before 1628, except that through his connexion with young
Cavendish he had relations with literary men of note like Ben
Jonson, and also with Bacon and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. If
he never had any sympathy with Herbert’s intuitionalist principles
in philosophy, he was no less eager, as he afterwards showed, than
Herbert to rationalize in matters of religious doctrine, so that he
may be called the second of the English deists, as Herbert has
been called the first. With Bacon he was so intimate (Aubrey’s
Lives, pp. 222, 602) that some writers have described him as a
disciple. The facts that he used to walk with Bacon at Gorhambury,
and would jot down with exceptional intelligence the eager
thinker’s sudden “notions,” and that he was employed to make
the Latin version of some of the Essays, prove nothing when
weighed against his own disregard of all Bacon’s principles, and
the other evidence that the impulse to independent thinking
came to him not from Bacon, and not till some time after Bacon’s
death in 1626.[1]
So far as we have any positive evidence, it was not before the year 1629 that Hobbes entered on philosophical inquiry. Meanwhile a great change had been wrought in his circumstances. His friend and master, after about two years’ tenure of the earldom of Devonshire, died of the plague Philosophic Inquiry. in June 1628, and the affairs of the family were so disordered financially that the widowed countess was left with the task of righting them in the boyhood of the third earl. Hobbes went on for a time living in the household; but his services were no longer in demand, and, remaining inconsolable under his personal bereavement, he sought distraction, in 1629, in another engagement which took him abroad as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, of an old Nottinghamshire family. This, his second, sojourn abroad appears to have been spent chiefly in Paris, and the one important fact recorded of it is that he then first began to look into Euclid. The engagement came to an end in 1631, when he was recalled to train the young earl of Devonshire, now thirteen years old, son of his previous pupil. In the course of the next seven years in Derbyshire and abroad, Hobbes took his pupil over rhetoric,[2] logic, astronomy, and the principles of law, with other subjects. His mind was now full of the thought of motion in nature, and on the continent he sought out the philosophical speculators or scientific workers. In Florence in 1636 he saw Galileo, for whom he ever retained the warmest admiration, and spent eight months in daily converse with the members of a scientific circle in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne (q.v.). From that time (the winter of 1636–1637) he too, as he tells us, was numbered among philosophers.
His introduction to Euclid took place accidentally in 1629 (Aubrey’s Lives, p. 604). Euclid’s manner of proof became the model for his own way of thinking upon all subjects. It is less easy to determine when he awoke to an interest in the physical doctrine of motion. The story told by himself (Vit. p. xx.) is that, hearing the question asked “What is sense?” he fell to thinking often on the subject, till it suddenly occurred to him that if bodies and their internal parts were at rest, or were always in the same state of motion, there could be no distinction of anything, and consequently no sense; the cause of all things must therefore be sought in diversity of movements. Starting from this principle he was driven to geometry for insight into the ground and modes of motion. The biographies we possess do not tell us where or when this great change of interest occurred. Nothing is said, however, which contradicts a statement that on his third journey in Europe he began to study the doctrine of motion more seriously, being interested in it before; and as he claims more than once (L.W. v. 303; E.W. vii. 468) to have explained light and sound by a mechanical hypothesis as far back as 1630, the inspiration may be assigned to the time of the second journey. But it was not till the third journey that the new interest became an overpowering passion, and the “philosopher” was on his way home before he had advanced so far as to conceive the scheme of a system of thought to the elaboration of which his life should henceforth be devoted.
Hobbes was able to carry out his plan in some twenty years or more from the time of its conception, but the execution was so broken in upon by political events, and so complicated with other labours, that its stages can hardly be followed without some previous understanding of the relations of the parts of the scheme, as there is reason to believe they were sketched out from the beginning. His scheme was first to work out, in a separate treatise De corpore, a systematic doctrine of Body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, as motion or mechanical action was then (through Galileo and others) understood—the theory of motion being applied in the light of mathematical science, after quantity, the subject-matter of mathematics, had been duly considered in its place among the fundamental conceptions of philosophy, and a clear indication had been given, at first starting, of the logical ground and method of all philosophical inquiry. He would then single out Man from the realm of nature, and, in a treatise De homine, show what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation and knowledge, as also of the affections and passions thence resulting, whereby man came into relation with man. Finally he would consider, in a crowning treatise De cive, how men, being naturally rivals or foes, were moved to enter into the better relation of Society, and demonstrate how this grand product of human wit must be regulated if men were not to fall back into brutishness and misery. Thus he proposed to unite in one coherent whole the separate phenomena of Body, Man and the State.
Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country seething with discontent. The reign of “Thorough” was collapsing, and the forces pent up since 1629 were soon to rend the fabric of the state. By these events Hobbes was distracted from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. The Short Parliament, as he tells us at a later time (E.W. iv. 414), was not dissolved before he had ready “a little treatise in English,” in which he sought to prove that the points of the royal prerogative which the members were determined to dispute before granting supplies “were inseparably annexed to the sovereignty which they did not then deny to be in the king.” Now it can be proved that at this time he had written not only his Human Nature but also his De corpore politico, the two treatises (though published separately ten years later) having been composed as parts of one work;[3] and there cannot be the least question that together they make “the little treatise” just mentioned. We are therefore to understand, first, that he wrote the earliest draft of his political theory some years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and, secondly, that this earliest draft was not written till, in accordance with his philosophical conception, he had established the grounds of polity in human nature. The first point is to be noted, because it has often been supposed that Hobbes’s political doctrine took its peculiar complexion from his revulsion against the state of anarchy before his eyes, as he wrote during the progress of the Civil War. The second point must be maintained against his own implied, if not express, statement some years later, when publishing his De cive (L.W. ii. 151), that he wrote this third part of his system before he had been able to set down any finished representation of the fundamental doctrines which it presupposed. In the beginning of 1640, therefore, he had written out his doctrine of Man at least, with almost as much elaboration as it ever received from him.
In November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded to the Short, and sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower, and Hobbes, who had become, or thought he had become, a marked man by the circulation of his treatise (of which, In Paris. “though not printed, many gentlemen had copies”), hastened to Paris, “the first of all that fled.” He was now for the fourth and last time abroad, and did not return for eleven years. Apparently he remained the greater part of the time in or about
- ↑ Hobbes, in minor works dealing with physical questions (L.W. iv. 316; E.W. vii. 112), makes two incidental references to Bacon’s writings, but never mentions Bacon as he mentions Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and others (De corpore, ep. ded.), among the lights of the century. The word “Induction,” which occurs in only three or four passages throughout all his works (and these again minor ones), is never used by him with the faintest reminiscence of the import assigned to it by Bacon; and, as will be seen, he had nothing but scorn for experimental work in physics.
- ↑ The free English abstract of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, published in 1681, after Hobbes’s death, as The Whole Art of Rhetoric (E.W. vi. 423-510), corresponds with a Latin version dictated to his young pupil. Among Hobbes’s papers preserved at Hardwick, where he died, there remains the boy’s dictation-book, interspersed with headings, examples, &c. in Hobbes’s hand.
- ↑ Among the Hardwick papers there is preserved a MS. copy of the work, under the title Elementes of Law Naturall and Politique, with the dedication to the earl of Newcastle, written in Hobbes’s own hand, and dated May 9, 1640. This dedication was prefixed to the first thirteen chapters of the work when printed by themselves, under the title Human Nature in 1650.
