The political opinions expressed in the Leviathan, which were Royalist in the extreme, had been held by Hobbes for a long time. When the Parliament of 1628 drew up the Petition of Right, he published a translation of Thucydides, with the expressed intention of showing the evils of democracy. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, and Laud and Strafford were sent to the Tower, Hobbes was terrified and fled to France. His book De Cive, written in 1641, though not published till 1647, sets forth essentially the same theory as that of the Leviathan. It was not the actual occurrence of the Civil War that caused his opinions, but the prospect of it; naturally, however, his convictions were strengthened when his fears were realized.
In Paris he was welcomed by many of the leading mathematicians and men of science. He was one of those who saw Descartes’ Meditations before they were published, and wrote objections to them, which were printed by Descartes with his replies. He also soon had a large company of English Royalist refugees with whom to associate. For a time, from 1646 to 1648, he taught mathematics to the future Charles II. When, however, in 1651, he published the Leviathan, it pleased no one. Its rationalism offended most of the refugees, and its bitter attacks on the Catholic Church offended the French government. Hobbes therefore fled secretly to London, where he made submission to Cromwell, and abstained from all political activity.
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He was not idle, however, either at this time or at any other during his long life. He had a controversy with Bishop Bramhall on free will; he was himself a rigid determinist. Over-estimating his own capacities as a geometer, he imagined that he had discovered how to square the circle; on this subject he very foolishly embarked on a controversy with Wallis, the professor of geometry at Oxford. Naturally the professor succeeded in making him look silly.
At the Restoration, Hobbes was taken up by the less earnest of the king’s friends, and by the king himself, who not only had Hobbes’s portrait on his walls, but awarded him a pension of £100 a year–which, however, His Majesty forgot to pay. The Lord Chancellor Clarendon was shocked by the favour shown to a man suspected of atheism, and so was Parliament. After the Plague and the Great Fire, when people’s superstitious fears were aroused, the House of Commons appointed a committee to inquire into atheistical writings, specially mentioning those of Hobbes. From this time onwards, he could not obtain leave in England to print anything on controversial subjects. Even his history of the Long Parliament, which he called Behemoth, though it set forth the most orthodox doctrine, had to be printed abroad ( 1668). The collected edition of his works in 1688 appeared in Amsterdam. In his old age, his reputation abroad was much greater than in England. To occupy his leisure, he wrote, at eighty-four, an autobiography in Latin verse, and published, at eighty-seven, a translation of Homer. I cannot discover that he wrote any large books after the age of eighty-seven.
We will now consider the doctrines of the Leviathan, upon which the fame of Hobbes mainly rests.
He proclaims, at the very beginning of the book, his thoroughgoing materialism. Life, he says, is nothing but a motion of the limbs, and therefore automata have an artificial life. The commonwealth, which he calls Leviathan, is a creation of art, and is in fact an artificial man. This is intended as more than an analogy, and is worked out in some detail. The sovereignty is an artificial soul. The pacts and covenants by which “Leviathan” is first created take the place of God’s fiat when He said “Let Us make man.”
The first part deals with man as an individual, and with such general philosophy as Hobbes deems necessary. Sensations are caused by the pressure of objects; colours, sounds, etc. are not in the objects. The
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qualities in objects that correspond to our sensations are motions. The first law of motion is stated, and is immediately applied to psychology: imagination is a decaying sense, both being motions. Imagination when asleep is dreaming; the religions of the gentiles came of not distinguishing dreams from waking life. (The rash reader may apply the same argument to the Christian religion, but Hobbes is much too cautious to do so himself. * ) Belief that dreams are prophetic is a delusion; so is the belief in witchcraft and in ghosts.
The succession of our thoughts is not arbitrary, but governed by laws–sometimes those of association, sometimes those depending upon a purpose in our thinking. (This is important as an application of determinism to psychology.)
Hobbes, as might be expected, is an out-and-out nominalist. There is, he says, nothing universal but names, and without words we could not conceive any general ideas. Without language, there would be no truth or falsehood, for “true” and “false” are attributes of speech.
He considers geometry the one genuine science so far created. Reasoning is of the nature of reckoning, and should start from definitions. But it is necessary to avoid self-contradictory notions in definitions, which is not usually done in philosophy. “Incorporeal substance,” for instance, is nonsense. When it is objected that God is an incorporeal substance, Hobbes has two answers: first, that God is not an object of philosophy; second, that many philosophers have thought God corporeal. All error in general propositions, he says, comes from absurdity (i.e., self-contradiction); he gives as examples of absurdity the idea of free will, and of cheese having the accidents of bread. (We know that, according to the Catholic faith, the accidents of bread can inhere in a substance that is not bread.)
In this passage Hobbes shows an old-fashioned rationalism. Kepler had arrived at a general proposition: “Planets go round the sun in ellipses”; but other views, such as those of Ptolemy, are not logically absurd. Hobbes has not appreciated the use of induction for arriving at general laws, in spite of his admiration for Kepler and Galileo.
As against Plato, Hobbes holds that reason is not innate, but is developed by industry.
He comes next to a consideration of the passions. “Endeavour”
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* Elsewhere he says that the heathen gods were created by human fear, but that our God is the First Mover.
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may be defined as a small beginning of motion; if towards something, it is desire, and if away from something it is aversion. Love is the same as desire, and hate is the same as aversion. We call a thing “good” when it is an object of desire, and “bad” when it is an object of aversion. (It will be observed that these definitions give no objectivity to “good” and “bad”; if men differ in their desires, there is no theoretical method of adjusting their differences.) There are definitions of various passions, mostly based on a competitive view of life; for instance, laughter is sudden glory. Fear of invisible power, if publicly allowed, is religion; if not allowed, superstition. Thus the decision as to what is religion and what superstition rests with the legislator. Felicity involves continual progress; it consists in prospering, not in having prospered; there is no such thing as a static happiness–excepting, of course, the joys of heaven, which surpass our comprehension.
Will is nothing but the last appetite or aversion remaining in deliberation. That is to say, will is not something different from desire and aversion, but merely the strongest in a case of conflict. This is connected, obviously, with Hobbes’s denial of free will.
Unlike most defenders of despotic government, Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life “nasty, brutish, and short.” In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and “force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues.”
The second part tells how men escape from these evils by combining into communities each subject to a central authority. This is represented as happening by means of a social contract. It is supposed that a number of people come together and agree to choose a sovereign, or a sovereign body, which shall exercise authority over them and put an end to the universal war. I do not think this “covenant” (as Hobbes usually calls it) is thought of as a definite historical event; it is certainly irrelevant to the argument to think of it as such. It is an explanatory myth, used to explain why men submit, and should submit, to the limitations on personal freedom entailed in submission to authority. The purpose of the restraint men put upon themselves,
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says Hobbes, is self-preservation from the universal war resulting from our love of liberty for ourselves and of dominion over others.
Hobbes considers the question why men cannot co-operate like ants and bees. Bees in the
