Thomas Robertson

“ Robertson devoted much time to literary work, and won reputation as a critic. In 1772 he revised for the press Dr. Gregory Sharpe's posthumous sermons, and in the same year edited Algernon Sidney's ‘Discourses on Government,’ at the request of Thomas Hollis, to whom the work has been wrongly ascribed [see under Hollis, Thomas, 1720–1774] (Hollis, Life, 1780, p. 448) . ”

“ Our knowledge of Robertson's character rests entirely on the testimony of Thomas Jones, the chief justice of New York, a malevolent and disappointed man, who wrote a history of New York during the revolutionary war. ”

“ He was generally reputed the first English writer of his time. Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robertson received four thousand five hundred pounds for the History of Charles V.; and it is no disrespect to the memory of Robertson to say that the History of Charles V. is both a less valuable and a less amusing book than the Lives of the Poets.
Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. ”

“ Taking up mathematics when not only his mind was already formed but his thoughts were crystallizing into a philosophical system, Hobbes had, in fact, never put himself to school and sought to work up gradually to the best knowledge of the time, but had been more anxious from the first to become himself an innovator with whatever insufficient means. ”

“ In 1848 he was elected by the students lord rector of Marischal College and university of Aberdeen, and received the degree of LL.D. He died suddenly, from a stroke of apoplexy, at his house in Drummond Place, Edinburgh, on 10 Jan. 1855, aged 60. He was buried in West Church burying-ground, Edinburgh, on the 15th of the same month. A marble tablet was erected to his memory in St. Giles's Church. Robertson was an able and energetic advocate, of strong natural abilities and vigorous common-sense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No year had passed since the appearance of Leviathan without some indignant protest against the influence which its trenchant doctrine was calculated to produce upon minds longing above everything for civil repose; but after the Restoration “Hobbism” became a fashionable creed, which it was the duty of every lover of true morality and religion to denounce. Two or three days after Charles’s arrival in London, Hobbes drew in the street the notice of his former pupil, and was at once received into favour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In its English form, as Seven Philosophical Problems and Two Propositions of Geometry (E.W. vii. 1-68) , the work was first published in 1682, after Hobbes’s death. ↑ Wallis’s pieces were excluded from the collected edition of his works (1693–1697) , and have become extremely rare. ↑ The De medio animarum statu of Thomas White, a heterodox Catholic priest, who contested the natural immortality of the soul. White (who died 1676) and Hobbes were friends. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then a quartermaster entered with the same report of the forecastles.
"Very well," said the captain, rising; "one by one come into my office — watchmen first, then petty officers, then the men. Quartermasters will watch the door — that no man goes out until I have seen him." He passed into another room, followed by a watchman, who presently emerged and went on deck with a more pleasant expression of face. Another entered and came out; then another, and another, until every man but Rowland had been within the sacred precincts, all to wear the same pleased, or satisfied, look on reappearing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Could you fill a position on my bridge? "
"I can fill a higher; and your company is not rich enough to buy me."
"You seem to be a man without ambition; but you must have wants."
"Food, clothing, shelter-and whisky," said Rowland with a bitter, self-contemptuous laugh. The captain reached down a decanter and two glasses from a swinging tray and said as he placed them before him:
"Here is one of your wants; fill up." Rowland's eyes glistened as he poured out a glassful, and the captain followed.
"I will drink with you, Rowland," he said; "here is to our better understanding." ”

“ Write to me, care o' Lloyds, if you want the berth, and I'll send you advance money to get back with."
"Thank you, captain," said Rowland, as he took the other's hand and then glanced at his empty sleeve; "but my going to sea is ended. Even a mate needs two hands."
"Well, suit yourself, Rowland; I'll take you mate without any hands at all while you had your brains. It's done me good to meet a man like you; and — say, old man, you won't take it wrong from me, will you? It's none o' my business, but you're too all-fired good a man to drink. ”

“ Well, you will have little time to quarrel aboard this ship, and plenty of time to make friends. It is too late to get rid of you; so you must work. Put them in separate watches, Mr. Butterell."
"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Butterell, reaching for Bill. "I choose you," he added, as his grip closed on Bill's collar. Then he swung him at arm's length aft toward the poop then forward with all his strength, hurling him, rolling and scrambling wildly, fully thirty feet along the deck. Then, with a quick, self-satisfied smirk up at those on the poop, he repeated the feat upon Tom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If he fails to answer the bells, keep him aloft the whole watch."
"Is that all, sir? Is the watch relieved?"
"Watch is relieved, all right. No need o' mustering and counting this moonlight night. You have the deck now. Watch out!"
"Yes, sir," I answered; then, stepping into the weather alley, I sent my voice forward, "Weather main- and cro'-jack clew-garnets and buntlines," I shouted, "and come aft here, some o' you, and take in this spanker!"
"What are you taking in the spanker for?" asked the mate as I resumed my position beside Tom, ready to aid him if necessary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You've got to get the young un over. You're the only one to do it. The old gentleman was an American, alone here—hadn't even a lawyer, that I could find. The boat sails in the morning and the night train leaves in two hours. Think of that mother, Rowland. Why, man, I'd travel round the world to stand in your shoes when you hand Myra over. I've got a child of my own." The captain's eyes were winking hard and fast, and Rowland's were shining. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Intending to devote himself to study, Robertson entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but in 1833 ill-health compelled him to retire to the Isle of Wight, where he attempted to arrange his business affairs. Obliged to earn a livelihood, he settled in London in 1834. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”