2
PHILOSOPHIES ANCIENT AND MODERN
THOMAS HOBBES
NOTE
As a consequence of the success of the series of Religions
Ancient and Modern, Messrs. CONSTABLE have decided to issue
a set of similar primers, with brief introductions, lists of dates,
and selected authorities, presenting to the wider public the
salient features of the Philosophies of Greece and Home and of
the Middle Ages, as well as of modern Europe. They will
appear in the same handy Shilling volumes, with neat cloth
bindings and paper envelopes, which have proved so attractive
in the case of the Religions. The writing in each case will be
confided to an eminent authority, and one who has already
proved himself capable of scholarly yet popular exposition
within a small compass.
Among the first volumes to appear will be : —
Early Greek Philosophy. By A. W. BENN, author of The Philo
sophy of Greece, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century.
Stoicism. By Professor ST. GEORGE STOCK, author of Deduc
tive Logic, editor of the Apology of Plato, etc.
Plato. By Professor A. E. TAYLOR, St. Andrews University,
author of The Problem of Conduct.
Scholasticism. By Father RICKABY, S. J.
Hoboes. By Professor A. E. TAYLOR.
Locke. By Professor ALEXANDER, of Owens College.
Comte and Mill. By T. W. WHITTAKER, author of The
Neoplatonists, Apollonius of Tyana and other Essays.
Herbert Spencer. By W. H. HUDSON, author of An Intro
duction to Spencer's Philosophy.
Schopenhauer. By T. W. WHITTAKER.
Berkeley. By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER, D.C.L., LL.D.
Bergsen. By Father TYRRELL.
THOMAS HOBBES
By
A. E. TAYLOR
LONDON
.RCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
1908
B
IU7
PREFATORY NOTE
THIS brief sketch has throughout been written directly from
the original text of Hobbes himself and his contemporary
biographers, though use has, of course, been made, especially
in the first chapter, of the labours of such modern students as
Professor Croom Kobertson, Professor F. Tonnies, and Sir
Leslie Stephen. The verbal quotations from Hobbes's works
are given from the following editions : (1) Elements of Philo
sophy, (Concerning Body}, London, 1656 ; (2) Human Nature
and De Corpore Politico, from the third edition of Hobbes's
Tripos, London, 1864 ; (3) Leviathan, from the reprint of the
first edition in the series of ' Cambridge English Classics,' 1904,
which has been carefully compared with my own copy of the
edition of 1651, (apparently one of the ' inferior ' issue). The
spelling of these editions has been preserved, but the punctua
tion modified in accord with present-day usage. Allusions
to the Latin texts of (1) and (3) are based on the edition
of Hobbes's Opera Philosophica published by Blaeuw of
Amsterdam in 1668.
A. E. TAYLOR.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
i. LIFE, 1
ii. PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE SAND METHODS, . . 27
in. EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY — THE NATURE OF MAN, 55^"
iv. THE MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN, . . ^f 76 "~~
v. THE POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN,"* . . . 10^^-
vi. CHURCH AND STATE, -T 116
CONCLUSION, 124
BOOKS USEFUL TO THE STUDENT OF HOBBES, . 127
vii
THOMAS HOBBES
CHAPTER I
LIFE
THE long life of Thomas Hobbes covers almost
the whole of the most critical period alike in the
growth of modern science and in the development
of the British Constitution. Born in the year of
the Armada, Hobbes did not die until nine years
before the great Revolution which finally deter
mined the question whether the British Islands
should be ruled constitutionally or absolutely.
He lived through the Stuart attempt to convert
England into an absolute monarchy, the Puritan
revolution and great Civil War, the political and
ecclesiastical experiments of the Long Parliament
and of Cromwell, the restoration of the exiled
line, and the beginnings of modern Whiggism and
Nonconformity. Still more remarkable were the
changes which came over the face of science
during the same period. When Hobbes entered
A i
THOMAS HOBBES
the University as a lad, the sham Aristoteliar
of the Middle Ages was still officially taught ii
lecture-rooms ; before he died, mechanical sci€
had been placed on a secure footing by Kef
Galileo, and Descartes, the foundations of
scientific study of physiology and magneti
had been laid by Harvey and Gilbert, the Ho
Society for experimental research into nature 1
been incorporated for more than a generatic
analytical geometry had been created by Descart
and the calculus by Leibniz and Newton, wh
it was only eight years after his death that t
final exposition of the new mechanical conceptii
of the universe was given by Newton's Principi
It is only natural that a philosopher who w
also a keen observer of men and affairs, livir
through such a period of crisis, should have mac
the most daring of all attempts to base the whoi
of knowledge on the principles of mechanic!
materialism, and should also have become th
creator of a purely naturalistic theory of ethic
and sociology.
Thomas Hobbes, the second son of the Yicar o
Westport, now included in the town of Malmes
bury in Wiltshire, was prematurely born on Gooc
Friday, April 5,_jj88L His own theory wa;
that both his premature birth and his constitu
LIFE
tional timidity were consequences of his mother's
alarm at the impending approach of the Great
Armada. The father, 'one of the ignorant Sir
Johns of Elizabeth's time,' fell into trouble by
assaulting a rival cleric at the church door, and
was obliged to go into hiding, but the boy's edu
cation was cared for by a maternal uncle, who was
a flourishing glover and alderman of Malmes-
bury. After a period of preliminary schooling at
Malmesbury and Westport, where he learned
enough of the classical languages to translate
Euripides' Medea into Latin verse at the age of
fourteen, the lad was sent to Oxford, where he
was entered at Magdalen Hall, then an important
centre of Puritanism. It was a time of general
relaxation of university discipline, and the acri
monious attacks made by Hobbes in later life on
the English Universities as haunts of debauchery,
hotbeds of disloyalty, and places where the
elements of Mathematics and Physics were
unknown, must have been chiefly based on his
undergraduate experiences. He tells us hi iself
of the contempt he conceived for the traditional
a iholastic logic and physics expounded by his
tutors, and of the joy he felt in escaping from
their lectures to the bookshops where he could
pore over books of travel and maps, and follow
3
THOMAS HOBBES
in imagination the voyages of the great Eliza
bethan buccaneers.
This rather unprofitable period of University
life ended, after five years, when Hobbes graduated
Bachelor of Arts on February 5, 160|."^-Tm-
mediately afterwards he formed what was to
prove a lifelong and honourable connection with
the rising family of Cavendish. William Caven
dish, Baron Hardwick (afterwards Earl of Devon
shire), second son by her second marriage of the
famous ' Bess of Hardwick/ being anxious to find
a suitable companion and tutor for his eldest
son, offered the post to Hobbes on the recom
mendation of the then President of Magdalen
Hall. By all accounts Hobbes's actual services
seem to have been those of companion rather
than tutor. Young Mr. Cavendish was a decided
spendthrift, and it became Hobbes's function to
assist him in raising frequent loans. Studies
were freely neglected, and Hobbes himself ' almost
forgot his Latin.' Fortunately, in 1610, the two
youJig, men were sent to make the grand tour of
the Continent, and travelled together over a great
part of France, Germany, and Italy. As yet
Hobbes appears to have been untouched by the
new scientific movement, though it was only in
the preceding year that Kepler had published
4
LIFE
the first two of his famous laws, and Galileo was
at the very height of his glory, owing to his
recent discovery of the satellites of Jupiter. The
main effect of the journey was to revive Hobbes's
interest in his neglected literary studies, and to
send him home with a fixed determination to
make himself a thorough scholar. The resolve
was executed so successfully that Hobbes not
merely became one of the most vigorous and
luminous of English writers, but learned to
handle Latin, still the general language of the
learned world, with rare force and fluency. The
first-fruits of this renewed interest in learning
was an English translation of Thucydides, pub
lished in 1628-9, for the purpose, as Hobbes said
at the time, of educating his readers in the true
principles of statesmanship. Afterwards, when
his absolutist political theories had been fully
developed, he wished it to be believed that his
real object had been to warn Englishmen against
the dangers of democracy, by showing them how
much wiser a single great statesman is than a
multitude.
From Hobbes's admirer, John Aubrey, we learn
something about the circles in which he was
moving at this time of his life. Foremost among
his friends stands Francis Bacon, who ' loved to
5
THOMAS HOBBES
converse with him,' and employed him on the
translation of some of the famous Essays, notably
that on The True Greatness of Kingdoms and
Estates, into Latin. This connection can be shown
to belong to the years 1621-6 when Bacon, after
his political disgrace, was devoting himself en
tirely to scientific work in his retreat at Gorham-
bury. The influence of Bacon, however, has left
no trace on Hobbes's own matured thought. He
barely mentions the Chancellor in his writings,
and has no place for ' Baconian induction ' in his
own conception of scientific method. Bacon's
zeal for experiment, the redeeming feature in an
otherwise chaotic scheme of thought, is entirely
alien to the essentially deductive and systematic
spirit of the Hobbian philosophy. Other friends
of this period were Ben Jonson, the reigning
literary dictator of London, Edward Herbert,
Baron Cherbury, the ' first of the English Deists/
the antagonist against whom Locke's attack on
' innate ideas ' was afterwards to be directed, and
the npw forgotten Scottish poet, Sir Robert
Ayton.
In 1628 Hobbes's ex-pupil died, after a two
years' tenure of the Earldom of Devonshire,
leaving the family estates heavily encumbered.
The necessary retrenchments involved a tem-
6
LIFE
porary severance of Hobbes's connection with the
Cavendishes, and from 1629 to 1631 he acted
as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, a gentle
man of Nottinghamshire. He accompanied this
new pupil on a foreign tour, which apparently
extended through France and as far as Venice.
It was probably during this period that an
incident occurred which was to exercise a lasting,
and not entirely happy influence on the whole of
Hobbes's subsequent thought. At the age of
forty he was, for the first time, introduced to the
works of Euclid, and at once 'fell in love with
geometry,' being attracted, he says, more by the
rigorous manner of proof employed than by the
matter of the science. (Mathematics, we must
remember, were then only beginning to be seriously
studied in England. Hobbes tells us that in his
undergraduate days geometry was still looked
upon generally as a form of the ' Black Art/ and
it was not until 1619 that the will of Sir Henry
Savile, Warden of Merton College, established the
first Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy
at Oxford.)
In 1631 Hobbes was recalled from Paris by
the widow of his late pupil to take charge of the
education of her eldest son, the third Earl of
Devonshire, then. a boy of twelve. By 1634 the
7
THOMAS HOBBES
lad was thought old enough to make the con
tinental tour, and Hobbes accompanied him on
a journey through France and Italy, from which
the pair did not return until 1637. This third
foreign journey was destined to be the turning-
point of Hobbes's intellectual life. All through
the journey he was haunted by a single idea,
the thought of the omnipresence of motion in
nature, and of the apparent variety of natural
objects as a mere effect of diversity of motion
in the different parts of body. The origin of this
absorption in the notion of motion he derives
from the following undated incident. In a com
pany of learned men, among whom he was present,
a chance reference to sensation provoked the con
temptuous question, ' And, pray, what is sense ? '
Reflecting long on this chance question, Hobbes
came to the conclusion that if all bodies were at
rest or all moved exactly in the same way, there
would be no means of distinguishing any one
thing from any other, and therefore no sensation.
Hence not only must the whole of physical
nature consist, as Galileo was already declaring,
of diversity of motions of homogeneous particles,
but the same must be true of the inner world of
our so-called 'mental processes/ they must all be
but so many diverse motions in what we now
8
LIFE
call our ' nervous system.' With this conclusion
Hobbes's path as a philosopher was marked out.
His task was to bejhe exhibition of all the facts
of the universe, and more particularly those of
the inner life of emotion and will, as consequences
of the primary laws _of_ motion. Hence, in the
preface to the De Corpore, after mentioning as
the founders of true physical science Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, and Harvey^ he adds that the
true doctrine of civil society is no older than his
own book De Give.
Evidence discovered by Dr. Ferdinand Tonnies
has now made it probable that the facts just
described belong to a date some years anterior to
the journey of 1637, but, in any case, Hobbes's
third residence abroad marks a definite epoch in
his life. It is the date at which he first takes his
place as a recognised member of the band of
European thinkers who were aiming at the syste- (
matic reconstruction of science. In Italy he met
the great Galileo, not yet, indeed, blind, but con
fined by the Inquisition to his villa, and a little
tarnished in his renown by his insincere recanta
tion. Almost more important were the connec
tions formed on the return to Paris in 1637.
Here Hobbes became one of the circle which
centred around the famous Franciscan friar,
9
THOMAS HOBBES
Marin Mersenne, who performed what, in the
absence of scientific journals, was the indispens
able service of furthering the communication of
knowledge by bringing learned men together, in
person or by correspondence. Mersenne's cell,
says Hobbes, was more to him than all the
universities. We may note that this same year
saw the publication of the first work of another
of Mersenne's constant correspondents, his old
school-fellow, Rene Descartes, now for years settled
in his self-chosen Dutch seclusion.
Before the end of 1637 Hobbes and his pupil
were once more in England, where the times, as we
know, now began to be singularly troublous. The
next two years saw the trial of Harnpden for his
refusal to pay ship-money, the Edinburgh revolt
against the ill-judged attempt to force Episcopacy
on Scotland, the signing of the Solemn League
and Covenant, and the Scottish invasion of
England. In virtue of his connection with the
Devonshire family, Hobbes was just now much in
the society of the more moderate Royalist leaders,
such as Falkland and Hyde, and the result was
that early in 1640, about the time of meeting of
the Short Parliament, he put aside his wider
philosophical schemes for the composition of a
little work in support of his fundamental political
10
LIFE
conviction that the an ti- social tendencies of
human nature are too strong and deep-rooted to
be held in check by anything short of an absolute
authority, free from all control, such as the
English Crown might be jnade, if released from
all dependence on Parliament. The work, which
bore the title, The Elements of Law, and contains
one of the clearest and fullest of Hobbes's exposi
tions of his psychology, was not printed, but
circulated in manuscript. Ten years later it was
published in an imperfect form as two distinct
essays, Of Human Nature and De Corpore
Politico. It was^ not until 1889 that the work
was printed in its original shape, and with its
original title, by Dr. Tonnies. When the Long
Parliament met towards the end of the year,
and showed its temper by at once proceeding to
impeach Strafford, Hobbes's native timorousness
got the better of him. Fancying that the author
of the Elements of Law might be the next victim,
he promptly escaped to Paris, not to return for
eleven years. In after days he oddly represented
this excessive alarm as giving him an exceptional
claim on royal gratitude.
His flight brought him back to Paris in the very
nick of time. Mersenne was busy, at Descartes'
request, in procuring criticisms from learned men
ii
THOMAS HOBBES
on the famous Meditations, then just about to be
published. One such set of criticisms he obtained
from Hobbes— those which now figure as the
'Third Objections '—but they failed to achieve
their purpose. Descartes was seeking help from
the criticisms of persons in sympathy with his
general line of thought. What he got from
Hobbes was an attack on his fundamental posi
tions by a thinker of radically different convic
tions. Hence he treated the 'Objections' very
curtly, even refusing to admit that they contained
a single valid inference, nor was he more favour
ably impressed by Hobbes's remarks on the
Dioptrique published along with the Discourse
on Method (1637), which were also communicated
to him by Mersenne. On the other hand, Hobbes
contracted an enduring friendship with another
of the lights of Mersenne's circle, Pierre Gassend,
the reviver of Epicureanism.
During 1641 Hobbes recast in Latin his exposi
tion of his psychological and political doctrines ,
The work was printed, in a very limited edition
in 1642 under the title De Give, and was highly
appreciated even by Descartes. It was reissued
five years later from the press of the Elzevirs at
Amsterdam as Elementa Philosophica de Give.
Hobbes had meanwhile been (1646) appointed
12
LIFE
mathematical tutor to the Prince of Wales, after
wards Charles n., who had just come over from
Jersey. The engagement cannot have lasted
beyond 1648, when the Prince withdrew to
Holland, and was possibly ended earlier by a
dangerous illness which overtook Hobbes in 1647.
In after years he was accustomed to meet doubts
as to his religious orthodoxy by an appeal to his
acquiescence, during this illness, in the minis
trations of Dr. Cosins (afterwards Bishop of
Durham).
In 1651 came out an English version of the
De .Give: Philosophical Rudiments concerning
Government and Society. During the same year
Hobbes was busy with the composition of the
work by which he is now best known to the
general student, Leviathan : or the Matter, Form,
and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical
and Civil, which appeared in London at the end
of the year. The book consists of a restatement
of the general philosophical argument for abso
lutism, with the addition of a long and bitter
polemic against admitting any independent
ecclesiastical authority other than the civil
sovereign. A specially handsome copy of the
MS. was presented to Charles n., now King of
Scots, on his return to Paris after the adven-
13
THOMAS HOBBES
turous escape from Worcester. But the Anglican
Royalists, who identified the cause of monarchy
with the cause of the English Church, were
naturally incensed at the author's consistent
Erastianism and an ti- clericalism, and for a time
contrived to keep Hobbes from access to the King.
