Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/42

32 HOBBES Hobbes the opportunity of acquiring a moderate knowledge of French and Italian; and he did not return without having received a distinct mental impulse that had a lasting effect on his life. The real intellectual activity of that time (still more than five and twenty years before the definite inauguration of modern philosophy by Descartes s Discourse on Method in 1637) was in the newly enlarged if not newly opened domain of physical science ; and Hobbes was little prepared by his juvenile training to understand the achievements of Galileo and Kepler, if he heard any thing of them. But he had had a little modicum of scholastic philosophy retailed to him at Oxford ; and now, wherever he went, he could hear nothing but words of scorn poured upon all such learning. How it had come to pass that the scholastic way of thinking, once so dominant, was thus discredited at the hands alike of revolutionary thinkers such as Bruno, of scientific workers like Galileo, and of men of the world like Montaigne, he could not know. Accordingly, it seems that at first he was more dismayed to find that the only knowledge to which he could pretend was laughed at by people whom he did not understand, than pleased to be furnished with such an excuse for his own youthful indifference to its value. It was not long, however, before he yielded to the stream. He was not yet able to strike out a new line of thought, and so (like Descartes) rise above the misconceptions mingled with the general aversion from scholasticism, amounting to a neglect of all philosophy. He had but sufficient force of mind to wish to- be seen, like others, at work upon something else. The line he should take could hardly be doubtful ; he had nothing to fall back upon except his Latin and Greek. He was no longer so familiar with them, but it was still open to him to become a scholar ; nor in the age of Scaliger and Casaubon was there any lack of ambition in making classical study the occupation of a life. The resolution was made when he returned home, if not earlier, and made in a determined spirit ; but when after many years labour he had made himself a scholar, his true work was still to lie all before him. Hobbes s period of scholarly acquirement lasted till 1628, and had as its immediate outcome a translation of Thucydides. In Derbyshire or in London, with his young master, he had abundant leisure and easy access to books, and he went carefully through the classical poets and his torians, reading critically with the help of commentators, and at the same time bent on acquiring (as if for future use) a good Latin style, clear and easy to read, because fitting words to thoughts. Among all the ancient writers Thucydides attracted him most, and he seems to have set himself early to the work of translation, wishing others to share in the pleasure and instruction he derived from his favourite s pages. But when he had finished his work he kept it lying by him for years, being no longer so sure of finding appreciative readers ; and when he did send it forth at last, in 1628, he was fain to be content with &quot; the few and better sort.&quot; 1 That he was finally determined to pub- J 1 The translation, under the title Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War, written by Thucydides the son of Olorus, interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greek by Thomas Hobbes, secre tary to the late Earl of Devonshire, appeared in 1628 (given also as 1629), after the death of the earl, to whom touching reference is made in the dedication. It reappeared in 1634, with the date of the dedi cation altered, as if then newly written. Though Hobbes claims to have performed his work &quot; with much more diligence than elegance,&quot; his version is remarkable as a piece of English writing, but is by no means accurate. It fills vols. viii. and ix. in Molesworth s collection (11 vols., including index vol.) of Hobbes s English Works (London, Bonn, 1839-45). The volumes of this collection will here be cited as E. W. Molesworth s collection of the Latin Opera Philosophica (5 vols., 1839-45) will be cited as L. W. The five hundred and odd Latin hexameters under the title De Mirabilibus Pecci (L. W., v. 323-40), giving an account of a short excursion from Chatsworth to lication by the political troubles of the year 1628 may be regarded as certain, not only from his own express declara tion at a later time (Vit. carm. exp. but also from unmis takable hints in the account of the life and work of his author prefixed to the translation on its appearance. 1628 was the year of the Petition of Eight, extorted by the popular leaders from a reluctant king in the third parlia ment he had tried within three years of his accession ; and, in view of Hobbes s later activity, it is very significant that just then he should come forward, at the mature age of forty, with his version of the impressive story of the Athenian democracy as the first production of his pen. Nothing else is known of his doings before 1628, except that through his connexion with young Cavendish, who from about the year 1619 became an important social and political figure, he had relations with literary men of note like Ben Jonson, and also with the two philosophical thinkers who before himself rendered the English name illustrious in the 17th century 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 with the same reason be called the second of the English deists as Herbert has been called the first. With Bacon there is evidence of his having been so intimate (Aubrey s Lives, pp. 222, 602) that it is not surprising that some writers have been betrayed into describing him as the disciple and follower of the great Instaurator. The facts as recorded, however, that he used sometimes to walk with Bacon at Gorhambury, and would jot down with exceptional intelligence the eager thinker s sudden &quot; notions,&quot; also that he was employed to make the Latin version of some of the Essays, prove nothing of the sort, when weighed against his own disregard of all Bacon s most characteristic principles, and the other evidence that the impulse to independent philosophical thinking came to him not from Bacon, and not till some time after Bacon s death in 1626. 2 So far as we have any positive evidence, it was not before the year 1629 that Hobbes first entered on the path of philosophical inquiry ; and meanwhile a great change had been wrought in his outer life. His friend and master, after only about two years tenure of the earldom, fell a sudden victim to the plague in June 1628; and the affairs of the Devonshire family having become greatly disordered by lavish expenditure, 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 as before, 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 Notts 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. Sojourn and engagement came to an end together in 1631, when he was recalled to train the young earl of Devonshire, now thirteen years old, as he never had had an opportunity of training the boy s father. In the course of the next view the seven wonders of the Derbyshire Peak, were written before 1628 (in 1626 or 1627), though not published till 1636. A later edition, in 1678, included an English version by another hand. 2 Hobbes, in minor works dealing with physical questions (L. W., iv. p. 316; E. W., vii. p. 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 &quot; Induction,&quot; 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.