to wield all sanctions, supernatural as well as natural, against
the pretensions of any clergy, Catholic, Anglican or Presbyterian,
to the exercise of an imperium in imperio.
We know the Leviathan only as it finally emerged from Hobbes’s pen. During the years of its composition he remained in or near Paris, at first in attendance on his royal pupil, with whom he became a great favourite. In 1647 Hobbes was overtaken by a serious illness which disabled him for six months. Mersenne begged him not to die outside the Roman Catholic Church, but Hobbes said that he had already considered the matter sufficiently and afterwards took the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. On recovering from this illness, which nearly proved fatal, he resumed his literary task, and carried it steadily forward to completion by the year 1650, having also within the same time translated into English, with characteristic force of expression, his Latin treatise. Otherwise the only thing known (from one or two letters) of his life in those years is that from the year 1648 he had begun to think of returning home; he was then sixty and might well be weary of exile. When 1650 came, as if to prepare the way for the reception of his magnum opus, he allowed the publication of his earliest treatise, divided into two separate small volumes (Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, E.W. iv. 1-76, and De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politic, pp. 77–228).[1] In 1651[2] he published his translation of the De Cive under the title of Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (E.W. ii.). Meanwhile the printing of the greater work was proceeding, and finally it appeared about the middle of the same year, 1651, under the title of Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (E.W. iii.), with a quaint frontispiece in which, from behind hills overlooking a fair landscape of town and country, there towered the body (above the waist) of a crowned giant, made up of tiny figures of human beings and bearing sword and crozier in the two hands. It appeared, and soon its author was more lauded and decried than any other thinker of his time; but the first effect of its publication was to sever his connexion with the exiled royalist party, and to throw him for protection on the revolutionary Government. No sooner did copies of the book reach Paris than he found himself shunned by his former associates, and though he was himself so little conscious of disloyalty that he was forward to present a manuscript copy “engrossed in vellum in a marvellous fair hand”[3] to the young king of the Scots (who, after the defeat at Worcester, escaped to Paris about the end of October), he was denied the royal presence when he sought it shortly afterwards. Straightway, then, he saw himself exposed to a double peril. The exiles had among them desperadoes who could slay; and, besides exciting the enmity of the Anglican clergy about the king, who bitterly resented the secularist spirit of his book, he had compromised himself with the French authorities by his elaborate attack on the papal system. In the circumstances, no resource was left him but secret flight. Travelling with what speed he could in the depths of a severe winter and under the effects of a recent (second) illness, he managed to reach London, where, sending in his submission to the council of state, he was allowed to subside into private life.
Though Hobbes came back, after his eleven years’ absence, without having as yet publicly proved his title to rank with the natural philosophers of the age, he was sufficiently conscious of what he had been able to achieve in Leviathan; and it was in no humble mood that he now, at the age of sixty-four, turned Return to London. to complete the fundamental treatise of his philosophical system. Neither those whom his masterpiece soon roused to enthusiasm, nor those whom it moved to indignation, were likely to be indifferent to anything he should now write, whether it lay near to or far from the region of practice. Taking up his abode in Fetter Lane, London, on his return, and continuing to reside there for the sake of intellectual society, even after renewing his old ties with the earl of Devonshire, who lived in the country till the Restoration,[4] he worked so steadily as to be printing the De corpore in the year 1654. Circumstances (of which more presently), however, kept the book back till the following year, and meanwhile the readers of Leviathan had a different excitement. In 1654 a small treatise, “Of Liberty and Necessity” (E.W. iv. 229-278), Controversy with Bramhall. issued from the press, claiming to be an answer to a discourse on the same subject by Bishop Bramhall of Londonderry (afterwards archbishop of Armagh, d. 1663), addressed by Hobbes to the marquis of Newcastle.[5] It had grown out of an oral discussion between Hobbes and Bramhall in the marquis’s presence at Paris in 1646. Bramhall, a strong Arminian, had afterwards written down his views and sent them to Newcastle to be answered in this form by Hobbes. Hobbes duly replied, but not for publication, because he thought the subject a delicate one. But it happened that Hobbes had allowed a French acquaintance to have a private translation of his reply made by a young Englishman, who secretly took a copy of the original for himself; and now it was this unnamed purloiner who, in 1654, when Hobbes had become famous and feared, gave it to the world of his own motion, with an extravagantly laudatory epistle to the reader in its front. Upon Hobbes himself the publication came as a surprise, but, after his plain speaking in Leviathan, there was nothing in the piece that he need scruple to have made known, and he seems to have condoned the act. On the other hand, Bramhall, supposing Hobbes privy to the publication, resented the manner of it, especially as no mention was made of his rejoinder. Accordingly, in 1655, he printed everything that had passed between them (under the title of A Defence of the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent or Extrinsic Necessity), with loud complaint against the treatment he had received, and the promise added that, in default of others, he himself would stand forward to expose the deadly principles of Leviathan. About this time Hobbes had begun to be hard pressed by other foes, and, being never more sure of himself than upon the question of the will, he appears to have welcomed the opportunity thus given him of showing his strength. By 1656 he was ready with his Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (E.W. v.), in which he replied with astonishing force to the bishop’s rejoinder point by point, besides explaining the occasion and circumstances of the whole debate, and reproducing (as Bramhall had done) all the pieces from the beginning. As perhaps the first clear exposition and defence of the psychological doctrine of determinism, Hobbes’s own two pieces must ever retain a classical importance in the history of the free-will controversy; while Bramhall’s are still worth study as specimens of scholastic fence. The bishop, it should be added, returned to the charge in 1658 with ponderous Castigations of Mr Hobbes’s Animadversions, and also made good his previous threat in a bulky
- ↑ The Human Nature corresponds with cc. i.-xiii. of the first part of the original treatise. The remaining six chapters of the part stand now as Part I. of the De Corpore Politico. Part II. of the D.C.P. corresponds with the original second part of the whole work.
- ↑ At the beginning of this year he wrote and published in Paris a letter on the nature and conditions of poetry, chiefly epic, in answer to an appeal to his judgment made in the preface to Sir W. Davenant’s heroic poem, Gondibert (E.W. iv. 441–458). The letter is dated Jan. 10, 1650 (1650/1).
- ↑ This presentation copy, so described by Clarendon (Survey of the Leviathan, 1676, p. 8), is doubtless the beautifully written and finely bound MS. now to be found in the British Museum (Egerton MSS. 1910).
- ↑ During all the time he was abroad he had continued to receive from his patron a yearly pension of £80, and they remained in steady, correspondence. The earl, having sided with the king in 1642, was declared unfit to sit in the House of Peers, and though, by submission to Parliament, he recovered his estates when they were sequestered later on, he did not sit again till 1660. Among Hobbes’s friends at this time are specially mentioned John Selden and William Harvey, who left him a legacy of £10. According to Aubrey, Selden left him an equal bequest, but this seems to be a mistake. Harvey (not Bacon) is the only Englishman he mentions in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the De corpore, among the founders, before himself, of the new natural philosophy.
- ↑ The treatise bore the date, “Rouen, Aug. 20, 1652,” but it should have been 1646, as afterwards explained by Hobbes himself (E.W. v. 25).