Between this, and his concern as to the way in
which the anti-papal doctrines of Leviathan
might be received by the French clergy, Hobbes
once more took alarm, and made his way back to
London at the end of 1651, sending in his formal
submission to the Council of State shortly after.
There was just now, amid the general confusion
following on the abolition of the old constitution,
no censorship of the press in England to interfere
with his publications. Thus it carne about that
the Leviathan could be published in London, and
that so much of the great systematic work on
philosophy as was ever completed appeared, after
all, on English soil.
Among Hobbes's personal friends of this period
we have to note the famous Selden, and the still
more famous Harvey. With Milton, the chief
man of letters among the anti-Royalists, he had
no relations, though it is recorded that Milton
i ' did not like him, but would acknowledge him to
\ be a man of great parts.' Hobbes, for his part,
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declared, comparing Milton's famous Defence of
the People of England with Salmasius' Defence of
the King, 'they are very good Latin both, and
hardly to be judged, which is better, and both very
ill reasoning, hardly to be judged, which is worse.' -
Hobbes was now at last, at the age of 64, work
ing on the reasoned exposition of his system.
When completed, the scheme was to contain
three divisions : (1) of Body, the presentation of
the fundamental principles of the new science of
motion, and the deduction from them of a doctrine
of physics ; (2) of Man, a further deduction from
the same principles, of human physiology and
psychology ; (3) of the Body Politic, a deduction
of ethics, politics, and sociology from the results
reached in the previous sections. Thus the final
achievement would have been the deduction of
social science as a body of corollaries from the
principles of mechanics. From the first, the
execution of this plan was delayed by contro
versies, largely provoked by Hobbes's own mis
takes, and the great scheme never reached fulfil
ment. The first section was, indeed, completed,
but the second remained a mere fragment, and
the third is represented only by works like the
De Give and Leviathan, originally composed as
independent treatises.
15
THOMAS HOBBES
The De Corpore, though in the press in 1654,
did not appear until 1655, the reason of the delay
being that, during the interval, Hobbes had dis
covered flaws in the quadrature of the circle
which he fancied himself to have found, and of
which he had been rather rashly boasting in
advance. By the time of publication he had
further become implicated in the eternal dispute
about the freedom of the will, and the con
sequence of his double controversy with the
mathematicians and the theologians was that,
when the De Homine at last appeared in 1658, it
turned out to contain nothing but a few chapters
on optics, along with a brief sketch of elementary
psychology. For many years after 1655 Hobbes's
career as an author is mainly the history of a
series of acrimonious disputes with mathematical
and theological opponents.
The theological disputes go back ultimately to
the year 1646, when Hobbes had held a verbal
discussion with Bramhall, Bishop of Londonderry,
and afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, in which
he maintained the determinist view of human
action against the Arminian and High Anglican
doctrine of free will. Both parties had after
wards reduced the substance of their contentions
to writing, though with an understanding that
16
LIFE
nothing should be published on either side. In
1654, however, an unknown person who had pro
cured a copy of Hobbes's MS., which contains
one of the clearest statements ever made of the
argument for determinism, published it under
the title A Discourse concerning Liberty and^
Necessity. Bramhall, angered at what he sup
posed to be the bad faith of Hobbes, replied in
1655 by publishing his own original contribution
to the controversy, Hobbes rejoining in the next
year with a fresh set of Questions concerning
Liberty, Necessity, and C/tance. The ' questions '
were,, in turn, attacked by Bramhall in 1658 in a
work to which was appended a violent attack on
Leviathan, facetiously styled The Catching of
Leviathan, the Great Whale. Hobbes took no
notice of this onslaught beyond drawing up, ten
years later (1668), a refutation of Bramhall's im
putations of impiety, which, like most of his
writings of that time, was not published until
after his death.
More damaging for Hobbes was his violent
quarrel with the Oxford mathematicians, itself an
outgrowth of his attacks on the Universities.
Like many other persons who have never quite
made themselves at home in geometry, Hobbes
unluckily conceived the notion that he had solved
B 17
THOMAS HOBBES
the famous (and insoluble) problems of the quad
rature of the circle and the subdivision of the
angle into any given number of equal parts. In
palliation of his delusion it may be pleaded that
neither problem was definitely known in his day
to be insoluble by the methods of elementary
geometry. In fact the insolubility of the more
famous of the two, that of the quadrature, has
only been finally demonstrated in our own time
by Lindemann, though a sounder mathematical
instinct would, no" ^doubt, have suggested to
Hobbes that it probably was not to be solved.
His fault lay not so much in attempting to
grapple with the problem as in the obstinacy
with which he refused to recognise the futility of
his results, even when they had been repeatedly
exposed by the first mathematicians of the day.
A few words must be said as to the history of the
quarrel. Hobbes had, in Leviathan, made a bitter
attack on the Universities, which he regarded as
v the chief supporters of clerical pretensions, and
had particularly enlarged on their ignorance of
mathematics and natural science. He did not
know, or forgot, that the Oxford of 1651 was a
very different place from the Oxford of half a
century earlier. The Savilian Professorships had
done much to raise the standard of mathematical
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and physical knowledge, and Oxford was already
the home of an eager band of scientific workers
who were subsequently to form the nucleus of the
Royal Society. The resentment of the Oxford
men of science against Hobbes's undeserved stric
tures had already found expression in the Vin-
dicice Academiarum (1654) of Seth Ward, Savilian
Professor of Astronomy, a rejoinder to an attack
on the Universities by the Rev. John Webster,
also honourably known as one of the first writers
against the belief in witchcraft. Ward, however,
took only a minor part in the long and angry
controversy which followed on the publication of
the De Gorpore, Hobbes's principal assailant being
Ward's associate, John Wallis, Savilian Professor
of Geometry, the most eminent English mathe
matician of the generation before Newton. Three
months after the issue of the De Corpore in 1655
followed Wallis's Elenchus Geometrice Hobbiance,
exposing the fallacies of Hobbes's quadrature, and
proving, with the aid of an unbound copy of the
work, that his ' solutions,' such as they were, had
been repeatedly modified owing to their author's
discovery of errors in them after they had been
sent to the press. In 1656 there came out an
English version of the De Corpore, made by
Hobbes's instruction, but not from his own hand
19
THOMAS HOBBES
(Concerning Body, 1656). Here the 'solutions'
were given as mere 'aggressions/ or approxima
tions, but, as a set-off, the book contained an
appendix, Six Lessons to the Oxford Professors,
decrying the whole of Wallis's mathematical
work. Wallis rejoined in three months with a
Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes, which, in its turn,
provoked in 1657 an abusive reply from Hobbes,
and the inevitable counter-reply from Wallis. In
1660 Hobbes returned to the fray with five Latin
dialogues, Examinatio et Emendatio Mathema
tical Hodiernce. Next year he proceeded to bring
out a professed solution of the third of the
famous ancient problems, the duplication of the
cube, which was, as usual, duly refuted by Wallis.
In 1662 Hobbes went on to aim a blow at the
recently incorporated Eoyal Society, in which
Wallis was a prominent figure, by attacking
Boyle's experiments with the air-pump, and en
deavouring to show that mere experimentation
adds nothing to our insight into nature. Boyle
replied with an Examen of Mr. Hobbes his Dia-
logus, and Wallis, with a scathing satire on
Hobbes's mathematics, Hobbius Heauton Timo-
rumenus. Hobbes wisely left this exposure un
answered, but avenged himself signally upon
Wallis's incidental political insinuation against
20
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him of having favoured Cromwell's usurpation,
by a letter On the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners,
and Religion of T. H., in which Wallis was re
minded of the service he had done to the Parlia
mentarians by deciphering the papers of Charles i.
captured at Naseby. For some years after this
the controversy slumbered, but was revived again
by Hobbes in 1666. Wallis continued to refute
Hobbes's various mathematical papers as they
came out until 1672, and then allowed the dis
pute to drop. Hobbes, for his part, still kept up
the game, and even in his latest work Decameron
Physiologicum, produced when he was over
ninety, contrived to insert a new ' demonstration '
of the equality of a straight line to an arc of a
circle.
Meanwhile, the Restoration had made some
change in the philosopher's position. He was
met and warmly welcomed by Charles n. a few
days after his return to England, encouraged to
present himself at Court, had his portrait painted
at the king's expense, and received a pension of
£100, which, unfortunately, was not always regu
larly paid. Court favour, however, could only,
partly protect the author of Leviathan from the
animosity of the clergy whom he had handled so
roughly. In connection with the Bill brought
21
THOMAS HOBBES
into the Commons in 1666, under the influence of
the emotions aroused by the Plague and the Great
Fire, for the suppression of atheism and profanity,
a Committee was appointed to receive informa
tions against atheistical, blasphemous, and pro
fane books, among which Leviathan was specified
by name. The Bill fell through in the Lords, but
Hobbes, who began to fear that he was in personal
danger, made, it is said, a show of conformity, and
took care, in reprinting Leviathan in Latin, to
add an appendix intended to show that his doc
trines did not formally contradict the Nicene
Creed. He even took the trouble to draw up a
dissertation on the state of the English law of
Heresy, to prove that he could not legally be
burned. From this time on, Hobbes only retained
Court protection on condition of abstention from
all publications on political and religious topics.
For the Latin edition of his Opera Omnia, which
appeared in 1668, he had to find a publisher in
Holland, and Pepys records in his diary for Sep
tember 3rd of the same year that a second-hand
copy of Leviathan (which had originally come
out at 8s.) cost him 24s., and that the price was
still rising, as the book could not be reprinted.
| Similarly a new treatise of the same date, Behe-
\ moth, the History of the Civil Wars, was pro-
22
LIFE
scribed by the censor. In spite of age and rebuffs,
Hobbes still continued to write on a variety of
topics, ranging from mathematics to English Law
and Church History, and was frequently visited,
on account of his fame as a scholar and philo
sopher, by foreign admirers of learning who found
themselves in England.
In 1669 his clerical enemies found a charac
teristic method of annoying him. Daniel Scar-
gill, a disreputable Fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, was deprived of his degree
and expelled from the University for having
publicly maintained theses taken from Leviathan.
Scargill was persuaded to make an edifying re
cantation, in which the blame for his loose life
was laid on the supposed immoral principles he
had imbibed from the books of Hobbes, who,
thanks to the censorship, was unable to protest
against the imputations. Five years later, Oxford
followed suit. Dr. Fell, Dean of Christchurch,
and hero of a well-known uncomplimentary
epigram, took advantage of his connection with
the University Press to strike out of the Latin
version of Anthony Wood's History and Anti
quities of Oxford all the appreciative epithets
which the English original had bestowed on
Hobbes, and to replace them by terms of abuse.
23
THOMAS HOBBES
Hobbes was this time permitted by the king to
publish a letter of remonstrance, but the only effect
was to draw from Dr. Fell an outrageous additional
note to the book in which Hobbes was reviled
more coarsely than before. Meanwhile the old
man had for a while amused himself by a return
to the literary pursuits of his earlier days. In
1672 he composed a succinct account of his life,
works, and various controversies in Latin elegiacs,
and in 1673 and the year or two following a
complete version of the Iliad and Odyssey in
English rhyme, a sufficiently arduous task for
an old man well on towards his ninetieth
year. In 1675 he finally left London, residing
for the few years of life still left to him alternately
at the two Derbyshire seats of the Devonshire
family, Chatsworth and Hardwick. His last
work, Decameron Physiologicum, was, as we
have already seen, produced in 1678 at the
age of ninety. At the end of the following
year, when the family moved, as usual, from
Ghatsworth to Hardwick for the winter, Hobbes
refused to be left behind. But the journey
proved too much for his strength, and a few
days after reaching Hardwick the old philosopher
was struck by paralysis, of which he died on
J^^m^be^rW^^t the age of ninety-one years
and eight months. The body was laid to rest in
24
LIFE
a modest grave in the parish church of Hault
Hucknall, just outside the park gates.
Hobbes's personal appearance is well known to
us from various portraits, and from the descrip
tion of his friend Aubrey. He was tall, erect,
and strikingly handsome of face. Though sickly
in youth, in manhood and later age he was excep
tionally healthy and vigorous, being able even
at seventy-five to enjoy an occasional game of
tennis. His personal habits were regular, and
in later age, abstemious, though, according to
Aubrey, he owned to having been drunk about a
hundred 'times in his life, a moderate allowance
in those days especially as the good gentleman
seems to have regarded occasional drunkenness
as medicinal. There is a report of the existence
of a natural daughter, for whom he is said to
have provided. With respect to his character,
there is little to be objected against except his
natural timidity, and a certain lack of emotional
warmth, which did not, however, prevent him
from proving a benefactor to his relatives and a
steady and constant friend. In spite of his rather
cynical theories of human nature, he appears to }
have been reasonably charitable to real distress,
and it is highly creditable to him, as well as to
his protectors, the family of Cavendish, that,
having once resolved on the life of a scholar and
25
THOMAS HOBBES
thinker, he avoided all temptations to desert his
modest position for the sake of worldly advan
tage, and that so much care was taken to make
that position compatible with his unchecked
pursuit of his chosen studies. If we look
in vain in his life and writings for any traces
of deep spirituality and ethical inwardness,
the same thing may be said of Descartes, and,
in fact, of most of the eminent thinkers of an
' exceedingly worldly and unspiritual age. It is
not often that we find, as we do in Plato, the
combination in one person of intense spiritual
earnestness with the faculty of cool and keen
rationalistic analysis. Apart from its splendid
trust in the competence of the human intellect
to discover the truth of things, there is not much
\ in Hobbes's philosophical scheme to arouse the
enthusiasm of the young and ardent, and more
than a little which is positively repellent. But
there are few writers whose work is more fruit
ful of suggestions for the matured and reflective
intellect which has grown suspicious of all en
thusiasm, even of its own, and demands before
all things calm and impartial reasoned analysis.
Perhaps the best proof of Hobbes's real genius
is that even his worst errors are so much more
instructive than the truths of lesser men.
26
CHAPTER II
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
HOBBES'S main influence on the thought both of his
own and of subsequent times has been felt almost
exclusively in the domain of Ethics and Politics.
He is primarily important to us as the herald of
a new epoch in English thinking, an epoch which,
we might fairly say, was closed only the other
day by the death of Herbert Spencer. When we
think of him, it is usually as the first in the long
succession of English empirical psychologists, the
earliest English writer of many who have sought
to found a purely naturalistic system of moral
and political science on the basis of biological
and psychological fact. But it is equally true
that Hobbes ends an epoch. He is the last
English philosophical writer, with the single ex
ception of Spencer, to understand the word
1 philosophy ' in the wide sense put upon it in the
Middle Ages, as the systematised and codified
body of all rational human knowledge. With his
27
THOMAS HOBBES
immediate successor, Locke, begins that distinc
tion between science and philosophy by which
the scope of the latter is closely restricted to
episteinological inquiries into the conditions and
nature of knowledge in general, and psychological
investigations into its growth, while the task of
extending the contents of our knowledge of the
extra-subjective world is made over exclusively
to the sciences — a distinction which has ever
since, for good and bad, dominated English philo
sophy. From Hobbes's own point of view, then,
his doctrine of Man and Society cannot be fully
appreciated unless we consider it, in connection
with the rest of his system, as an integral part of
that body of deductions from the general laws
of motion which constitutes science. For this
reason, as well as for the intrinsic value of many
of his thoughts on the nature and methods of
science, it is essential to examine Hobbes's general
theory of the range and the procedure of science
before considering his achievements as a theorist
in the fields of morals and sociology.
The definition of philosophy, as given at the
beginning of the De Corpore — our citations are
from the English version of 1656— runs thus:
'Philosophy is such knowledge of effects or
appearances as we acquire by true ratiocination
28
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
from the knowledge we have first of their causes
or generations, and, again, of such causes or genera
tions as may be from knowing first their effects.'
