life that might be traced from its generation through human reason under pressure of human needs to its dissolution through civil strife proceeding from human passions. This, we may suppose, was the presiding conception from the first, but the design may have been variously modified in the three or four years of its execution. ”

“ We may now follow out the more troublesome conflict, or rather series of conflicts, in which Hobbes became entangled from the time of publishing his De corpore in 1655, and which checkered all his remaining years. In Leviathan he had vehemently assailed the system of the universities, as Controversy with Wallis and Ward. originally founded for the support of the papal against the civil authority, and as still working social mischief by adherence to the old learning. The attack was duly noted at Oxford, where under the Commonwealth a new spirit of scientific activity had begun to stir. ”

“ If apt to be drawn out with an earnestness and explicitness open to criticism from the literary point of view, the political lessons and ethical judgments so characteristic of the book render it the most instructive of histories. ”

“ In 1864 they settled finally at Shiere, Surrey, in 'The Ridgeway' as it was called by Mrs. Grote, after the place of her birth. At all these houses she exercised a hospitality which was of great benefit to Grote, distracting him from too close application to work and developing the exquisite courtesy of his nature. Herself an accomplished musician (while Grote also had trained musical tastes) , she cultivated friendly relations with Mendelssohn and others whether composers or performers, and undertook a certain charge of Jenny Lind in the early days of that great singer. ”

“ The De cive, presently to be published, was written in Latin for the learned, and gave the political theory without its foundation in human nature. The unpublished treatise of 1640 contained all or nearly all that he had to tell concerning human nature, but was written before the terrible events of the last years had disclosed how men might still be urged by their anti-social passions back into the abyss of anarchy. ”

“ After many failures to reach a definite conclusion, partly, as it seemed, because a few individuals could hardly make the inquiry sufficiently continuous and comprehensive, a plan was formed in 1882 of a regular ‘Society for Psychical Research.’ This was to bring together for careful testing a large variety of human experiences, real or imagined, not taken into account by any of the accepted sciences. ”

“ Professing to be roused by the attack on his friend Boyle, when he had scorned to lift a finger in defence of himself against the earlier dialogues, he tore them all to shreds with an art of which no general description can give an idea. He got, however, upon more dangerous ground when, passing wholly by the political insinuation against himself, he roundly charged Hobbes with having written Leviathan in support of Oliver’s title, and deserted his royal master in distress. ”

“ In Florence in 1636 he saw Galileo, for whom he ever retained the warmest admiration, and spent eight months in daily converse with the members of a scientific circle in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne (q.v.) . From that time (the winter of 1636–1637) he too, as he tells us, was numbered among philosophers.
His introduction to Euclid took place accidentally in 1629 (Aubrey’s Lives, p. 604) . Euclid’s manner of proof became the model for his own way of thinking upon all subjects. It is less easy to determine when he awoke to an interest in the physical doctrine of motion. ”

“ Gurney's undergraduate course had been lengthened by broken residence, caused by a depression of body and mind which was apt with him to follow upon moods of high enthusiasm and consuming activity. As soon as he took his bachelor's degree in 1871, being in moderately easy circumstances, he was free to follow his natural bent. This now turned him to philosophy, though he always retained the keenest interest in letters and poetry. Strongest, however, remained his passion for music. ”

“ Finally he would consider, in a crowning treatise De cive, how men, being naturally rivals or foes, were moved to enter into the better relation of Society, and demonstrate how this grand product of human wit must be regulated if men were not to fall back into brutishness and misery. Thus he proposed to unite in one coherent whole the separate phenomena of Body, Man and the State.
Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country seething with discontent. ”

“ Many hours were accordingly spent day by day over piano or violin. In 1873 he even achieved the composition of what another member of the school describes as ‘a really pretty violin sonatine;’ but the net result of years spent for the most part at Harrow till 1875 was failure to come in any way near to the satisfaction of his personal longings, or the ability to fulfil what he regarded as his social purpose. He next settled in London, and still for several years continued his musical practice under different direction before he lost hope. ”