George Croom Robertson

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the same year Hobbes was recommended by Wilkinson as tutor to the son of William Cavendish, baron of Hardwick (afterwards 2nd earl of Devonshire) , and thus began a lifelong connexion with a great and powerful family. Twice it was loosened—once, for a short time, after twenty years, and again, for a longer period, during the Civil War—but it never was broken. Hobbes spoke of the first years of his tutorship as the happiest of his life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Wallis’s Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae, published in 1655 about three months after the De corpore, contained also an elaborate criticism of Hobbes’s whole attempt to relay the foundations of mathematical science in its place within the general body of reasoned knowledge—a criticism which, if it failed to allow for the merit of the conception, exposed only too effectually the utter inadequacy of the result. ”

“ Other writings which he had finished, or on which he must have been engaged about this time, were not made public till after his death—the king apparently having made it the price of his protection that no fresh provocation should be offered to the popular sentiment. The most important of the works composed towards 1670, and thus kept back, is the extremely spirited dialogue to which he gave the title Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1660. ”

“ When 1650 came, as if to prepare the way for the reception of his magnum opus, he allowed the publication of his earliest treatise, divided into two separate small volumes (Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, E.W. iv. 1-76, and De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politic, pp. 77–228) . [8] In 1651 [9] he published his translation of the De Cive under the title of Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (E.W. ii.) ”

“ With the translation, [14] in the spring of 1656, he had ready Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics, one of Geometry, the other of Astronomy, in the University of Oxford (E.W. vii. 181-356) , in which, after reasserting his view of the principles of geometry in opposition to Euclid’s, he proceeded to repel Wallis’s objections with no lack of dialectical skill, and with an unreserve equal to Wallis’s own. ”

“ He was even unable, in dealing with the elementary conceptions of geometry, to work out with any consistency the few original thoughts he had, and thus became the easy sport of Wallis. At his advanced age, however, and with the sense he had of his powers, he was not likely to be brought to a better mind by so insulting an opponent. He did indeed, before allowing an English translation of the De corpore (E.W. i.) ”

“ After a time Hobbes took heart again and began a third period of controversial activity, which did not end, on his side, till his ninetieth year. Little need be added to the simple catalogue of the untiring old man’s labours in this last stage of his life. The first piece, published in 1666, De principiis et ratiocinatione geometrarum (L.W. iv. 385–484) , was designed, as the sub-title declared, to lower the pride of geometrical professors by showing that there was no less uncertainty and error in their works than in those of physical or ethical writers. ”

“ Very characteristic is the interest in men and things, and the disposition to cut through questions in the schools after a trenchant fashion of his own. He was little attracted by the scholastic learning, though it would be wrong to take his words as evidence of a precocious insight into its weakness. ”

“ He read little, and often boasted that he would have known as little as other men if he had read as much. He appears to have had an illegitimate daughter for whom he made generous provision. In the National Portrait Gallery there is a portrait of him by J. M. Wright, and two others are in the possession of the Royal Society.
As already suggested, it cannot be allowed that Hobbes falls into any regular succession from Bacon; neither can it be said that he handed on the torch to Locke. ”

“ Philosophical citations from the De corpore should always be made in the original Latin. Molesworth reprints the Latin, not from the first edition of 1655, but from the modified edition of 1668—modified, in the mathematical chapters, in general (not exact) keeping with the English edition of 1656. The Vindex episode, referred to in the Six Lessons, becomes intelligible only by going beyond Molesworth to the original Latin edition of 1655. ”

“ He would then single out Man from the realm of nature, and, in a treatise De homine, show what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation and knowledge, as also of the affections and passions thence resulting, whereby man came into relation with man. ”

“ Among Hobbes’s papers preserved at Hardwick, where he died, there remains the boy’s dictation-book, interspersed with headings, examples, &c. in Hobbes’s hand. ↑ Among the Hardwick papers there is preserved a MS. copy of the work, under the title Elementes of Law Naturall and Politique, with the dedication to the earl of Newcastle, written in Hobbes’s own hand, and dated May 9, 1640. This dedication was prefixed to the first thirteen chapters of the work when printed by themselves, under the title Human Nature in 1650. ”

“ Du Verdus was one of Hobbes’s profoundest admirers and most frequent correspondents in later years; there are many of his letters among Hobbes’s papers at Hardwick. ↑ The Human Nature corresponds with cc. i.-xiii. of the first part of the original treatise. The remaining six chapters of the part stand now as Part I. of the De Corpore Politico. ”

“ Among Hobbes’s friends at this time are specially mentioned John Selden and William Harvey, who left him a legacy of £10. According to Aubrey, Selden left him an equal bequest, but this seems to be a mistake. Harvey (not Bacon) is the only Englishman he mentions in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the De corpore, among the founders, before himself, of the new natural philosophy. ↑ The treatise bore the date, “Rouen, Aug. 20, 1652,” but it should have been 1646, as afterwards explained by Hobbes himself (E.W. v. 25) . ↑ “The Vit. auct. ”