Here the words ' by true ratiocination ' are in
tended to exclude from philosophy knowledge
directly given in sense perception or resting
merely upon unsystematised experience, while the
expression 'such causes ... as may be/ in the
second clause of the sentence, alludes to Hobbes's
view that by reasoning backward from ' effects '
to their ' causes/ we can never discover the ' cause '
of a given ' effect/ but on.ly one or more alterna
tive ' causes ' by any one of which the result
might have been ' produced/
Philosophy then is, in short, reasoned know
ledge, and, if we ask why we ought to set a value
on such knowledge, Hobbes replies, even more
emphatically than Bacon, 'for the sake of its
practical consequences.' 'The end of knowledge
is power, and the use of theorems ... is for the
construction of problems ; and lastly, the scope of
all speculation is the performing of some action, or
thing to be done ' (Concerning Body, i. 6). In par
ticular, the utility of ' moral and civil philosophy '
is to be measured by the calamities which arise
from ignorance of it. All the avoidable
calamities of human life, says Hobbes, with
29
THOMAS HOBBES
characteristic exaggeration, are due to war. And
men go to war, not because they wish to do so,
or because they do not know that war is pro-
^ductive of evil effects, but because they do not
w the true causes of war and peace. That
is, they are uninstructed in the true principles of
civil and political obedience, which had, in fact,
according to Hobbes, been formulated for the
first time in 1642 in his own De Give. A true
system of Philosophy, in which the principles of
morals and politics should be rigorously deduced
from the fundamental axioms of science, would
therefore act as a universal peacemaker.
Philosophy, then, is sharply distinguished by
its reasoned form from history, the mere record
of past experience ; ' whereas sense and memory
are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past
and irrecoverable, science is the knowledge of
consequences and dependence of one fact upon
another' (Leviathan, c. v.). The peculiarity of
philosophy or science is that its results are at
once universal and exact. 'Experience conclu-j
deth nothing universally,' but 'nothing is produced [
by reasoning aright but general, eternal, and im- .!
mutable truths.' It is a notable peculiarity of
Hobbes's doctrine that, while he agrees with the
ordinary empiricist that 'the first beginnings of
30
\
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
knowledge are the phantasms of sense and
imagination/ he almost entirely neglects the
problem of inductive logic, how ' general eternal
and immutable truths ' can be educed from these
particular isolated ' phantasms/
From the definition above given, it follows at
once that, since philosophy treats only of ' genera
tions ' or causal processes, there can be no philo
sophical knowledge of any being which has no
cause, and consequently no philosophy of any
thing eternal. Hence, there is no science of God,
since God is, by definition, an uncaused and
eternal being. Theology is thus, at a stroke, ex
cluded from the range of scientific knowledge.
Similarly, since all causation is production of one
motion by another, there is no science of any
thing except bodies ; the profession of philosophy
is 'to search out the properties of bodies from
their generation, or their generation from their
properties.' Hobbes will not even allow that we
can form any intelligible concept of anything
incorporeal, and contends that when God is said
by the official Anglican theology to be ' without
body,' this is a mere vague expression of reverence.
In strictness, according to him, there is no definite
concept attached to the name ' God,' and it is on
this ground that he criticises Descartes' argu-
THOMAS HOBBES
ment from my possession of an ' idea of God ' to
the actual existence of God. Hobbes replies
(Third Objections to the Meditations), that the in
ference is worthless, since I have no ' idea ' of God
at all. ^All knowledge of God requires revelation,
and revelation needs to be accredited by miracles.
Since miracles have ceased, a point on which
Hobbes agrees with orthodox Protestants, no one
can now claim to be heard when he alleges a
divine revelation as a reason for disobedience to
his civil sovereign. It is our duty to accept the
theology promulgated by the State, not because it
is true, but because it is official. ' Religion is not
philosophy but law.'
Hobbes's general position as to the limits of
science is thus closely akin to that which we
should nowadays call positivistic. Science ex
tends only so far as the world of bodies moving
in accord with fixed mechanical law, and no
further. What distinguishes Hobbes from most
modern representatives of this view is that he
does not combine it, as they do, with the further
assertion that the whole of the knowledge thus
acquired is merely ' relative,' or concerned solely
with ' phenomena,' which are manifestations of an
underlying unknown, and perhaps unknowable,
reality. That bodies really and objectively exist,
32
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
and that the laws of their motion can be dis
covered, he simply assumes as an unquestionable
fact ; he has no inkling of the deeper problem of
Descartes' Meditations, how it is possible for the
individual mind to be assured of anything outside
the circle of its own states.
From the definition of philosophy as the know
ledge of bodies, the threefold division of the
subject at once follows. For bodies are either
natural or artificial. Natural bodies, again, in
clude, among others, one class which is of supreme
importance, inasmuch as it is the object of all
our psychological study of sensation, thought, and
emotion, the bodies of human beings. An arti
ficial body is what we commonly call a society or
commonwealth. The society or commonwealth is
just as much a single body, and governed just as
completely by the general laws of the motion of
bodies, as the individual organism. Its only dis
tinctive characteristic is that it is artificial ; i.e. it
owes its origin to the voluntary agreement of the
persons who form its constituent members. Hence
philosophy, as a whole, falls into three parts,
the doctrine of body in general, the doctrine of
the human body in particular, the doctrine of
the artificial body, or commonwealth. ' Two chief
kinds of bodies, and very different from one
c 33
THOMAS HOBBES
another, offer themselves to such as search after
their generation and properties ; one whereof,
being the work of nature, is called a natural body :
the other is called a commonwealth, and is
made by the wills and agreement of men. And
from these spring the two parts of philosophy
called Natural and Civil ... In the first place,
therefore (after I have set down such premisses as
appertain to the nature of philosophy in general),
I will discourse of bodies natural, in the second
of the dispositions and manners of men, and in
the third of the civil duties of subjects.' — (Con
cerning Body, i. 9.)
By the premisses which appertain to the nature
of philosophy in general are meant, of course, the
general principles of logic and method, and it is
from the account of them that we have to collect
Hobbes's views on the theory of knowledge.
Scientific method, then, has two branches, reason
ing from general principles (definitions and
axioms), to their consequences, or, as Hobbes
phrases it, from causes to their effects, and this is
synthesis; reasoning from the facts to the prin
ciples involved, from effects to causes, and this is
analysis. Synthesis and analysis thus correspond
to our popular distinction between the deductive
and inductive uses of logic. Only the former, the
34
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
purely deductive type of reasoning, is rigidly cer
tain and yields perfectly determinate conclusions. A
The latter is essentially hypothetical, and consists
merely in pointing out such principles as would
lead deductively to the observed results. Hence
Hobbes, like Epicurus, explicitly maintains that
different theories as to the ' cause ' of an observed
fact may be equally true, if each would equally
lead to consequences which agree with observed
facts. In modern language, his theory of method
makes ' induction ' to consist simply in the forma
tion of explanatory hypotheses, apart from the
further task of complete verification by showing
that any explanation other than that adopted
would lead to results which conflict with fact.
Like Jevons, he regards ' induction ' as being
merely the inverse operation corresponding to
the direct operation of deduction, as division
or integration corresponds to multiplication or
differentiation. Hence he held that the Royal
Society was proceeding on altogether false lines in
attempting to advance physical science by direct
experiment rather than by reasoning deductively
from preassumed general theories. Hence, too,
his uniform silence as to the ' inductive ' method
of Bacon, the avowed object of which was to
eliminate the 'anticipation of nature' by the
35
THOMAS HO
framing of initial hypotheses altogether from the
work of science.
Now the ultimate first principles of deductive
science are all, according to Hobbes, definitions,
that 'is, statements of the meaning of names.
Everything in science, therefore, turns upon the
original definitions ; science is merely the correct
deduction of the consequences implied in the
giving of names. And names, Hobbes holds, were
originally given arbitrarily. ' For it is true that,
e.g. man is a living creature, but it is for this
reason, that it pleased men to impose both those
names on the same thing ' (Concerning Body, iii. 8).
This point comes out clearly in the famous
definition of a name (Ib., ii. 4): 'A name is
a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark
which may raise in our minds a thought like to
some thought we had before, and which, being
pronounced to others, may be to them a sign of
what thought the speaker had, or had not, before
in his mind.' Consistently with this view, Hobbes
adopts an ultra-nominalist position in logic. The
only names which directly denote realities are
singular names of individual bodies; general
terms, or common names, do not directly denote
an object at all. There is, e.g. no such object as
' man in general.' ' This word universal is never
36
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
the name of anything existent in nature, nor of
any idea or phantasm formed in the mind, but
always the name of some word or name, so that
when a living creature, a stone, a spirit, or any
other thing is said to be universal, it is not to be
understood that any man, stone, etc., ever was or
can be universal, but only that these words are
universal names, that is, names common to many
things' (76., ii. 9). A proposition is 'a speech
consisting of two names copulated, by which he
that speaketh, signifies he conceives the later
name to be the name of the same thing whereof
the former is the name ' (/&., iii. 2).
Thus Hobbes's doctrine as to the import of
propositions is that their whole meaning is that
the predicate is a name of the same thing as the
subject, or the case of negative propositions, that
the subject and predicate are not names for the
same thing. He is careful, however, to mitigate
the extreme nominalism of this account by add
ing that the use of the copula in English is to
make us think of a reason why the two names
are both given to the same thing. Searching
criticism might here find an occasion for attack
ing Hobbes out of his own mouth, since this last
remark as to the function of the copula clearly
sets limits to the alleged arbitrariness of the em-
37
THOMAS HOBBES
ployment, if not to the arbitrariness of the inven
tion, of names.
Keasoning now receives an equally nominalist
definition. It is, and the phrase sounds curiously
prophetic of the modern discovery that logic is
really a mathematical calculus, the computation
of the consequences of names, and may be re
garded as consisting entirely of addition (the
formation of complex concepts by putting words
together), and subtraction (i.e. abstraction, the
formation of more general concepts by analysis of
a complex name into its simpler components),
Concerning Body, i. 2, 3 ; iv. 6 ; Leviathan, c. iv.).
Now apart from any minor objections which
might be raised as to Hobbes's tacitly implied
theory of the way in which language has histori
cally developed, this whole account of the nature
of reasoning involves an obvious and tremendous
difficulty of principle, a difficulty which meets us
again in the doctrine of those modern mathema
ticians and logicians who regard the written or
printed symbols of Arithmetic and Algebra as the
actual objects with which mathematical thought
is concerned. As we have seen, Hobbes holds
that the whole body of the conclusions of deduc
tive science is a mere consequence of the initial
deiinitions (a point on which he was afterwards
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND M
followed by Locke), and, as he is careful ^ point
out, the sense which the introducer of a new
word or other symbol is to put upon his invention
is a matter of his own choice. The definition,
then, being merely a declaration of the sense in
which I intend to employ a hitherto unused word
or other sign, is, properly speaking, neither true
nor false. As Hobbes himself puts it (Concerning
Body, vi. 15), it is not necessary to dispute whether
definitions are to be admitted or no. For when a
master is instructing his scholar, if the scholar
understand all the parts of the thing defined
which are resolved in the definition, and yet will
not admit of the definition, ' there needs no further
controversy betwixt them, it being all one as if
he refused to be taught.' Since all our conclu-
sions, then, are simply logical consequences of
arbitrarily constructed definitions, whio.h are
themselves neither true nor false, it would seem
to follow that the whole of knowledge is a mere
ingenious sporting with puzzles, like the solving
of chess problems, the ultimate rules of the game
being, like the rules of chess, neither true nor
false, but purely arbitrary. In what intelligible
sense, then, can our conclusions be said to be
themselves true ?
It is this difficulty which Leibniz has in his
39
THOMAS HOBBES
mind when he urges against the extreme nomi
nalists that though names are artificial, they are
not arbitrary. (For instance, quite different
symbols might be chosen to represent the con
cepts we commonly symbolise by the signs 2, 3, 5,
4- , = , and in that case the truth we now write in
the form 2 + 3 = 5 would be expressed by a very
different set of symbols. But the numerical truth
meant, or symbolised, by both groups of signs
would be one and the same. For every true
proposition, expressed in our familiar notation,
about relations between numbers, there would be
one, and only one, corresponding proposition in
the other set of symbols. The particular signs
selected to denote the different numbers, and the
different operations which can be performed upon
them, may be largely arbitrary, but there is
nothing arbitrary about the laws of their com
bination.)
The secret of Hobbes's mistake, in fact, lies in
the insidious error into which he falls about the
logical character and function of definitions. It
is not true, as he supposes, that e.g. in Geometry
the definitions are the real premisses from which
the theorems are inferred. Technically, as Hobbes
himself has seen, a definition is a mere verbal
abbreviation, a mere substitution of a single
40
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
hitherto unemployed word, or other symbol, for a
more complicated set of words or signs of already
known import. Hence you could eliminate the
definitions from the science altogether by merely
replacing every defined symbol in a demonstration
by the group of symbols for which, as its definition
declares, it is an abbreviation. The only differ
ence such a proceeding would make would be that
our demonstrations would be thus rendered pain
fully long and cumbrous. This is why Hobbes is
perfectly correct in holding that a scientific defi
nition is really neither true nor false, since it is,
in fact, not a proposition at all, but a mere con
vention between different thinkers as to the sense
to be put on a particular abbreviation. But what
Hobbes does not see is thatvjt follows at once from
this correct view of the function of definitions,
that the definitions are never the premisses from
which our scientific demonstrations are inferred.
real premisses of all demonstrations are party
logical axioms, that is assertions which declare
that certain propositions imply formally the truth
of certain others, partly postulates, or unprovable
existence-theorems, that is assertions that certain
objects exist, or have a certain relation to one
another. An instance of the former kind of
premiss in Euclid is the 'first axiom,' which
THOMAS HOBBES
states that if the magnitude of a is the same as
that of 6, and the magnitude of b is the same as
that of c, then it follows that the magnitude of a
is the same as that of c. Examples of the second
kind are the unexpressed postulate that there
exists the class of entities called points, or the
explicitly enunciated postulate of the existence of
the straight line (i.e. of an entity which is com
pletely determined when two of its points are
given). And when we carry our analysis of the
presuppositions of demonstrative science far
enough we shall always find that just as the
ultimate logical axioms are, for the simple reason
that they are preconditions of all proof, them
selves unprovable, so the ultimate existential
postulates, because they are preconditions of all
definition, are all assertions of the existence of
kinds of entities which are indefinable. Now
these ultimate axioms and postulates being thus
neither arbitrary, nor mere declarations of the
signification of names, we escape the conclusion to
which Hobbes's view would lead, that there is, in
the end, no sense in asking whether the proposi
tions of science are true or not, and science comes,
after all, to be something very different in kind
from a curiously complicated chess problem.
To return, however, to the exposition of Hobbes's
42
PHILOSOPHY, IT METHODS
thought. As we have aireau^ *v^, ^obbes starts
with the assumption, as ultimate scientific pos
tulates, of the fundamental propositions of a rigid
mechanical materialism. The only things which
we really know to exist are bodies, and bodies are
only known to us as vehicles of motion. All the
facts of external nature and of mental life must
therefore, for science, be varieties of motion in
the parts of body, and nothing more. Hence a
completed philosophy would amount to a vast
system of deductions by which all the truths of
physical and mental science would be shown to
be logical consequences of the ultimate simple
laws of motion laid down by mechanics. From ,
the purely philosophical point of view, it is
Hobbes's chief merit that he has undertaken the
task of performing such a deduction with greater
consistency, and a fuller consciousness of what it
implies than any writer before or after him ; he is
the one consistent philosophical materialist in the
history of thought, as far as that history is known
to us, whose intelligence rises above mediocrity,
and whose candour, at the same time, leaves no
doubt as to his exact meaning. Hence it is most
instructive, as throwing light upon the inherent
defects of materialism as an ultimate philosophical
standpoint, to observe at what points his initial
THOMAS HOBBES
postulates fail him. Such a failure occurs, with
the consequence that Hobbes is forced to abandon
his strictly deductive method, at two critical
points in his exposition. When he enters upon
the realm of our inner mental life in his account
of sensation, he has to abandon the attempt to
deduce our perception of the various qualities of
bodies, their colours, savours, odours, and the like,
from a mathematical theory of the external motions
which are commonly called their causes or stimuli,
and to accept the correlation of the various sense-
qualities with certain external stimuli simply as
given and unexplained facts of experience. And in
the same way, when he advances to the theory of
human conduct, he finds it quite out of the ques
tion to exhibit the fundamental passions of human
nature as movements of particles within the
organism mechanically determined by similar
movements on the part of external bodies; the
fundamental passions, like the simple, sensible
qualities of things, have to be treated as unex
plained given facts, and the assertion that they are
really motions of particles of the body, and nothing
more, remains a mere unproved assertion which
is of no significance for the further development
of Hobbes's ethical scheme. There is thus no
real logical connection between Hobbes's ineta-
44
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
physical materialism and his ethical and political
doctrine of human conduct; the whole of the
latter might, in fact, be equally well grafted upon
a pronounced spiritualistic metaphysic, such as
that of Descartes. Even the rejection of the
doctrine of free wilH§, in point of fact, based upon
assumed psycKoIogical grounds which in no way
involve the metaphysical postulate that all exist
ence is bodily ; in short, the only advantage which
Hobbes really derives from his materialism is
that it furnishes him with a plausible excuse for
his refusal to take theology seriously.
