closet. These marks of favour, naturally, did not lessen Hobbes’s
self-esteem, and perhaps they explain, in his later writings, a
certain slavishness toward the regal authority, which is wholly
absent from his rational demonstration of absolutism in the
earlier works. At all events Hobbes was satisfied with the rule
of a king who had appreciated the author of Leviathan, and
protected him when, after a time, protection in a very real sense
became necessary. His eagerness to defend himself against
Wallis’s imputation of disloyalty, and his apologetic dedication
of the Problemata physica to the king, are evidence of the
hostility with which he was being pressed as early as 1662;
but it was not till 1666 that he felt himself seriously in danger.
In that year the Great Fire of London, following on the Great
Plague, roused the superstitious fears of the people, and the
House of Commons embodied the general feeling in a bill against
atheism and profaneness. On the 17th of October it was ordered
that the committee to which the bill was referred “should be
empowered to receive information touching such books as tend
to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness, or against the essence
and attributes of God, and in particular the book published
in the name of one White,[1] and the book of Mr Hobbes called
the Leviathan, and to report the matter with their opinion to
the House.” Hobbes, then verging upon eighty, was terrified
at the prospect of being treated as a heretic, and proceeded to
burn such of his papers as he thought might compromise him.
At the same time he set himself, with a very characteristic
determination, to inquire into the actual state of the law of
heresy. The results of his investigation were first announced
in three short Dialogues added (in place of the old “Review and
Conclusion,” for which the day had passed) as an Appendix to
his Latin translation of Leviathan (L.W. iii.), included with the
general collection of his works published at Amsterdam in 1668.
In this appendix, as also in the posthumous tract, published in
1680, An Historical Narration concerning Heresy and the Punishment
thereof (E.W. iv. 385-408), he aimed at showing that,
since the High Court of Commission had been put down, there
remained no court of heresy at all to which he was amenable,
and that even when it stood nothing was to be declared heresy
but what was at variance with the Nicene Creed, as he maintained
the doctrine of Leviathan was not.
The only consequence that came of the parliamentary scare was that Hobbes could never afterwards get permission to print anything on subjects relating to human conduct. The collected edition of his Latin works (in two quarto volumes) appeared at Amsterdam in 1668, because he could not obtain the censor’s licence for its publication at London, Oxford or Cambridge. Other writings which he had finished, or on which he must have been engaged about this time, were not made public till after his death—the king apparently having made it the price of his protection that no fresh provocation should be offered to the popular sentiment. The most important of the works composed towards 1670, and thus kept back, is the extremely spirited dialogue to which he gave the title Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1660.[2] To the same period probably belongs the unfinished Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (E.W. vi. 1-160), a trenchant criticism of the constitutional theory of English government as upheld by Coke. Aubrey takes credit for having tried to induce Hobbes to write upon the subject in 1664 by presenting him with a copy of Bacon’s Elements of the Laws of England, and though the attempt was then unsuccessful, Hobbes later on took to studying the statute-book, with Coke upon Littleton. One other posthumous production also (besides the tract on Heresy before mentioned) may be referred to this, if not, as Aubrey suggests, an earlier time—the two thousand and odd elegiac verses in which he gave his view of ecclesiastical encroachment on the civil power; the quaint verses, disposed in his now favourite dialogue-form, were first published, nine years after his death, under the title Historia ecclesiastica (L.W. v. 341-408), with a preface by Thomas Rymer.
For some time Hobbes was not even allowed to utter a word of protest, whatever might be the occasion that his enemies took to triumph over him. In 1669 an unworthy follower—Daniel Scargil by name, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—had to recant publicly and confess that his evil life had been the result of Hobbist doctrines. In 1674 John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, who bore the charges of the Latin translation of Anthony Wood’s History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1670), struck out all the complimentary epithets in the account of his life, and substituted very different ones; but this time the king did suffer him to defend himself by publishing a dignified letter (Vit. Auct. pp. xlvii.-l.), to which Fell replied by adding to the translation when it appeared a note full of the grossest insults. And, amid all his troubles, Hobbes was not without his consolations. No Englishman of that day stood in the same repute abroad, and foreigners, noble or learned, who came to England, never forgot to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect no progress of the years seemed able to quench. Among these was the grand-duke of Tuscany (Ferdinand II.), who took away some works and a portrait to adorn the Medicean library.
His pastimes in the latest years were as singular as his labours. The autobiography in Latin verse, with its playful humour, occasional pathos and sublime self-complacency, was thrown off at the age of eighty-four. At eighty-five, in the year 1673, he sent forth a translation of four books of the Odyssey (ix.-xii.) in rugged but not seldom happily turned English rhymes; and, when he found this Voyage of Ulysses eagerly received, he had ready by 1675 a complete translation of both Iliad and Odyssey (E.W. x.), prefaced by a lively dissertation “Concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem,” showing his unabated interest in questions of literary style. After 1675, he passed his time at his patron’s seats in Derbyshire, occupied to the last with intellectual work in the early morning and in the afternoon hours, which it had long been his habit to devote to thinking and to writing. Even as late as August 1679 he was promising his publisher “somewhat to print in English.” The end came very soon afterwards. A suppression of urine in October, in spite of which he insisted upon being conveyed with the family from Chatsworth to Hardwick Hall towards the end of November, was followed by a paralytic stroke, under which he sank on the 4th of December, in his ninety-second year. He lies buried in the neighbouring church of Ault Hucknall.
He was tall and erect in figure, and lived on the whole a temperate life, though he used to say that he had been drunk about a hundred times. His favourite exercise was tennis, which he played regularly even after the age of seventy. Socially he was genial and courteous, though Personal characteristics. in argument he occasionally lost his temper. As a friend he was generous and loyal. Intellectually bold in the extreme, he was curiously timid in ordinary life, and is said to have had a horror of ghosts. He read little, and often boasted that he would have known as little as other men if he had read as much. He appears to have had an illegitimate daughter for whom he made generous provision. In the National Portrait Gallery there is a portrait of him by J. M. Wright, and two others are in the possession of the Royal Society.
As already suggested, it cannot be allowed that Hobbes falls into any regular succession from Bacon; neither can it be said that he handed on the torch to Locke. He was the one English thinker of the first rank in the long period of two generations separating Locke from Bacon, but, Place in English thought. save in the chronological sense, there is no true relation of succession among the three. It would be difficult even to prove any ground of affinity among them beyond a desposition to take sense as a prime factor in the account of subjective experience: their common interest in physical science was shared
- ↑ The De medio animarum statu of Thomas White, a heterodox Catholic priest, who contested the natural immortality of the soul. White (who died 1676) and Hobbes were friends.
- ↑ E.W. vi. 161-418. Though Behemoth was kept back at the king’s express desire, it saw the light, without Hobbes’s leave, in 1679, before his death.
