36 materials he had long had by him 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. ]F.,iv. pp. 229-278), issued from the press, claiming to be an answer to a discourse on the same subject by Bishop Bramhall of Londonderry, addressed by Hobbes to the marquis of Newcastle. 1 It was really such, and had grown out of an oral discussion between Hobbes and Bram hall in the marquis s presence at Paris in 1646, Bramhall, a strong Arminian, having afterwards written down his views and sent them to Newcastle to be answered in this form by Hobbes, and Hobbes having duly replied, but not for publication, because he thought the subject a delicate one. Unpublished, accordingly, the piece remained ; but it happened that Hobbes, in the interval between writing his own reply and receiving from the bishop in 1647 a re joinder which he left unanswered, allowed a French acquaint ance to have a private translation of his reply made by a young Englishman, who secretly took also 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 extrava gantly 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 readily enough condoned the offender s act. On the other hand, Bramhall, supposing Hobbes privy to the publication, might well resent the manner of it, especi ally 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 him self 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 con cerning 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 circum stances 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 BramhalPs 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 Hobbes s Animadversions, and also made good his previous threat in a bulky appendix entitled The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale. Hobbes never took any notice of the Castigations, but ten years later replied to the charges of atheism, &c., made in the non- political part of the appendix, of which he says he then heard for the first time (E. W., iv. pp. 279-384. This Ansiver was first published after Hobbes s death. Bram hall had died, as archbishop of Armagh, in 1663). 2 1 The treatise bore the date, "Rouen, Aug. 20, 1652," but it should have been 1646, as afterwards explained by Hobbes himself ( E. W., v. p. 25). 2 A little tract by Bishop Laney of Ely, directed against the con cluding summary in Hobbes s original statement to Newcastle, was published in 1676, and called forth a printed reply from Hobbes, again addressed to Newcastle (who had meanwhile become duke). This letter is not reprinted by Molesworth. We may now follow out the more troublesome conflict, or rather series of conflicts, in which Hobbes became entangled from the time of publishing his DC Corpore in 1655, and which checkered all his remaining years. In Leviathan lie had vehemently assailed the system of the universities, as originally founded for the support of the papal against the civil authority, and as still working social mischief by adherence to the old learning. The attack was duly noted at Oxford, where under the Commonwealth a new spirit of scientific activity had begun to stir ; and in 1654 Seth Ward, the Savilian professor of astronomy, replying in his Vindicitx, Acadcmi- artim to some other assaults (then very common) on the academic system, retorted upon Hobbes that, so far from the universities being now what he had known them in his youth, he would find his geometrical pieces, when they appeared, better understood there than he should like. This was said in reference to the boasts in which Hobbes seems to have been freely indulging of having squared the circle and accomplished other such feats ; and, when a year later the De Corpore (L. W., i.) finally appeared, it was seen how the thrust had gone home. In the chapter (xx. ) of that work where Hobbes dealt with the famous problem whose solution he fondly thought he had found, there were left some self-compla cent expressions vented against Vindex (Ward) at a time when the solutions still seemed to him good ; but the solutions themselves, as printed, were allowed to be all in different ways halting, as he naively confessed he had discovered only when he had been driven by the insults of malevolent men to examine them more closely with the help of his friends. A strange conclusion this, and reached by a path not less strange, as was now to be disclosed by a relentless hand. Ward s colleague, the more famous John Wallis, Savilian professor of geometry, had been privy to the challenge thrown out in 1654, and it was arranged that they should critically dispose of the De Corpore between them. Ward was to occupy himself with the philosophical and physical sections, which he did in leisurely fashion, bringing out his criticism in the course of next year (In Tli. Jfobbii Philosophiam Exercitatio Epistolica). Wallis was to confine himself to the mathematical chapters, and set to work at once with characteristic energy. Obtaining an unbound copy of the De Corpore, he saw by the mutilated appearance of the sheets that Hobbes had repeatedly altered his demonstrations before he issued them at last in their actual form, grotesque as it was, rather than delay the book longer. Obtaining also a copy of the work as it had been printed before Hobbes had any doubt of the validity of his solutions, Wallis was able to track his whole course from the time of Ward s provocation his passage from exultation to doubt, from doubt to confessed impotence, yet still without abandoning the old assumption of confident strength ; and all his turnings and windings were now laid bare in one of the most trenchant pieces of controversial writing ever penned. Wallis s Elenchus Gcometrice Hobbianoc, published in 1655 about three months after the De Corpore, contained also an elaborate criticism of Hobbes s whole attempt to relaj T the foundations of mathematical science in its place within the general body of reasoned knowledge a criticism which, if it failed to allow for the merit of the conception, exposed only too effectually the utter inadequacy of the result. Taking up mathematics when iiot only his mind was already formed but his thoughts were crystallizing into a philosophical system, Hobbes had, in fact, never put him self to school and sought to work up gradually to the best know ledge of the time, but had been more anxious from the first to become himself an innovator with whatever insufficient means. The consequence was that, when not spending himself in vain attempts to solve the impossible problems that have always way laid the fancy of self-sufficient beginners, he took an interest only in the elements of geometry, and never had any notion of the full scope of mathematical science, undergoing as it then was (and not least at the hands of Wallis) the extraordinary development which made it before the end of the century the potent instrument of physical discovery which it became in the hands of Newton. He was even unable, in dealing with the elementary conceptions of geometry, to work out with any consistency the few original thoughts he had, and thus became the easy sport of Wallis. At his advanced age, however, and with the sense he had of his powers, he was not likely to be brought to a better mind by so insulting an opponent. He did indeed, before allowing an English translation of the De Corpore (E. IV., i. ) to appear in 1656, take care to remove some of the worst mistakes exposed by Wallis, and, while leaving out all the references to Vindex, now profess 1o make, in altered form, a series of mere "attempts" at quadrature; but he was far from yielding the ground to the enemy. With the translation, 3 in the spring of 1656, he had ready Six Lessons to tlie 3 This translation, Concerning Body, though not made by Hobbes, was revised by him; but it is far from accurate, and not seldom, at critical places (e.g., c. vi. 2), quite misleading. Philosophical citations from the De Corpore should always be made in the original Latin. Molesworth reprints the Latin, not from the first edition of
1655, but from the modified edition of 1668 modified, in the mutlie-