Of Hobbes's theory of the passions it will be
time enough to speak in the next chapter. But
something must be said here of the effect of
his materialistic assumptions upon his doctrine
of perception. It is an immediate consequence
of the postulate that all physical change is
motion that the various apparent sensible quali
ties of external bodies cannot be objectively real.
Colours, smells, and the rest must be mere
'appearances' within the percipient of realities,
which are, in truth, mere motions of material
particles— ' All which qualities, called sensible,
are in the object that causeth them but so many
several motions of the matter, by which it presseth
our organs diversely' (Leviathan, c. i.). Hobbes
45
*
1
THOMAS HOBBES
is thus at one with Galileo and Descartes, and the
rest of the founders of modern mechanical science
in proclaiming the doctrine of the c subjectivity '
of sensible — or, as Locke named them — secondary
qualities. They are not real attributes of external
things, but simply effects, produced by the action
of external things upon the ' mind ' or the ' nervous
system ' of the percipient. But Hobbes does not
stop at this point. As a consistent materialist,
he is bound to hold that the mind or nervous
system is, like everything else, a body, and con
sequently that the only effect that can be pro
duced upon it by any external agent is the same
kind of effect which one external agent can
produce on another, a modification of its previous
motions. The sensible quality, e.g. a colour, must
not merely be a mere subjective effect of external
motion, it must itself, as a subjective effect, be a
motion, and nothing more. So he adds immedi
ately after the words just quoted, ' Neither in us
that are pressed are they anything else but divers
motions; (for motion produceth nothing but
motion).' Thus we are left to face the paradox
that the whole world of perceived sensible quali
ties is an illusion, while there is not, and on the
principles of strict materialism cannot possibly
be, any one to be illuded. Colours, tones, smells,
- *
^OSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
tastes, have first been declared to be subjective
effects produced upon the individual percipient
by the impact of particles themselves devoid of
all quality; then, since it has to be recognised
that, according to materialism, the subject in
which these effects are produced must be itself ^ *
just one collection of such particles among others/\ ^
it is announced that the effects themselves cannot^
really be there. If the average materialist stops v+
short of enunciating this intolerable paradox, * ,<
it is only because he is so far Hobbes's inferior
in logical power, or in candour, or in both.
The conception of the subjectivity of sensible
qualities is still so commonly regarded as an
established result of modern science that it is
worth our while to pause over it for a few
moments, and to ask whether it can be main
tained in a form which does not lead to the
Hobbian paradox. Suppose that Hobbes had
so far relaxed his materialism as to recognise A
the real existence of immaterial 'states of con- /
sciousness,' might he not have held, without any
paradoxical consequences, that what we com
monly call the secondary or sensible qualities of
external things are in truth 'states of our own
consciousness,' which are caused by the action
of an external world of bodies totally devoid of
47
THOMAS HOBBES
quality ? Such a view was widely current in the
ancient philosophical schools, and was revived
in Hobbes's own day by Galileo and Descartes,
from the latter of whom it passed as an almost
unquestioned axiom into modern science. Yet
it is clear, I think, that the doctrine will not bear
serious examination. The very ground upon
which the sensible qualities are declared to be
subjective, to be 'in us ' and not ' in the things
outside us,' is the assumption that all the pro
cesses of the physical world, however various
they may seem to be, are in actual facf purely
mechanical. If this principle is true, it must
hold just as much for the living organism, which,
after all, is just one body among others, as for
everything else. The effects of a stimulus upon
the organism, whatever they may seem to be,
must in reality be as entirely mechanical as the
stimulus itself, as Hobbes very properly said.
Even if a colour or a sound could be said without
absurdity to be a 'state of consciousness,' the
principles of a mechanical philosophy would
absolutely forbid our calling that' state an ' effect '
\ of an external stimulus. The ' effect ' of the
stimulus would have to be simply the ex hypothesi
purely mechanical changes induced by it in the
nervous system, and with these changes the
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
' state of consciousness ' would have really no
discoverable relation but the temporal relation
of simultaneity. The whole of our intellectual life
would become, as it has sometimes been called,
an ' epiphenomenon,' a series of events occurring
simultaneously with certain mechanical changes
in the world of bodies, but standing absolutely
outside the series of causes and effects.
And, if we carried analysis a step further, we
should at once be confronted by a still more
formidable difficulty. For it would readily be
come apparent that, whatever sensible qualities
may be, they are certainly not ' states ' of a mind.
When, in common parlance, I arn said to see a
blue flower, it is really ridiculous to say that in
truth it is my mind which is blue. My judgment
' that flower is blue ' may be true, or it may be
false, but in either case one thing is quite clear.
It is not ' being blue/ but ' believing that the
(•'•'.*rer is blue' which is, in that moment, a state
' :ny perceiving mind. And this simple reflec
tion is in itself enough to dispose of the whole
doctrine of the 'subjectivity of sensible qualities.'
There are really only two alternative possibilities
in the case. Either all the propositions in which
a sensible quality is ascribed to a thing are merely
false, as Hobbes's account logically implies, or
D 49
THOMAS HOBBES
slse there are at least some bodies which really
lave the sensible qualities of colour, savour, and
50 forth. It would be no way of escape to suggest
,hat perhaps what is really blue is neither the
lower nor my mind, but some part of my optical
ipparatus, e.g. the stimulated region of my retina.
Tor, on such a theory, there is at least one body
vhich really has the sensible quality, viz. my
etina. But, if so, why not other bodies as well,
,nd what becomes of the postulate that the only
objectively real properties of body are mechanical?
The fact is that Hobbes, like all the philo-
ophers who have taught the subjectivity of
ensible qualities, commits the grave error of
rying to combine two really inconsistent con-
eptions of the relation between the external
rorld and our perception. He tries to think
f the world of bodies as being at once the cause : ,
I perception, I and also the object which percep-
ion apprehends, j What our last two paragraphs
ave gone to show is that both these conceptions
annot be true at once. If the external world \
is the cause of perception, it cannot be the object \
apprehended in perception; in fact, perception,^)
in that case, can have no object at all, and all
supposed knowledge about anything must be a
mere illusion, as was pretty clearly seen by Hume.
So
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
On the other hand, since the external world is
certainly the object of our perception (how far
that perception is correct or erroneous makes
no difference to the argument), the relation of
the world to the perceiving subject cannot pos
sibly be a causal one. When we have once
grasped this truth, we shall see that the accuracy
of our perception of sensible qualities of body
is a question to be argued, in every special case,
on its own merits, and cannot be impugned by
any general a priori arguments drawn from the
principle of causality. Nor does this conclusion
in any way conflict with the fullest recognition
of the right of physical science to treat the
external world, for its own purposes, as if it were
devoid of sensible qualities, and consisted merely,
let us say, of vibratory motions of different rates
of frequency. All that is required to justify such
a proceeding is that there should be a uniform
one-to-one correlation between each sensible
quality (e.g. each shade of colour), and a par
ticular kind of vibration ; we may then treat the
colour, for all purposes of mathematical physics,
as if it actually were the vibration, just as, in
ordinary analytical geometry, we can treat a
point in a plane as if it were actually a couple
of numbers. Where the physicist so often goes
Si
THOMAS HOBBES
wrong, when he strays into the domain of philo
sophy, is in hastily assuming that two things
which have a one-one correspondence to each
other are really the same thing. As for the
further a posteriori arguments by which Hobbes
tries to establish the subjectivity of sense-
qualities, e.g. in the first chapter of Leviathan,
they are all of the type since made familiar by
Berkeley and his followers (appeals to dreams,
to hallucinations, etc.). Their conclusive force,
whatever it may be, would be equally great if
we applied them to the 'primary' mechanical
properties of body, or even to Hobbes's supreme
reality, motion itself, since all these may be the
subject of dreams and hallucinations, just as
colours or smells might be. In truth, all that
is proved by arguments of this type would seem
to be that it is possible to make erroneous
judgments about external things, a proposition
which no sober philosophy is called on to deny.
In one respect Hobbes goes beyond most of the
English writers who have since espoused the
doctrine that sensible qualities are subjective ; he
maintains the same thing about space and time /
themselves. They also are merely 'phantasms,'
that is, they are not ' the accident or affection of
any body ' ; they are ' not in the things without us,
52
PHILOSOPHY, ITS SCOPE AND METHODS
but only in the thought of the mind ' (Concerning
Body, vii. 3). More precisely, space is ' the phan
tasm of a thing existing without the mind simply ;
that is to say, that phantasm in which we con
sider no other accident, but only that it appears
without us ' ; time is ' the phantasm of before and
after in motion' (Ibid., vii. 2, 3). The ground
given by Hobbes for this assertion is that if the
whole world could be suddenly annihilated except
one man, that man would still retain his con
sciousness of space and time. I confess I do not
see that this consideration proves anything, except
perhaps that space and time are not bodies, nor
do I see how Hobbes could think that motion (the
successive occupation of different positions by the
same thing), is objectively real, and yet hold that
space and time are mere subjective ideas of our
own. His statement, it should be noted, bears no
real resemblance to Kant's famous doctrine of the
' ideality ' of the forms of perception. Space and
time are regarded by him not as universal forms
of perception impressed by the mind upon a
'manifold' of sensations received from without,
but merely as constituent elements of the ' mani
fold' itself. The whole distinction between a
formal element in perception, which comes from
the perceiving subject, and a material element
53
THOMAS HOBBES
contributed by the external world, belongs to a
later and more developed stage of the theory of
knowledge. It is, indeed, a signal advance upon
the Kantian position to recognise clearly that the
'formal' element in perception is no less objec
tive than the * material,' but the recognition seems
inconsistent with sensationalism as a theory of
knowledge. Hobbes is able to be consistently
sensationalist precisely because it does not occur
to him to draw any distinction between the
' formal ' and the ' material ' in our knowledge.
54
CHAPTER III
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY — THE NATURE OF MAN
WE may now proceed to consider the main out
lines of the analysis of cognition and volition
which has earned for Hobbes the well- merited title
of 'founder of e,rppirip.ql psychology.' that chief
contribution of the English-speaking peoples to
mental science. This analysis will be found by
the English reader most fully set forth in two
works, the Human Nature (the first part of the
treatise on the Elements of Law originally com
posed in 1640), and the opening chapters of
Leviathan (published in 1651). We must bear in
mind, however, that Hobbes is chiefly interested
in the ho of the individual mind less for
its^ own sake thanbecause it furnishes him with
a logical foundation for his naturalistic docjJjBp
of ethics and politics; his psychology is con
sequently only worked out so far as is necessary
for the achievement of this ulterior end.
Hobbes, as we have seen, does not attempt to
55
THOMAS HOBBES
deduce the principles of psychology, let alone
these of ethics and politics, from the general
doctrine of motion, but falls back upon our
immediate experience of the main facts of human
nature as we find them in ourselves. He is, so to
say, an empiricist malgre lui, and it is one of the
entertaining ironies of history that the English
philosopher who, of all others, is most strongly
insistent upon the deductive character of genuine
science should be chiefly remembered by that
part of his work which is most flagrantly inconsis
tent with his own conception of strictly scientific
method. From the axiom that neither within nor
without is there any reality but motion there is,
in truth, no road to moral and political science.
Hobbes starts, in his doctrine of man, from the
usual empiricist assumption that all mental life
is a development from beginnings in sensation \_
' for there is no conception in a man's mind which
hath not, at first, totally or by parts, been be
gotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are
derived from that original' (Leviathan, c. i.).
Sensation, as we have seen, is, according to him,
a motion caused in these organs by previous
Liotion in some external body. Why the sensible
qualities, thus begotten, are supposed to belong to
external bodies he explains by the theory that all
56
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
sensation gives rise to motor reaction from the
heart, which he, like the Aristotelians, regards as
the centre of the nervous system, towards the
periphery of the body. It is the outward-flowing
direction of these reactions which causes sensible
objects to appear without us, — a crude version of
the now seriously discredited doctrine of ' feelings
of innervation.' He immediately adds a doctrine
of the relativity of sensation. Sensation requires
a constant variety of stimuli ; persistent exposure
to an unvarying stimulus would readily give rise
to total unconsciousness, ' it being almost one for a
man to be always sensible of one and the same thing
and not to be sensible at all of anything ' (Cone*, n
ing Body, xxv. 5). That is, consciousness depends
. From sensation Hobbes goes on
next to derive imagination and memory. Im
agination is simply ' decaying sense/ i.e. the per
sistence, in a less intense form, of the organic
process excited by a stimulus after the stimulus
itself has been withdrawn. This persistence itself,
again, is a consequence of what Newton was after
wards to call the ' first law of motion/ ' When a
body is once in motion, it moveth (unless some
thing else hinder it) eternally, and whatsoever hin-
dereth it, cannot in an instant, but in time, and by
degrees quite extinguish it. And as we see in the
THOMAS HOBBES
water, though the winds cease, the waves give not
over rolling for a long time after; so also it
happeneth in that motion which is made in the
internal parts of a man, ther\ when he sees,
dreams, etc. For after the object is removed, or
the eye shut, we still retain an image of the
" thing seen, though more obscure than when we
see it. ... Imagination therefore is nothing but
decaying sense' (Leviathan, c. ii.). How, in the
general subjectivity of all sensation, we are to
\ know whether the 'object5 has really been 'with-
Jp drawn ' or not is a problem which Hobbes would
scarcely have found it easy to solve. Memory is
nc";v explained to be simply imagination of what
is past. ' When we would express the decay, and
signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is
called Memory. So that imagination and memory
are but one thing, which for divers considerations
hath divers names ' (Ib.).
It is clear that we are here again confronted by
a difficulty which Hobbes's superficial appeals to
physical analogies cannot conceal. For imagina
tion is by no means exclusively of things past ;
we can imagine our future as readily as we can
remember our past, and we often divert ourselves
by imagining a state of things which neither has
existed nor will ever exist. Now how do we
58
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
come to make these distinctions between different
imaginations if imagination and memory are
merely two names for the same thing looked at
from two different points of view ? Why is not
all imagination indistinguishable from reminis
cence ? In other words, what a psychological
analysis of memory ought to account for is not
the mere fact thatwe can imagine what is
actually past, but the fact that, in doing so, we
recognise the events imagined as belonging to
the past and not to the future or to no time
at all. The secret of Hobbes's failure to give any
satisfactory account of memory is not hard to
find, and it is also the secret of much more that
is defective in his psychological analysis. What
must happen to any really consistent sensationalist
in psychology has happened to him. In his
derivation of mental life from passively received
sensations he has forgotten the presence of .selec
tive attention as an ever-present factor which
actively determines the course of all mental pro
cesses. It is only when we have learned to
distinguish that from which attention is turning
away from that towards which it is moving that
we acquire a basis for the distinction between im
agination of what is ' no longer ' and imagination
of what is ' not yet.'
59
THOMAS HOBBES
Hobbes next advances to the analysis of com
plex trains of thought (Leviathan, c. iii.). He
begins by laying down the general doctrine of
' association of ideas/ giving a crude account of the
psycho-physical dependence of the process upon the
formation of ' paths of conduction ' in the nervous
system, and recognising ' association by contiguity
'more explicitly than ' association by resemblance/
though the latter is not entirely overlooked.
' When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever,
his next thought after is not altogether so casual
as it seems to be. Not every thought to every
thought succeeds indifferently. But ... we have
no transition from one imagination to another
whereof we never hacl the like before in our
senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies
are motions within us/ relics of those made in
the sense ; and "those motions that1 immediately
succeeded one another in the sense continue also
together after sense, insomuch as the former coming
again to take place and be predominant, the later
followeth by coherence of the matter moved/
He distinguishes, however, between mere random
association and thought guided or regulated by
the presence of a definite end or purpose which
controls the formation of associations, e.g. the
orderly thinking out of a series of steps towards
60
>
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
the gratification of a given desire. This latter
ought really to present a difficulty to him, since
it most obviously involves the presence of pur
posive attention as actively determining the
current of thought, and leading to sequences in
'imagination' quite independent of previous
sequences ' in our senses,' and it seems manifest
that such attention cannot be analysed into a
mere succession of subjective effects of physical
stimuli. On Hobbes's theory, as on any theory
which treats association as more than a sub
ordinate factor in determining the course of
thought, whenever we think of a given thing A,
. our next thought should be of a thing B, which
^is either very like A or has been most commonly
perceived or thought of in close connection with
A. In actual fact, in proportion as our thinking
is truly rational, or, as Hobbes would say, regu
lated, the B which the thought of A calls up is
that which it is most relevant to our present
object to think of next, and this B may be some
thing quite unlike A and something which has
never been thought of in this particular con
nection with A before. It is really only un
regulated, random thinking which is dominated
by~ association ; in an orderly train of pur-
2sive thinking association appears, as often as
61
1
THOMAS HOBBES
not, as a disturbing factor and source of pure
irrelevance.
Hobbes now proceeds (Leviathan, c. vi.) to a
similar analysis of voluntary motions, i.e. the
whole conative side of mental life. Like most
pre-Kantian psychologists he reckons feeling and
emotion among the forms of conation. Conation^
is, in every case, nothing but incipient motion
within the nervous system, and such incipient
outward-directed reaction Hobbes calls by the
general name endeavour. Endeavour, again, has
two contrasted directions. It iselther endeavour
to or from a perceived object, the words ' to ' and
from ' being understood quite literally of direc
tion in space. Endeavour towards an object is
what we call appetite or desire ; endeavour "from
an object is called aversion. Other names for
the two directions of endeavour are love and hate.
1 Because going, speaking, and the like voluntary
motions depend always upon a precedent thought
of whither, which way, and what, it Js^evident
tlyitlLLgjniagination is the first internal beginning
of all voluntary motions^ And. althougl
"Studied men do not conceive any motion at all
to be there, where the thing moved is invisible,
or the space it is moved in is (for the shortness
of it) insensible; yet that doth not hinder bn'fi
62
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
that such motions are. . . . These small beginnings
of motion, within the body of man, before they
appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other
visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOUR.
This endeavour, when it is toward something
which causes it, is called APPETITE, or DESIRE;
. . . and when the endeavour is fromward some
thing, it is generally called AVERSION. . . . That
which men desire, they are also said to LOVE, and
to HATE those things for which they have aversion.
So that desire and love are the same thing ; save
that by desire we always signify the absence of
the object, by love most commonly the presence
of the same. So also by aversion we signify the
absence, and by hate the presence, of the object'
(76., c. vi.).
Whatever is the object of appetite or desire
f to a man he calls good; whatever is the object o£
f aversion he calls evil. Hence, since the desires
' of different men, and even of the same man at
different times, are very various, good and evil
\ are purely relative terms, and there can be no
common measure of them, except in civil society,
where they are determined by the command of
the ruler ; hence, again, the absolute necessity for
the civil sovereign and his laws, if moral anarchy
v is to be avoided. ' These words . . . are ever
] 63
i
THOMAS HOBBES
used with relation to the person that useth thei^ ,
there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor
any common rule of good and evil to be taken
from the nature of the objects themselves, but
from the person of the man (when there is no
commonwealth), or (in a commonwealth) from
the person that representeth it, or from an
I arbitrator or judge, whom men disagreeing shall
by consent set up, and make his sentence the
rule thereof (Leviathan, c. vi.). In other words,
there is no such thing as a moral law, equally
binding upon all persons, except in an organised
political community, and in such a community it
self what we call the ' moral ' law is a consequence,
a reflex in the consciousness of the individual man,
of the habit of obedience to the commands of a/
>»c
political ruler.
It follows from this purely naturalistic con
ception of the primary meaning of the words
' good ' and ' evil/ that ' of the voluntary acts of
every man the object is some good to himself
(76., c. xiv.). The proposition is, in fact, tauto-
logous, since, according to Hobbes's definition of
good, good means what a man desires, and, as
we are to see immediately, his psychology is
unable to draw any real distinction between
desire, or ' appetite/ and volition. Thus, on the
64
EMPIRICAL PSYCH
ground that 'the object of a man*
object of his desire/ Hobbes bases the conclusion
that all voluntary action is, in the last resort,
purely egoistic, though it appears that the ' good '
at which an action aims may, in some cases, be
the suppression of the pain we feel at the sight
of another person's suffering, and room is thus
made for a limited and rather inferior kind of
benevolence. It should further be noted that
Hobbes oddly confounds pleasure and pain with
the consciousness of appetite and of aversion
respectively, a gross blunder in analysis which is
forced on him by the necessity of bringing all
features of our mental life under one of the
heads, cognition and motor impulse. Similarly,^ I
he is obliged to falsify his analysis of deliberation
and volition. Deliberation is nothing more than
a succession of alternating impulses or appetites
towards and from the same object. 'When in
the mind of man appetites and aversions, hopes
and fears, concerning one and the same thing
arise alternately, and divers good and evil con
sequences of the doing or omitting the thing
propounded come successively into our thoughts,
so that sometimes we have an appetite towards
it, sometimes an aversion from it ... the whole
Q1H8 °iujJesireQ' ^aversions, hopes, and fears con-
'
THOMAS HOBBES
tinued till the thing be either done, or thought
impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION'
(Leviathan, c. vi.). It follows, of course, that
deliberation is no prerogative of man, but common
to him with the ' brutes.5 Will is simply the last
member of this series, the appetite or aversion
which immediately precedes the visible bodily
reaction. ' The last appetite or aversion immedi
ately adhering to the action, or to the omission
thereof, is that we call the Will . . . and beasts,
that have deliberation, must necessarily also have
will ' (lb.).
From the definition of good and evil, it follows
that Hobbes adopts a purely and crudely deter-
ininist view on the question of free will. A man
inevitably aims at that which at the moment
appears good to himself; in fact all that we mean
by saying that it appears good to him is that he
does so aim at it. Hobbes's essay on Liberty and
Necessity still remains one of the clearest and
most forcible statements of the case for this kind
of rigid determinism against any admission of
j contingency or genuine freedom in human action.
This whole theory of volition obviously suffers
I from grave psychological defects, which, in their
turn, lead to equally grave ethical and sociological
errors. The secret source of Hobbes's worst
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
mistakes in ethical theory must be sought in the
absurd inadequacy of his analysis of deliberation.
From the standpoint of a really thorough psy
chology, nothing can be more ludicrous than his
confusion of rational deliberation with a mere
, see-saw of conflicting animal impulses. Rational
deliberation, as distinguished from mere hesitation,
implies the successive examination of alternative
possibilities of action with a preconceived plan
or purpose which Is^jdrelHy^i&xed in its main
\putlines, but receives further special determina
tion as t"o its details by each of these successive
comparisons^ the final selection of one of the
alternatives as the line to be followed is an acfc,
totally different in its psychical character from :
the blind translation into overt movement of anj
irrational impulse. Hence it is that_ we cant
actually desire what wgdo not will, and will much
we do not desire. Thus we find in Hobbes's
account of volition precisely the same blindness
to the importance of selective attention which we
had found in his analysis of cognition. This has
a further most momentous consequence for his
ethical and social doctrine. From the identifica
tion of volition with mere animal appetite it
follows that civilisation can provide us with no
new objects of volition, it can merely increase our
THOMAS HOBBES
command over the means of gratifying desires
which remain identical with those of the savage,
or supply additional motives, such as, e.g. fear of
the police or the gallows, strong enough to check
the gratification of such desires. We are all still
savages at heart, though we are better informed
than the savage as to the probable consequences
of gratifying our appetites, and have also con- s
trived to attach artificially various new unpleasant
consequences to the gratification of some of them.
Not, of course, that Hobbes was himself ethically
on the level of a savage; the acquisition of a
rational comprehension of life to which Hobbes's
labours were so unremittingly devoted, is itself
an object of desire impossible to a mere savage,
but for such objects his crude psychological
analysis has provided no place. It is a direct
consequence of this analysis, and at the same
time the real foundation of his whole moral and
social theory, that competition for objects of
desire which can only be enjoyed by one man on
the condition that all others are prevented from
enjoying them, is still, as it always has been, the
law of human life, and that this competition will
always make ordered society impossible unless
there is a ruler with the admitted right to set
limits to it and the power to enforce his regula-
68
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
tions by penalties. However strongly some of the
facts of the period of revolution through which
England was passing during Hobbes's manhood
might suggest such a conception, it should be
manifest to a dispassionate student of human
history that it does infinitely less than justice to
the extent to which, as civilisation advances, the
objects of human desire become more and more
of a non- competitive kind, or of a kind which are
positively unattainable by one man except on
the condition of their equal attainment by his
fellows.
Hobbes develops these portentous ethical con
sequences of his psychology in much detail in the
eleventh and thirteenth chapters of Leviathan.
The supreme aim of every man is to obtain
power, i.e. an assured command over the means
of future gratification of desire, the reason why
this passion persists so obstinately throughout
life being not so much that man is never content
with the degree of satisfaction he has already
attained, as the uncertainty whether he will
continue to retain it undiminished. ' In the first
place, I put for a general inclination of all man
kind a perpetual and restless desire of power after
power that ceaseth only in death. And the cause
of this is not always that a man hopes for a more
THOMAS HOBBES
intensive delight, ... or that he cannot be content
with a moderate power, but because he cannot
% assure the power and means to live well which he
hath present without the acquisition of more.'
(Leviathan c. xi.)
Now Hobbes also holds that there ia.no ^great
natural difference between one man and another
either in physical or mental capacity : * As to the
strength of body, the weakest has strength enough
to kill the strongest, either by secret machination
or by confederacy with others that are in the
same danger with himself. And as to the faculties
of the mind ... I find yet a greater equality
amongst men than that of strength.5 (Ib., c. xiii.).
Consequently, the natural state of man, i.e. the
condition into which he is born and in which
he remains, so far— aa_he does not artificially
put an end to ij^ by iiie creation of a political
system, is one of_nniyiersal competition, or as
Hobbes, who likes to give his ideas the most
startling and provocative wording, phrases it, one
of 'war of every man against every man,' in
which there is no moral law, since the recognition
of moral law is onlvjpossible among men living in
civil society, and respecting their mutual rights
and duties. ' To this war of every man against
every man this als_o_js consequent, that nothing
70
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong,
justice and injustice, have there no place. Where
there is no common power, there is no law;
where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are *•
in war the two cardinal virtues. ... It is. con
sequent also to the same condition that there
$be no propriety (i.e. property), no dominion, no
mine and thine distinct, but only that to be
every man's that he can get, and for so long as
he can get keep it ' (/&•)• This state of universal
anarchy, we must remember, is not in the least
Hobbes's ideal, as it has sometimes been falsely re
presented to be by unscrupulous controversialists ;
on the contrary, he abhors it, and is at great
pains to point out its horrors. So long as it lasts, j
there can be no settled industry or commerce, no
0 science, no arts or letters, ' and, which is worst of
all, continuous fear and danger of violent death ;
and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short1 (/&.). The salvation of man, in ;
fact, as we shall see, depends on the fact that
though nature has placed him in so evil a
condition, she has also endowed him with ' a
possibility to come out of it.' Whatever we may V
think of Hobbes's analysis ofhuman nature, it
must not be forgotten for a moment that itsi
object is not the repudiation _of law and morality,!
THOMAS HOBBES
but the vindication of them as the only safe
guards against generaLanarchy and misery.
In proof of the correctness of the dark picture
thus drawn of what human life would be without
a firmly established political authority to protect
men against one another and against their own
anti-social appetites, Hobbes appeals (1) to the
actual condition of savages) (2) to the absence of
all moral restraint shown in the mutual relations of
independent states, who have no common superior,
towards each other; and (3), with special refer
ence to the calumniators who charged him with
a desire to undermine the authority of the exist
ing moral law, to the precautions which men take
against one another even in settled and civilised
states. He thus fairly retorts that he only puts
into words what is implied in the conduct of his
critics themselves when they bar their chests,
lock their doors, or carry arms when on a journey.
Hobbes's account of the ' state of nature ' is, of
course, as is shown in particular by the seventeenth
chapter of Leviathan, expressly intended to con
tradict the doctrine of Aristotle, revived and made
popular in his own time by the famous work of
Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pads, that man is
'naturally a political animal,' i.e. that the rudi
ments of sociability and social organisation are
72
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
never absent from any group of human beings
living together. This implies, contrary to Hobbes's
psychological analysis, that human impulses are
not exclusively egoistic. So Hobbes reverts to a
notion ultimately derived from the old Greek
sophists, who taught that morality is the result of
^convention,' the i^ljjm-kh&t mankind originally
existed in a ' state_^L_aature,' which was one of
sheer lawlessness, and that_jJI settled morality is
the result of Ibabituation to obedience to political
rules, which must haw been originally set up by
voluntary agreemejiLjlTLJcontract. It is easy to
point out that Hobbes exaggerates the extent to
which morality is a mere effect of civil obedience,
and to show, in the light of later research, that
eveiLsavages,. who have no settled political organi-
sation, really possess a rudimentary morality
based on traditional tribal custom. It is equally
true that he exaggerates the defects even of the
seventeenth century, when he maintains that inde
pendent nations recognise no moral restrictions
whatever in their dealings with their neighbours.
Yet his reflections on the character of international
morality, as well as on the precautions taken even
by the citizen of a law-abiding community against
his fellows, retain even to-day a great deal of
unpleasant significance. We are, after all, in
73
THOMAS HOBBES
many things nearer the savage than we like
to think, and it is well that we should not be
allowed to forget the fact.
And it is, at least, an important part of the truth,
that our moral codes are too largely merely the
effect of unreasoned acquiescence in long estab
lished custom, while there can be no doubt that
Hobbes is much nearer the truth than the senti
mental writers before and after him, who have
glorified the relatively lawless condition of the
pre-civilised man as a golden age of superior
innocence or virtue. And there is an element of
truth in Hobbes's polemic against Aristotle's con
ception of the way in which the family has
widened into the village community, and the
village community into the city or nation, by a
process of peaceful expansion. We know enough
now of the steps by which historical Greece came
into existence to be sure that what lay behind the
formation of the Greek polis was, more often
than not, invasion, conquest, massacre, and the
anarchy produced by the violent subversion of
older settled ' morality.' If we abandon the empty
dream of ever discovering historical information
as to the ' primitive ' condition of mankind, and
content ourselves with the more modest question,
What state of things preceded the growth of that
74
EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY
which we call Western civilisation, whether
Hellenic or Germanic, we shall find that Hobbes
has, after all, given us a large part, though not
the whole, of the truth, especially if we take his
picture, with his own qualifying remark that ' it
was never generally so all over the world/ and
that his prime purpose is not to write ancient
history, but to show by philosophical analysis
' what manner of life there would be where there
were no common power to fear, by the manner
of life which men that have formerly lived under
a peaceful government use to degenerate into a
civil war ' (Leviathan, c. xiii.).
75
/
y
CHAPTER IV
THE MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
WE have seen, in the last chapter, what is
Hobbes's conception of the ' state of nature,' the
condition in which man found himself at the
dawn of civilisation, and into which he tends to
degenerate when the bonds of political allegiance
are gravely relaxed. It is a condition in which
the machinery provided by government for the
restraint of men's fundamentally anti-social
impulses is entirely absent, and_in which there
is nothing to take its place. , How, then, could
any number of men ever pass out of this state of
anarchy into a state of settled order ? Hobbes
replies that there is a possibility to escape from
the state of nature into one of civil society which
is founded partly on men's passions, partly on
omen's reason. Partly on their passions, since
among these there are several which make for
peace and orderly existence, such as ' fear of death,
desire of such things as are necessary to com-
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
modious living, and a hope by their industry to
obtain them.' (Leviathan, c. xiii.) Partly on
reason^ since; it is reason which suggests to man
kind the proper means of securing gratification
for these unbellicose passions, or as Hobbes puts
it, ' suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon
which men may be drawn to agreement ''•• (76.).
We might, perhaps, ask how men living by the
unregulated promptings of egoistic appetite ever
come to listen to these 'suggestions' of reason,
but here, too, Hobbes is ready with an answer.
We, all of us, he says, have our calmer moments
when rational reflection is undisturbed by passion,^
and it is then that the voice which suggests
' articles of peace ' makes itself heard.
Like the great majority of the political theorists
from Hooker in the sixteenth century to Kousseau
in the eighteenth, JFTnfr frp.R t.h n « aSELLTT1 ft
thejransition from savagery to civil
the so-called { socjaJLcompact/ Hence with
him, as with the others, it becomes the first object
of political theory to discover the terms of this
original contract — the ' articles of peace ' alreadv
mentioned — since it is by these terms that \\
have to ascertain the limits of the rightfi
authority of political rulers. <^The ruler is legit
77
THOMAS HOBBES
raately entitled to just so much authority over
his subjects, and no more, as can be logically'N
deduced from the examination of the terms of I
the contract by which civil subjection was /
first instituted. Whatever in the practice of/
actual rulers is not covered by these terms is
usurpation. This method of deducing the rights
of a government over its subjects from a supposed
original contract, which had, in point of fact, come
down to the thinkers of the sixteenth century
from the mediaeval legists and schoolmen, who
were seeking a rational basis for their various
theories of the division of power between the
"Pope and the secular authorities, or between the
Pope and the general councils, received its death
blow towards the end of the eighteenth century
from Bentham and Burke, both of whom insist,
in different ways, that the rights of governments
must be based on the actual needs of society, and
k not on any theory of the primitive rights of man.
Bentham's arguments, which will be found in his
Fragment on Government, are mainly directed
against Blackstone's attempt to determine the
rights of the British Crown by deductions from
the compact between king and people supposed
to be made in the coronation oath, Burke's,
against the onslaught of the French Re-volution,
78
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
acting in the name of the ' rights of man ' upon
the vested interests, which he chooses to regard as
established ' rights/ of the nobility and clergy.
In the nineteenth century, the growth of historical
research into social origins made the conception
of government as having arisen at a definite time
by means of a definite voluntary compact even
more unreal, by revealing the enormous extent to
which definite political institutions have arisen
out of an earlier stage of ' customary ' law. In
deed, when we look the matter squarely in the
face, it becomes evident that free association by
voluntary agreement belongs to the culmination
rather than to the beginnings of civilisation, and
that the recognition of the binding force of such
agreements presupposes the existence of a highly
organised public opinion against their violation,
so that contract depends upon society more than
society upon contract. It is therefore quite v
impossible for us to take Hobbes's account of the
compact by which savagery is ended and civilised
life begun as serious historical fact. Yet it is
possible to suspect that the reaction against
theories of the origin of government in contract
may perhaps have been carried too far even on the
historical side. History itself, at least, gives us
reason to believe that many a famous community
79
THOMAS HOBBES
has sprung from combinations of ' broken men/
relics, in a period of general disintegration, from
many distinct ruined tribes or cities, who have
somehow been thrown together and entered into
a new alliance among themselves, and in such
cases the new community must clearly have
rested upon the voluntary agreement to unite in
mutual support. But, in any case, the substance
of Hobbes's reasoned plea for absolutism is quite
independent of the largely mythical form in
which it is clothed by the author. However
governments originate, it is at least true that
their permanency depends upon the recognitipn
by governors and governed alike of certain general
principles denning the functions of the governor
and the obligations of the governed,fotnd such
recognition may not unsuitably be represented to
the imagination as an implicit bargain./ These
principles Hobbes and the seventeenth/ century
publicists in general call by a name borrowed
from the Roman lawyers, who in their turn had
borrowed it from the Stoic philosophers, the ( laws_
of nature/ the curious result of this appeal to the
terminology of the Roman jurists being that, in
effect, the theorists of the ' social contract '
contrive to apply to political institutions of a very
un-Roman character the doctrines of the Roman
80
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
law of corporations. There is, of course, no
inconsistency between the phrase ' laws of nature '
and Hobbes's doctrine that a law, in the sense of
a command by a superior, is impossible until the
creation of a public authority to give the com
mand, since Hobbes is careful to explain that
' lgws,,of nature \ are not commands, but ' rules
of reason/ true universal propositions as to the
conditions upon which settled wellbeing is obtain
able. They are laws in the sense in which we
apply the name to the principle of Excluded
Middle or to that of the syllogism, not in the
sense in which it is given to the Statute of
Mortmain or the British North America Act:
' A law of nature (lex natural-is), is a precept, or
genecaLrule found out by reason, by which a man
is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his
life, or taketh away^the means of preserving thej
same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it
may best be jjreserved' (Leviathan, c. xiv.).
Hobbes's employment of the word ' forbidden ' in
this sentence is, of course, metaphorical. His
meaning is simply that SI'TU^ pyery man desires to.
live, reflection shows us that it would be irrational/
our liyp.a or t^ fail t
It is in this, and not in any mere idealistic sense,
that we have to understand the declaration, in
F 81
•I
THOMAS HOBBES
the first chapter of the De Corpore Politico, that
the law of nature is identical with reason. It is
not that reason is thought of as supplying us
with ends of action : the ends of action are already
given by the fundamental brute passions and
appetites. What reason does is to indicate
general rules as to the means by which
such foregone endsjaay be most certainly
obtained.
Of such ' general rules found out by reason/
there are, according to Hobbes, a considerable
number, but all are deducible from a single
supreme rule, ' that every man ought to endeavour
peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and
where he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and
use all helps and advantages of war. The first
branch of which rule containeth the first and
fundamental law of nature, which is to seek peace
and follow it ; the second the sum of the right of
nature, which is, by all means we can to defend
ourselves' (Leviathan, c. xiv.). (Of course, by
saying that we 'ought' to seek peace, Hobbes
means no more than that, in virtue of the hazards
and dangers of the ' war of all against all,' it is
manifestly to our advantage to do so where we
can.) An immediate corollary, which figures as
the second law of nature, is that each of us should
82
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
be willing, when the rest are equally willing, to
abandon the general claim to act exactly as he
thinks fit, so far as the renunciation is necessary
for peace ; ' that a man be willing, when others
are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of
himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down
this right to all things, andjpe contented^with sfr
much liberty against other men as he would allow^,,
other men against himself (Ib.) Briefly, then,
the second law is ' do not to others what you are «
not prepared to allow them to do to you/ a precept
which Hobbes, characteristically enough, confuses
with the ' golden rule ' of the Gospel. It is upon
this rule that the whole possibility of contract, fc
and, consequently, according to Hobbes, of political
society, depends. For what J^he rule provides
for is the laying aside by each member of a body
of men of some part of his original right, as
described in the first of Hobbes's 'rules of
reason/ to act exactly as he thinks fit. Now
rights laid aside are either merely renounced, or,
when they are resigned^for the benefit of an
expressly designated person or persons, trans
ferred to that person or persons. Such trans-
ference.being a voluntary act, is necessarily
7 interested, since thff nhjfto.fi of every vo1nnf.fl.rj
frftt iff gome^good to myself. The contracting
THOMAS HOBBES
parties, then, in every^case, ^Qt each with a view
to his own ultimate advantage. Also, since there
are certain things for the surrender of which no
man can receive an equivalent, there are things
which cannot be made the subjects of contract,
rights which cannot be transferred. A man can-
jp not e.g. divest himself of the right to resist an
assault upon his life, or an attempt to wound or
imprison him. More generally, since the whole
object of a transference of rights is to obtain
an increased security of life and the means of
enjoying life, no act or word of mine can reason
ably be interpreted as showing an intention of
divesting myself of the means of self-preserva
tion. These considerations will meet us again
as furnishing some limits even to the power of
the sovereign.
Hobbes now proceeds to deduce from this
second law a third,, which is the immediate
foundation of the rest of his social theory. When
two parties make a bargain for their mutual
advantage, it frequently happens that one of
them is called upon to perform his part of the
contract first and to trust the other to discharge
his part at some future time. In this case the
contract is called, from the point of view of the
second party, & covenant. From the second law
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
of nature we can then deduce a third, which
'^^•^••••^
Hobbes treats as the foundation of all moral,
obligation. ' thaL^men perform their covenants
made' (Leviathan, c. xv.). This follows, because
if I break my agreement with you, then, since
your object in the original agreement was to
secure some good to yourself, and my failure to
perform what I undertook has frustrated that
object, you have no longer any inducement to
fulfil your part of the bargain. Thus the whole
purpose of making covenants has been defeated ;
' covenants are in vain, and but empty words,
and, the right of all men to all things remaining,
we are still in the condition of war' (Ib.). _0n
this law of the sacredness of a covenant depends
the distinction of justice from injustice, and, in
directly, the whole of social morality, since ' the p
definition of injustice.^ no other than the not
performance of covenant. And whatsoever is not
unjust _is just.' (Ib. Note, incidentally, that
Hobbes thus, like Schopenhauer, treats wrong
doing as a concept logically prior to right-doing.)
This definition explains what Hobbes had meant
by saying that in * a state of nature ' there can
be no^ injustice. Injustice is breach of covenant,
but the mutual trust upon which the making of
covenants depends, is only possible when there
85
THOMAS HOBBES
is a coercive power which can affect breaches of
covenant with penalties severe enough to make
it to my interest to abstain from them, i.e. under
a civil government. For the same reason it is
only under civil government that there can 4ae
property. It is a natural question why, if the
motive for loyalty to my agreements is always
some prospect of advantage to myself, I should
•• be morally bound to keep them in cases where
treachery promises to be still more advantageous.
The fact of the obligation Hobbes does not dis
pute ; he even maintains expressly that a promise
to a brigand to pay a certain sum on condition
of being released is binding unless declared in
valid by a properly constituted court of law ; but
he is not altogether successful in the reasoning
by which he supports his view. Partly he replies
that a promise-breaker is not likely to gain in
the long-run, since no one will trust him after
^ his detection ; partly he obscurely hints that there |
L may be a final judgment of God to be reckoned
with. Apparently this suggestion is not merely
made for the benefit of the orthodox reader but
represents a laudable inconsistency in the author's
own views, a belief that honesty is not merely the
best policy, but has a higher sanctity of its own
which Hobbes's analysis of jnorality fails to
86
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
account for. Perhaps he was more deeply influ
enced than he knew by the traditional English
hatred of a lie, as something inherently base.
JHobbes now enumerates no less than sixteen
subsidiary ' laws of nature/ that is, conditions
without which peaceable common existence would
be impossible. The general character of the
' laws ' is negative ; they are prohibitions of varioi
forms of behaviour which may be expected 1
lead to a breach of the peace, and the deductio]
in each case, takes the- form of an appeal to sel
interest. E.g. if I show myself revengeful, c
arrogant, or unwilling to refer a dispute between
myself and my neighbour to a disinterested and
impartial arbitrator, I am doing what lies in me
to prolong the ' state of war/ and am thus losing
the increased security of life and enjoyment of
its good things which peace would have given
me. The whole body of the nineteen 'laws/
Hobbes says, may be summed up in the simple
formula which had already been given as an
equivalent for the second ' law ; : ' To leave all
men unexcusable, they have been contracted into
one easy sum, intelligible even to the meanest
capacity, and that is. Do not that to
which thou wouldest not have done to thyself;
which sheweth him that he has no more to do
87
THOMAS HOBBES
in learning the laws of nature, but when, weighing
the actions of other men with his own, they
seem too heavy, to put them into the other part
of the balance and his own into their place, that
his own passions and self-love may add nothing
to the weight; and then there is none of these
laws of nature that will not appear unto him very
reasonable ' (Leviathan, c. xv.).
We see, then, that Hobbes's 'laws of nature,'
looked at as a whole, afford a fair formulation of
the fundamental negative condition upon which
the maintenance of social order depends ; no man
is to expect more from his neighbours than he is
willing that they should expect from him, and
no man is to interfere with the doings of
his neighbours in any way in which they may
not equally interfere with his. The competitors
in the great struggle of life are to start fair, and
to 'play the game.' What we should seek in
vain in any of Hobbes's expositions of his social
doctrine is the great Hellenic conception of the
state or community as having a further positive
function, a duty to ennoble the lives of its
members, so that each of them may, if he will,
climb to spiritual heights which he could not
have scaled alone. Hobbes can hardly be said
to have any real belief in social institutions as the
88
/ J
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
instruments and bearers of progressive civilisation,
he treats them as merely so much machinery for
the preservation of a status quo. He has mastered
only the first half of Aristotle's famous dictum
that 'the city comes into being that men may
live, but continues to be that they may live
well.'
We may now pass at once to a demonstration
of the necessity of the organised state and its
^machinery. The ' laws of_ nature ' are, indeed, in
themselves a sufficient _code of conduct, and if
they were always observed, peaceful social existence
would be guaranteed _with all its accompanying
0 benefits. But in the ' state of nature ' we can
have no security that they will be obeyed. They
' oblige iuforo interno: that is to say, they bind<
a desire they should take place ; but in foro
externo, that is, to the putting them in act, not
always,' since a man who persisted in keeping
them while all his neighbours broke them, would
infallibly lose by his conduct, and it is impossible,
on Hobbes's theory of human nature, that a man
should persist in doing what he knows to be
contrary to his private interest. Thus they are,
rightly speaking^ not > as _yet laws, so long as men
remain in a ' state of nature.' For a law means
a command given and enforceable by a definite
THOMAS HOBBES
person. ' These dictates of rbason men use to
call by the name ofjiaws, but improperly; for
they are but conclusions or theorems concerning
what conduceth to the conservation and defence
,-- , of themselves, whereas law properly is the word
of him that by right hath command over others '
(Leviathan, c. xv.). What is needed, then, to
secure actual obedience to them is that they
should be converted into commands issued by an
authority which has rightful claims to obedience,
and has also sufficient force at its disposal to
secure obedience by the infliction of such penalties
for disobedience as may make it always to a
man's own advantage to obey. What is needed
is, in fact, the institution of a ruler, or sovereign,
and with the creation of the ruler we have passed
at once into a state of civil society, or political
subjection. This is why, with Hobbes, the
creation of a ruler or chief magistrate is identical
with the creation of^sociefe itself, and rebellion
against the ruler equivalent to the dissolution of
the social bond itself.
Before we go on to examine the way in which
the ruler is created, there are two points to which
it is essential to call attention if Hobbes is not to
be greatly misjudged. In spite of his insistence
upon the view that the ' dictates of reason ' do not
90
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
become actual commands until there is some one
to enforce them, Hobbes js not justly chargeable
with the identification of the moral law with the
caprices of an autocrat. The validity of the moral
law, though not its character as ' law', is with him
anterior to the establishment of the ruler, and
depends upon what he takes to be the demon- ^
strable coincidence of morality with the general
interest. What the ruler is needed for is to pro
vide the individual with a standing adequate
incentive to behave morally, and Hobbes is at
great pains to urge that his favourite constitution,
an absolute monarchy, is precisely the form of
society in which the ruler is least likely to have
any personal interest independent of the well-
being of the community, and may therefore be
most safely trusted to see that his ' laws ' embody
nothing but the conditions necessary for peace
and security.
And again, though Hobbes's argument amounts
to a defence of absolutism, the defence is through
out based on rationalistic and, consequently,
democratic grounds. He is entirely free both
from the superstition of a ' divine hereditary right '
inherent in monarchs, such as the Stuarts laid
claim to, and from the doctrine that mere forcp^
itself constitutes right. His object is to show that
THOMAS HOBBES
the absolute authority of the sovereign has a
foundation in right by tracing it back to its
supposed origin in a voluntary ' transference of
right ' on the part of the subject, a transference
made in the interests of the subject himself, and so
to legitimate absolutism by giving it a utilitarian
basis. The jure divino royalists were thus com
pletely justified in their instinctive distrust of
Hobbes. When once it is granted that absolute
sovereignty is only defensible if it can be shown
to be for the general interest, the door is opened
for further inquiry whether absolutism really is
for the general interest or not, and, if it can be
shown that it is not, for the rejection of absolutism
itself. Thus Hobbes's theories really contain the
germs of the constitutionalism which he com
bated. To declare that absolutism requires an
utilitarian justification is to be already half-way
on the road to revolution; there is much more
community of spirit between Hobbes and Locke
or Sidney, or even Rousseau, than between Hobbes
and Filiner.
The immediate object of Hobbes's deduction of
the rights of the sovereign is closely connected
with the political controversies of his own time.
He is anxious to disprove the claims made by
Parliament against the British Crown to be, in
92
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
a special sense, the representative of the people
and of popular rights. He therefore sets himself
to argue that, in every society, the supreme
executive authority is already itself the true
representative of the whole community ; the
community, consequently, cannot be again ' repre
sented' by any other institution, and all claims
made by such institutions to authority co-ordinate
with, or superior to, that of the executive, on the
plea of their ' representative ' character, must be
nugatory. To effect this proof, he has recourse
to the technical terms of the Roman law of
corporations and their legal representation. He
starts with the legal definition of a person. A
person means any being whose words and acts
are considered in law as issuing either from him
self or from any other man or thing to whom they
are attributed. In the latter case, where the
words and acts of such a person are legally
regarded as belonging to some other being or
beings, whom he represents, the representer is
an artificial person (e.g. an advocate, speaking
from his brief, is an artificial person, who repre
sents his client ; what he says is taken in law as
if it were uttered by, and committed, not the
advocate himself, but his client). When the
being thus represented by another owns .the -
93
THOMAS HOBBES
words and acts of his representative, he is said
to authorise them, and the representative speaks
and acts with authority, so that an act done by
authority always means an act 'done by com
mission or license from him whose right it is.'
This at once leads to the conclusion that, by
the ' law of nature,' any being who has ' author
ised' another to represent him is bound by all
engagements entered into by his representative
on his behalf, so far as they come within the
scope of the authorisation, exactly as if they
were his own words or acts. To repudiate them
is to be guilty of a breach of the law that
covenants when made are to be kept.
This point being granted, it only remains to
establish the proposition that all governments
must be regarded as originating in a commission
bestowed by a whole community upon the govern
ment to ' represent ' it, and the logical defence of
absolutism is complete. Accordingly Hobbes now_
proceeds to reason as follows. An &ggr_ega_te .Q|JH-
_dividual/meii can only become a true society in so
far as it exhibits a unity of will and purpose. It is
this unity of will which constitutes the multitude
into a community. But there is, properly speaking,
no such thing as a ' general ' will, or will of society
at large, which is not that of individuals. Only
94
THE LEVIATHAN
by a legal fiction can we speak of anything but
individual beings as endowed with will. Conse
quently, the unity of society is only possible by
means of representation. The ' will ' of the society
becomes a real thing when the original aggregate
agree to appoint a determinate man, or body of
men, their representative, i.e. to take the volitions
of that man, or that body of men, as ' authorised '
by every individual composing the aggregate.
• In this way, and only in this way, an aggregate
may, by legal fiction, become one person, i.e. a
collective subject of legal rights and duties. 'A
multitude jpf men are madeone person when they
are by one man, or by one person, represented so
that it be done with the consent of every one
of that multitucTe in particular. For it is the
unity of the Representer, not the unity of the
Represented, that maketh the person one. And
it is the Representer that beareth the person, and
but one person; and unity cannot otherwise be
understood in multitude. And because the multi
tude naturally is not one but many, they cannot
be understood for one, but many, authors of every
thing their representative saith or doth in their
name, every man giving their common representer
authority from himself in particular, and owning
all the actions the representer doth ' (Leviathan,
*
THOMAS HOBBES
c. xvi.). The only way, then, in which an aggregate
of men can form themselves into a society for
mutual defence against outsiders, and against one
another's anti-social tendencies, is by unanimous
agreement to- appoint some definite man, or
number of men, to act as their representative,
whose commands each of the aggregate is hence
forth to regard as issuing from himself, and by
whose actions each henceforth is to regard himself
as bound, exactly as though they had been per
formed by himself. In this way, the 'laws of
nature/ the conditions of peace and security, be
come actually operative, since by making such
an agreement, the represented implicitly authorise
their representer to employ their united physical
force, as though it were his own, in restraint of
all disobedience to his commands, and thus create
a coercive power adequate enough to give every
individual personal motives to obey.
'The only way to erect such a common power
. . . is to confer all their power and strength upon
one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may
reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto
one will ; which is as much as to say, to appoint
one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person ;
and every one to own and acknowledge
author of whatsoever he that so beareth
96
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
their person shall apt nr ng.n«f>f f,r> fre acted in those
things which concern the common peace apcl
safety, andjbherein to submit their wills to his
wjlljind their judgments to his judgment. This
is more than consent or concord ; it is a real unity
of them all in one and the same person, made by
covenant of every man with every man.,, . . ..JThis
done, the multitude, so united in one person, is
called a CommonweciWi. . . . This is the genera
tion of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak
more reverently, of that mortal God, to which
we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and
defence. For by this authority, given him by
every particular man in the Commonwealth, he
hath the use of so much power and strength
conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is
enabled to form the wills of them all to peace
at home and mutual aid against their enemies
abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the
Commonwealth, which, to define it, is one person,
of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual
covenants one with another, have made them
selves every one the author, to the end that
he may use the strength and means of them
all as he shall think expedient for their peace
and common defence. And he that carrieth this
person is called Sovereign and said to
G 97
THOMAS HOBBES
sovereign power, and every one besides, his
subject' (Leviathan, c. xvii.).
One or two points in this deduction call, perhaps,
for special remark. (1) It should be clear that, in
spite of his absolutist leanings, what Hobbes is
trying to express by the aid of his legal fictions
is the great democratic idea of self-government.
The coercive powers of the ruler are only legiti
mated in his eyes by the thought that they give
effect to what is at heart the will of the whole
people over whom he rules ; the sovereign is, in
effect^ tha. incarnation of the national will. But
as his philosophy will not allow him to admit the
reality of any purpose which is not that of a definite
man, he has to conceive of this national spirit and
purpose as having no actual existence until it is
embodied in a representative of flesh and blood.
The nation is one man, with a will j-nd purpose of
its own, but it is one only by the legal fiction
which treats the acts of an agent or representative
as if they were those of that which he represents.
To borrow an analogy from the case of the
individual, the soul of the great artificial 'body
politic' is not diffused over the whole organism,
'all in every part/ but definitely located in a
central organ, or brain. This is why Hobbes is
so careful to insist that legitimate sovereignty
98
-\THAN
MAKING OF THE LEYIA1.
of his
must be based on an express or tacit consent ^
every member of the subject body, and also why
he is afterwards at great pains to argue that
his favourite form of government, the absolute
sovereignty of a single man, is just the one in
which, from the nature of the case, the ruler is
least likely to have any private interests of his own
distinct from those of the community, and, in
fact, is most nearly a mere mouthpiece of the
national will.
(2) With Hobbes, as we see, the creation of a
commonwealth, and the creation of a central
coercive or executive power, form one and the
same act. It is by the_constituiiQn of an execu
tive that the ' laws of nature^wjiich bid men to
seek peace and ensue it, cease to be amiable but
impracticable ideals an^Jbe^ojiia-OpQiative realities.
He is thus the author of the doctrine, revived
in the nineteenth century by Austin and his
disciples, that sovereign power is in its nature one
and indivisible, and that there can be no real
distinction between the different functions of
government, so that the making of laws may
belong to one set of persons, the enforcing them
by penalties to a second, and the interpretation
of them in particular cases to a third. It is on
this point that Hobbes's political theory is most
99
THOMAS HOBBES
s°Jfkingly at variance with those of his best-
known successors. When Locke formulated the
philosophy of the Revolution Whigs in his
treatises on Civil Government, he was inevitably
led, in the attempt to justify resistance to a chief
magistrate who violates his trust, to make a dis
tinction which is opposed to the central thought
of Hobbes. With Locke the fundamental and
* gf>fl]*||] fiompftftt ' consists simply in the
determination of a number of men to live in future
under a known and common law of action instead
of being guided by the uncertain and fluctuating
dictates ofljjidiyidtuil judgment, i.e. in the will to
establish a common legislature. The appointment
of a definite set of persons armed with power to
put the decisions of this legislature into act — the
creation of executive officials — is a later proceed
ing, and the chief magistrate thus becomes a mere
delegate of the legislature, a trustee, who may
lawfully be removed whenever he transgresses the
limits of the powers delegated to him. Locke is
thus the author of the famous doctrine of the
' division of powers ' between distinct ' branches '
of government, and of the theory of the import
ance of 'constitutional checks,' by which one
'branch' may be hindered from usurping the
functions of the others.
100
\
MAKING OF THE LEVIATHAN
(3) We might perhaps add that in virtue of his
definition of the ends of government as exhausted
by the preservation of 'peace and common de
fence,' Hobbes may be regarded as a forerunner
of the negative laisser alter doctrine of the
functions of the state. The sovereign is there, in
fact, to remove certain standing obstacles to the
secure prosecution by his subjects of their in
dividual aims, to keep society from relapsing into
primitive anarchy. With his defective theory of
volition, Hobbes can naturally find no place for
any conception of the state as an organisation for
the positive promotion among its members of the
' good life ' or ' civilisation ' or ' progress/ or what
ever else we may please to call that ideal of life,
by which the rationally free man is distinguished
from the barbarian. The very existence of moral
and social progress is, in fact, just the one striking
feature of historical civilisation which his account
of human nature, to be consistent with itself, is
bound to ignore.
101
CHAPTER V
THE POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN
THAT the legitimate powers of a sovereign are
absolute, and^ that all resistance to his autEorSy~
must be a' 'breach of covenant/ and therefore
unjust, are consequences which follow directly
jrom Hnhhfig^ conception^pF the fundamental
conditions^ social ^existence. The sovereign has,
in fact, been authorised by me, if I am a member
of the Commonwealth, to make what regulations
he thinks fit for the preservation of order and
peace, and to use the whole physical force of the
community to punish or prevent violations of
those regulations. Refusal to obey, or resistance
to the execution of the sovereign's command is
thus a distinct breach of my given promise, and
against the ' law of nature,' i.e. the rational con
sideration, that covenants ought to be kept, i.e.
that the making of them is useless unless they
are kept. Hence the duty of unconditional
obedience on the part of the subject. But there
1 02
±' THE SOVEREIGN
is nq_. corresponding duty on the part of the
sovereign. He has been expressly authorised to
make such regulations as he thinks fit, and, .con
sequently, no violation of compact can be pleaded
against him, no matter what ^commands he may
Mak .goad, to issue. Hobbes throws this latter
part of his argument, which aims at justifying
the Stuart claim of irresponsibility of the kings
of England to their subjects, into a curiously arti-<
ficial form. The argument by which the sovereign
is set up is, he says, one between each individual
member of a crowd and every other. There
has been no agreement between the whole com
munity as such, on the one part, and the sovereign,
on the other. Before the creation of the Levi
athan, in fact, the community has no corporate
existence, as such, and the sovereign is, as yet, no
sovereign, but only one man, or a number of men,
among others, and therefore there are no such
parties as sovereign and public to bargain with
one another. Or even if we suppose that the
person finally created sovereign had^pf^m^ed his
nomination by private bargaining with individual
members of the crowd, yet when once he has been
declared sovereign all these bargains become in
valid, since he now, as sovereign, has the right to
say what agreements shall or shall not be con-
103
THOMAS HOBBES
sidered binding. Hence no act_of_ a__soyereign
towards any of his subjects can be unjust; in a
commonwealth, justice, in fact, simply means
observing the rules of conduct which the sovereign
has laid down (Leviathan, c. xviii.). But if I plead
that I was not a party to the original agreement
of every man with every man to accept this par
ticular sovereign, and to acknowledge his acts as
if they were my own, then he is not my sovereign
at all, and I am no member of the society which,
as such, is created by his elevation. Towards him
and them I am still in ' the state of nature/ and
may without injustice be treated as an enemy, and
subject to all that is incidental to the 'war of all
against all/
It follows that a sovereign, once instituted, can
.in no case be guilty of an injustice towards any of
his subjects. And JEEobbes bids us take note that
in the psalm whicife according to the notions of
the seventeenth century, expresses David's peni
tence for adultery and murder, no acknowledgment
is made that the author had done a wrong to
Uriah in first corrupting his wife and then com
passing his death; it is for sin against God
I that the Psalmist entreats forgiveness, not for
wrong done to man. So, Hobbes concludes, it is
the teaching of Scripture, as well as of reason,
104
POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN
that the ruler can never be unjust to his subject,
and therefore never lawfully accused, judged, or
condemned by those who have themselves agreed
to take his orders as the measure of just and
unjust. Still, it is admitted, a ruler may abuse
his power, as David did, and if this is not injustice
to the subject, it is at least iniquity for which
the ruler is amenable to the judgment of God.
' Though the action be against the law of nature,
as being contrary to equity (as was the killing of
Uriah by David), yet it was not an injury to Uriah,
but to God. Not to Uriah, because the right to
do what he pleased was given him by Uriah him
self; and yet to God because David was God's
subject, and prohibited all iniquity by the law of
nature.. Which distinction David himself, when
ne repented the fact, evidently confirmed, saying,
To Thee only have I sinned (Leviathan, c. xxi .).'
As in a former case, this suggestion of a divine
judgment to whft^even the irresponsible sovereign
is amenable, leaves us in a perplexing uncertainty
how far it is a concession to the weaknesses of
orthodox readers, or how far it may represent a
genuine feeling on the writer's part that there is,
after all, a moral authority more ancient and
august than the various leviathans men have
made for themselves.
105
THOMAS HOBBES
It must not of course be supposed that it is
only a monarch who can be absolute. Hobbes is
careful to point out that it follows from his theory
of the 'social compact' that every government,
when once duly established, whatever its form
may be, is clothed with the same absolute au
thority over its subjects. Indeed, it is in the case
of a ' democracy/ i.e. a state in which the whole
assembly of citizens is itself the sovereign body,
that he thinks the fact of absolute authority most
patent. 'When an assembly of men is made
sovereign, then no man imagineth any such
covenant to have past in the institution, for no
man is so dull as to say, for example, the people of
Rome made a covenant with the Romans to hold
the sovereignty on such and such conditions,
which not performed, the Romans might lawfully
depose the Roman people. That men see not
the reason to be alike in a monarchy and in
a popular government proceedeth from the
ambition of some, that are kinder to the govern
ment of an assembly, whereof they may hope to
participate than of monarchy, which they despair
to enjoy.' (Leviathan, c. xviii.) Hobbes is, how
ever, of opinion that of all forms of government
monarchy best answers the purpose for which
sovereignty is instituted, and that for several
1 06
POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN
reasons: (1) A monarch's private interest is
more intimately bound up with the interests of
his subjects than can be the case with the private
interests of the members of a sovereign assembly.
' The riches, power, and honour of a monarch
arise only from the riches, strength, and reputation
of his subjects. . . . Whereas in a Democracy or
Aristocracy, the public prosperity confers not
so much to the private fortune of one that is
corrupt as doth many times a perfidious ad
vice, a treacherous action, civil war' (76., c.
xix.) — a sentence upon which the history of
the relations of the restored Stuarts with the
Court of France surely affords an entertaining
commentary. (2) A monarch is freer to receive
advice from all quarters, and to keep that advice
secret, than an assembly. (3) Whereas the
resolutions of a monarch are subject only to the
\inconstancy of human nature, those of an
assembly are exposed to a further inconstancy
arising from disagreement between its members.
Monarchy thus offers the maximum of security
for 'continuity' of policy. (4) A monarch
'cannot disagree with himself out of envy or
interest, but an assembly may, and that to such
a height as may produce a civil war' (76., c.
xix.).
107
THOMAS HOBBES
Against these advantages of monarchy may be
pleaded two disadvantages, (1) the ill effects
produced by the influence of flatterers and
favourites with the monarch, and (2) the disorders
which arise when the monarchy descends to an
infant or an imbecile. These, however, are dis
counted by considering (1) that flatterers and
favourites, in the form of interested demagogues,
are as common in popular as in monarchical
government; and under the former have more
power to do harm and less to do good than under
the latter. ' For to accuse requires less eloquence
(such is man's nature) than to excuse ; and con-
<^mnation,than absolution, more resembles justice'
eviathan, c.xix.); and that the powers of an infant
imbecile monarch can always be placed in the
,nds of a qualified body of regents, and therefore
iy disturbances that arise must be attributed
not to the inherent defects of monarchical
government, but to ' the ambition of subjects, and
ignorance ot their duty' (76.). As we have
already seen, Hobbes's conception of human
nature and the ends of action precludes his
reckoning with what a more idealistic philosophy
would probably regard as the chief objection to
despotism, even when it is both benevolent and
capable, viz. the conviction that freedom and self-
108
POWERS OE THE SOVEREIGN
nature absolute o ^ ^
vindicating for the g , d b the Puritan
powers which had been challenged j ^
jtfSRSZ go--*
monarch is m <Acts of
the monarc ^ <A
modern phrase, m accord
Parliament.' Parliament is merdy 7 ^ ^
together by the Anarch to Jvisg ^ ^
state of the kmgdom and th Q{ ^
taken for the common P*- ^ ^
elected Parliament "**>£* \s entirely un
•representative of tte > P completel;
founded. The people are ^ al y mQnMcl
.^resented' ^ ^ sove^gn ^
and consequently ^^^ it enjo;
again. What powers Parham
^ - a ^S o 1 People,'^
the real < represent atw e reject lt,
therefore free J° ^fj'^thout consulti
to promulgate laws of h^n^
it as he thinks best ,(1 _
THOMAS HOBBES
take charge
*
the
Control of
(3)
im''Sted
controversy
to
-ecessary to the
demand of the
*« militia was an
momrch, again, has the s
at hs own discretion a r 1
by Hobbes with^fere
ship.mon , "
from hisUtLn t
all the rules of iusl! ° authori
deciding ajl Jj a>bce.e°wn»te, of -
which
natural, or con.
aX since,
against aaother'
opposition to he
the Star
from
°f
opions
COndUpcingn:
r,0
<to ^
there-
POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN
fore, that it is for him, and for him alone, to
decide 'on what occasions, how far, and what
men are to be trusted withal in speaking to
multitudes of people, and who shall examine the
doctrines of all books before -they be published.
For the actions of men proceed from their
opinions, and in the well governing of men's
opinions consisteth the well governing of men's
actions in order to their peace and concord'
(Leviathan, c. xviii.). Of the bearing of this con
clusion upon Hobbes's views of the ecclesiastical
supremacy of the sovereign I shall have some
thing to say in the next chapter.
It must be observed that the highly doctrin
aire character of this defence of the Royalists'
position at once lays it open to a damaging attack
which Hobbes does nothing to meet. He has
proved conclusively, if you grant the truth of his
peculiar view of human nature, that ' peace and
concord' are only attainable in political society.
He has also shown that in every political society
there must be somewhere a centre of authority
endowed with plenatyjfewers, and only restrained
in the exercise of them by the consideration that
governmental authority, pushed beyond a certain
point, will provoke rebellion and so defeat its
own ends. What he has not proved, but is con-
iii
THOMAS HOBBES
tent simply to assume, is that, as a matter of
historical fact, this plenitude of power is, under
the constitution of England, reposed in the person
of the king, or in other words, that the govern
ment of England is really a monarchy in his
sense of the term. Now this was precisely what
the Parliamentarian statesmen denied. Accord
ing to them, the powers of the English Crown were,
in point of fact, and had always been, circum
scribed by a superior authority, which is described
e.g. in the Petition of Right, as ' the laws and
statutes of the realm,' ' the laws and customs of
this realm,' and they had, as we know, sound
historical reasons to urge in support of this view
, of the case. < As Hobbes never takes issue on the
historical question, his leading opponents would
have been perfectly justified in calling his argu
ment, as applied to the proceedings of the Parlia
mentarians, an elaborate ignoratio elenchi.' The
question at issue between Charles i. and Hampden
or Pym was not whether the ultimate seat of
authority in England is 'absolute' or not, but
where that seat of authority lies. Hobbes's
evasion of the real question throws a flood of light
upon the fundamental weakness of the theory
which treats government as legitimated by ' con
tract.' Such a hard and fast theory is bound to
112
POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN
be, at some point or other, discrepant with the
actual facts of the historical situation. A consti
tution is not a thing which is made once for all
by the wisdom of .a .particular set of persons ; it
is something which grows up gradually under all
sorts of perceptible and imperceptible infJaasnces.
At any given time, the various formulae by which
it is described by those who live under it are
sure to be only imperfectly consistent with
one another. Nay, further, since the formulae for
the most part are things devised to fit a past state
of affairs, which continue to be repeated long after
the situation they describe has been profoundly
modified in fact, they are almost certain to be
largely false when accepted as an account of the
stage of development actually reached, long
before they lose their inherited prestige. And of
development and progress as great social facts,
Hobbes, as we saw, has as good as no conception.
From his examination of the powers of the
sovereign, Hobbes advances to a consideration of
the liberties of the subject. One might be
**^0./..r.. ...... V.1 --*,<~W.^.^ — .Jl^. O
tempted to think that the latter must be non
existent in such a scheme as his. But there are
certain inevitable limits even to the most unre
stricted absolutism, and there are others which
suggest themselves as soon as absolutism itself is
H 113
THOMAS HOBBES
treated as only defensible on a utilitarian basis.
What these limits are, according to Hobbes, is
explained in chapter xxi. of the Leviathan. .... The
'liberty of the subject' is simply that part of the
supposed original 'right of every man to every
thing ' of which he cannot possibly have divested
himself, or of which he cannot be supposed to
have divested himself without defeating his pur
pose in entering into the 'social compact' — viz.,
I the preservation j)f himself. He is free then (1) to
refuse, even when commanded by the sovereign,
to kill or maim himself, or to submit without
resistance to those who are charged to kill or
maim him ; (2) to refuse to confess a crime, except
upon previous promise of pardon ; (3) to refuse to
execute an order to kill another man, and more
generally to decline any dangerous or dishonour
able office by executing which he imperils that
very self-preservation for the sake of which he
has entered into social life. On this ground
Hobbes justifies the refusal of 'men of feminine
courage ' (like himself) to do personal service as
soldiers, provided they are ready to furnish a
sufficient substitute. Even a band of rebels, he
holds, may without injustice refuse to capitulate
except on a promise of pardon. To these elemen
tary liberties we subsequently find added com-
114'
POWERS OF THE SOVEREIGN
plete liberty of conscience, so far as private
thoughts are concerned. Thought is absolutely
free, si T^ply because it. is impossible to subject it;
the expression of thought in words, as we have
seen, is not free at all, it being for the sovereign
to decide what thoughts may be made public
without danger to the peace. It has only to Jje
added that the authority of a sovereign, of nmrrBft,
only lasts so long as he is able to ensure the
general safety, for no covenant can deprive a man
ot'Jiis right to protect himself when he has no
other protector. Political allegiance is therefore I v
terminated, the life of the Leviathan extinguished,!
when a monarch is captured in war and purchases
his personal liberty by submission to the con-l
queror, or when he voluntarily releases his sub-l
jects from their obedience, and so declares that he j
no longer embodies the public will for self- V
protection.
CHAPTER VI
CHUKCH AND STATE
SINCE it has been already declared that the
sovereign, in the interests of the general peace,
has the sole right to determine what opinions may
be safely taught in the commonwealth, it follows
at once that Hobbes can allow of no division
between a civil and a spiritual power. In fact he
holds, as a man of the seventeenth century not
unreasonably might, that the most potent of all
sources of anarchy and civil disorder is precisely
the claim of the clergy of various churches to
possess an inherent right, not depending on any
grant from the political authority, to declare what
religious doctrines shall be taught and what form
of church discipline permitted, and to depose or
rebel against civil rulers who refuse to submit to
their dictation on these points. Writing, as he
did, in the seventeenth century, Hobbes found it
necessary to plead the cause of Erastianism not
only on grounds of reason, but by the aid of an
116
CHURCH AND STATE
appeal to Scripture, and the consequence is that
nearly a half of Leviathan is taken up by the
ecclesiastical controversy in which he has to
oppose at once the Romanist, the Scotch Cove
nanter, and the ordinary Anglican High Church- ^
man. It is impossible in a short sketch like the
present to do more than indicate the general
character of the singular result at which he
arrives. The key to his whole position must be
sought in his pithy aphorism that religion is not-' v
philosophy, but law. That is, the sovereign
authorises the preaching of certain doctrines and
prohibits others, not because the former are scien
tifically true, and the latter false (in fact, we saw
long ago that all doctrines about God lie outside
the limits of human knowledge), but because the
... former are conducive to peace, and the latter to
discord. And our profession of faith in the
authorised religion is to be understood not as a
declaration of our philosophical belief, but as a
declaration of our submission to the rightful poli- j
tical authority of the sovereign. Hobbes has then
to meet the objection that, on his view, our duty to
the sovereign must, whenever the sovereign is an
' infidel/ lead us into disobedience to God. The
'infidel' sovereign commands us to practise a
' false ' religion, God commands us, in his Word,
117
THOMAS HOBBES
to embrace the ' true.' Are we then to obey man
rather than God, and must the martyrs who died
for the faith be accounted criminals? Hobbes's
reply is, in principle, that we have to learn what
is the ' true ' religion from the ' canonical ' Scrip
tures, and that a writing depends for its ' canon
ical ' character upon its authorisation as such by
the sovereign, who also, in virtue of his general
right to prohibit dangerous teaching, is the final
court of appeal as to the interpretation of ' Scrip
ture.' It must, therefore, be vain to plead our
interpretations of some work which we regard as
'inspired' in justification of our refusal to submit
to the sovereign. As for the martyrs of history,
no man can be a ' martyr,' or witness for the truth
of a revelation from God, except its .immediate
recipient. All that any other martyr can testify
to is his belief in the veracity of the person who
claims to have received the revelation. To reject
his witness is thus not to reject his commands of
God, but merely to reject the claims of a certain
person to have had communications with God.
Now the only way in which a man can prove his
divine commission is by the performance of
miracles, and since miracles have ceased, no one
can now establish his claims to be believed as a
messenger of God except indirectly by the agree-
118
CHURCH AND STATE
ment of his teaching with that of Christ and the
apostles. But Christ and the apostles taught,
both by precept and by example, the duty of
submission to civil authorities. Hence no man
can claim their authority in favour of disobedience
to the sovereign. In the purely hypothetical case
of a man receiving to-day a direct command from
God to disobey his sovereign, he must, no doubt,
be prepared to obey God, who can make it his
highest interest to do so, rather than the sove
reign ; but since he is unable to prove his divine
commission by miracles, he has no ground for
complaint if the sovereign refuses to believe in
it and punishes him as an offender.
To make this doctrine more palatable to his
readers, Hobbes combines it with an elaborate
scriptural exegesis of his own, in the develop
ment of which he rivals or outdoes his orthodox
antagonists in profusion of biblical quotations
and ingenuity of interpretation, not infrequently
throwing out remarkable anticipations of more
modern criticism, f The fundamental proposition
of the whole scheme is that the 'kingdom of
God,' spoken of in Scripture, is not an ecclesi
astical system, but a civil government in which
God, as represented by a visible human lieutenant,
reigns as civil sovereign. This kingdom was first
119
THOMAS HOBBES
instituted when Moses was directly installed by
God as His representative in the government of
the Jews, but suspended when that people revolted
from their lawful rulers, the successors of Moses,
and set up the kingdom of Saul. The mission
of Jesus was to announce its restoration, not in
his lifetime, but in an age yet to come, when the
righteous are to rise from the dead and be reigned
over personally by Jesus, as God's representative,
in Palestine. Hence the only condition imposed
from the first as necessary for entrance into the
Church was the acknowledgment of the belief that
Jesus is the ' Messiah/ i.e. the destined monarch
of the coming ' Kingdom of God.' All that a
Christian is obliged to, therefore, as a condition
of salvation is the belief that at some future time
Jesus will reappear on earth as a civil sovereign,
and the intention of then obeying his authority ; I
in the meanwhile the Christian is bound, by the
express language of Scripture itself, to complete
submission to the existing civil power. As for
the ' Church/ which sometimes claims to be the
1 Kingdom of God ' announced by Jesus, and con
sequently to have a first lien, so to say, on the
obedience of Christians, Hobbes gives us a choice
of alternatives. 'If it be one person, it is the
same thing with a commonwealth of Christians,
1 20
CHURCH AND STATE
called a commonwealth because it consisteth of
men united in one person, their sovereign, and a
church because it consisteth in Christian men
united in one Christian sovereign. But if the
church be not one person, then it hath no
authority at all ; it can neither command, nor do
any action at all ... nor has any will, reason,
nor voice, for all these qualities are personal.'
(Leviathan, c. xxxiii.) It is then argued at length
that the only commission given by Christ to his
apostles, and by them to their successors, was to
teach and persuade, and the only weapon with
which they were armed against the recalcitrant,
the power of excommunication, i.e. the threat of
exclusion from the future 'Kingdom of God.'
Such power as the clergy now exercise in Christian
countries, then, is derived from, and dependent
on, the political sovereign, who is the single
fountain at once of temporal and 'spiritual'
authority. They are, in fact, so far as concerns
their social status, a body of civil servants, and
nothing more, and Hobbes declares that whereas
the king of England, as responsible to no tribunal
on earth, may rightly claim to rule Dei gratia, a
bishop holds his see 'by the grace of God and
the king's permission.'
The fourth and last division of Leviathan is
121
THOMAS HOBBES
devoted to an unsparing attack, conducted chiefly
with an eye to Bellarrnine's arguments for Papal
supremacy, upon ' the kingdom of darkness/ that
is, the church organised as a society independent
of the authorisation of the civil power, and claim
ing an independent 'spiritual' jurisdiction to be
enforced at its peril by the ' secular arm ' through
the medium of temporal disabilities and penalties.
The origin of this ' kingdom of darkness ' is sought
in the ambition of the Roman clergy, which led
them first to accept support and grants of power
from the Christian Roman Emperors, and finally,
in the general decay of the imperial system, to
usurp the place of their original protectors. ' If
a man,' says Hobbes, in one of his most famous
epigrams, ' considers the original of this great
ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive
that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the
deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon
the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start
up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen
power ' (Leviathan, c. xlvii.). The ghost, Hobbes
adds, has partly been exorcised in England, first
by the Tudor sovereigns who overthrew the power
of the Pope, then by the Presbyterians of the
Long Parliament who put down the Bishops, and
finally (we must remember that this sentence,
122
CHURCH AND STATE
which does not appear in the modified Latin text
of 1669, was written in 1651), by the Indepen
dents, who destroyed the domination of Presby-
terianism, 'and so we are reduced to the inde
pendency of the primitive Christians, to follow
Paul or Cephas or Apollos, every man as he
liketh best, which, if it be without contention . . .
is perhaps the best' (/&.). But> ne a(Ws> tne
exorcism will never be complete until a bold
ruler takes in hand the universities, the chief
sources hitherto of high ecclesiastical pretensions,
and compels them to instruct their students in
the true rudiments of political science, and the
true grounds of political submission. That is,
said his critics, until the Leviathan is officially
made the sole text-book of political science.
123
CONCLUSION
>
THE true measure of Hobbes's greatness as a
philosopher was hardly recognised either by his
own contemporaries in England or by their suc
cessors of the eighteenth century. The innumer
able attacks of the orthodox upon his theories, on
the ground of their alleged irreligious and im
moral tendency, are mostly of an ephemeral kind,
but the attitude of Locke and Berkeley, who had
capacity enough to understand him, if they had
cared to do so, and who would have found his
nominalism at least entirely to their taste is more
significant. Locke never mentions his name at
all throughout the Essay, and when accused by
Stillingfleet of arriving at results similar to those
of Hobbes, retorts with a sarcasm upon the good
Bishop's familiarity with a 'suspected' author.
Berkeley mentions him once, in his Alcipkron,
along with Spinoza and Vanini, as a typical atheist.
Though Warburton, with his usual love for a
paradox, prided himself on having been the first
person to discover the real strength of Hobbes's
124
CONCLUSION
position, real appreciation of his merits in Eng
land begins with the utilitarians of the early
nineteenth century, Austin, Grote, and Moles-
worth, to the last of whom we owe the only
approach as yet made to a complete edition of
Hobbes's works. Down to their time Hobbes's
chief influence on English thought lay in the
stimulus his ethical theories afforded to a pro-
founder moral analysis and a deeper study of
human nature on the part of antagonists who
sought to vindicate the originality of disinter
ested action and to base morality upon grounds
independent of positive law. The ethical work of
Cudworth, of Shaftesbury, of Cumberland, of
Butler is throughout inspired by the felt need
to meet and overcome a conception of human
nature which goes back, in the end, to the
philosopher of Mahnesbury. On the Continent
the direct influence of Hobbes made itself more
immediately and more permanently felt. Within
the philosopher's own lifetime Spinoza had
adopted, as the basis of the theory of government
given in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus, a
view of ' natural right ' and the ' social compact/
which is, in all fundamentals, identical with that
of Hobbes, whose influence is also visibly traceable
in the argument for the freedom of philosophy
125
THOMAS HOBBES
from theological restraints set forth in the famoi •
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Leibniz, too, in
his youthful recoil from scholasticism was power
fully attracted by Hobbes's clear-cut logical
nominalism and outspoken materialism, nor did
he cease to express his admiration for the English
man's genius after he had finally arrived at his
own mature doctrine of spiritual realism. It has
been shown that throughout the eighteenth cen
tury, down to the time of Kant, Hobbes continued
to be an object of philosophic interest in Ger
many. But the detailed facts as to his influence
at home and abroad belong to the general history
of modern thought, and necessarily fall outside
the limits of a brief sketch like the present.
126
BOOKS USEFUL TO THE STUDENT
OF HOBBES
Editions of Works : —
The Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Edited
by Sir W. Moles worth. 16 vols. (English Works,
11 vols ; Latin Works, 5 vols.) London, John Bohn,
1839-1845.
Leviathan. Eeprints — (1) In Morley's (now Eoutledge's)
Universal Library; vol. xxi. of the original series.
(2) In the Cambridge English Classics, 1904. (Cam
bridge University Press.)
The Metaphysical System of Hobbes, as contained in twelve
chapters from his ' Elements of Philosophy Concerning
Body,' and in briefer extracts from his 'Human Nature '
and 'Leviathan,3 selected by Mary Whitton Calkins.
Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co. London, Kegan
Paul, Trench, Triibner and Co., 1906.
Monographs : —
Hobbes, by Prof. J. Groom Kobertson, in Blackwood's
Philosophical Classics. Blackwood and Sons, 1886.
Hobbes, by Prof. F. Tonnies, in Frohmann's Classiker
der Philosophic, No. 2. Stuttgart, 1896.
Hobbes, by Sir Leslie Stephen, in English Men of Letters
Series. Macmillan and Co., 1904.
General works on the history of modern thought : —
History of Modern Philosophy, by Prof. H. Hoffding.
English Translation. Macmillan. 2 vols. 1900. (For
Hobbes in particular see vol. i. p. 259-291.)
127
THOMAS HOBBES
Principles of Political Obligation, by T. H. Green. (For
Hobbes in particular see §§ 42-50.) Originally pub
lished in vol. ii. of Works of Thomas Hill Green.
Longmans, Green and Co., 1886 ; since reprinted as a
separate volume.
The Philosophical Theory of the State. Bernard Bosanquet.
Macmillan and Co., 1899.
Outlines of the History of Ethics. Henry Sidgwick. Mac
millan and Co.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majeaty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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