Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/43

33 H O B B E S seven years Hobbes took his young pupil over rhetoric, 1 logic, astronomy, and the principles of law, with other sub jects. Most probably their life for the first three years was in Derbyshire, till they went abroad in the middle of 1634. They remained away till the spring of 1637, and Hobbes went over much the same ground as in his first journey, but now in a very different frame of mind. His head was now full of the thought of motion in nature, and whenever he could meet with the philosophical speculators or scientific workers who were then with a new-born ardour seeking for a clue to the secret of the physical world, none so forward to consort with them as he. He was still in time to pay his respects to the aged Galileo, for whom he conceived and ever retained the warmest admiration ; and on the way homewards he spent no less than eight months in daily converse with the members of a busy scientific circle in Paris, held together by the genial influence of the Pere Mersenne. From that time (the winter of 1636-7) he too, as he tells us, was numbered among philosophers. It is not impossible to trace a little more exactly the steps by which Hobbes reached this consummation when he was just touch ing his fiftieth year. There can be no doubt, it seems, that his introduction to Euclid took place in 1629, and according to Aubrey, who tells the story with a quaint dramatic vigour (Lives, p. 604), the introduction was quite accidental. Euclid s manner of proof was as a revelation to him, and it became the model for his own way of thinking upon all subjects ever after ; nor was he content till he too could be seen at woik solving questions of geometry with as much confidence as if he had been, like Descartes, an accom plished mathematician from his boyhood. It is less easy to deter mine when he awoke to an interest in the physical doctrine of motion. The story told by himself (Vit., p. xx.) is that, being struck one day in a company of learned men by the question, What is sense ? which some one asked and nobody could answer, 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, he presumed, be sought in diversity of movements, and starting from this principle he was driven to geometry for insight into the ground and modes of motion. Unfortunately no date or place is given ; but if it may be supposed that he must already have known something of geometry to understand its bearing on the study of motion, the scene or at least the conclusion to which it led .should be referred to some time after his casual introduction to Euclid. It is even suggested in one or two of the biographical narratives that the new mental advance was not made till the time of the third journey. Nothing is said, however, which should exclude another account, that on the third journey 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. p. 303; E. W., vii. p. 468) to have explained light and sound by a mechanical hypothesis as far back as 1630, the company-scene (which is more likely to have occurred abroad than in England) and the sudden inspiration may perhaps more safely 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 &quot;philosopher&quot; 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 hence forth 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 the dire political events that happened from the year 1637, and became so complicated with other labours, that its stages can hardly be followed without some previous understand ing of the relations of the parts of the scheme, as there is reason to believe they were sketched out from the beginning. And there is the more need for some preliminary statement because at least one of the parts the doctrine of Man is far more effectively wrought out in other works than in the treatise DC Hominc, which professes to contain the formal exposition of it. Hobbes s notion was that the whole body of philosophical truth should be disposed in three sections, dealing progressively with Body, Alan, and State or Society. An anxious political observer before lie became a philosopher, he was supremely interested in the problem of con- 1 The free English abstract of Aristotle s Rhetoric, published in 1681, after Hobbi-s s death, as The Whole Art of Rhetoric (E. W., . pp. 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 head ings, examples, &c., in Hobbes s hand. duct; but the philosopher could not be satisfied till the foundations of settled social life were based deep in the constitution of human nature ; and his new philosophical insight revealed to him the need and the possibility of interpreting the facts of human nature by what had begun to be known of physical nature generally. He would therefore first work out, in a separate treatise DC Corporc, a systematic doctrine of Body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, as motion or mechanical action was now (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 DC Hominc, show what specific bodily motions were in volved 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 con sider, in a crowning treatise DC Give, how men, being naturally rivals or foes, were moved to enter into the better relation of Society, and demonstrate how this grand and beneficent product of human wit must be regulated if men were not to fall back into brutislmess and misery. Such, in briefest summary, was the scheme conceived, at a time of new intellectual expansion, with reference to a threatening movement of social upheaval. AVe are now to see how it fared in the execution. Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country seething with discontent. The reign of &quot;Thorough&quot; was collapsing, and the forces pent up since 1629 were soon to rend the fabric of the English state to pieces. In February Hampden s case began to be tried ; in July broke out the Edinburgh riot over Laud s prayer-book ; next year was formed the Solemn League and Covenant ; the year after the rebel Scots had the king at their mercy in the open field ; and finally, in the spring of 1G40, with a new prospect of war, Charles had no resource left but once more, after eleven years of personal rule, to call a parliament. Such a rush of events was but too likely to overpower Hobbes s resolu tion to work up to social problems from abstract questions of body and space and motion, and there is clear evidence that he was soon distracted from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. The Short Parliament, as he tells us himself at a later time (E. W., iv, p. 414), was not dis solved, in three weeks from the time of its meeting, before he had ready &quot; a little treatise in English,&quot; in which lie sought to prove that the points of the royal prerogative which the members were determined to dispute before granting supplies, &quot;were inseparably annexed to the sove reignty which they did not then deny to be in the king.&quot; Now it can be proved that at this time he had written not only his Human Nature but also his De Corpore Po i- tico, the two treatises, though published separately ten years later, having been composed as parts of one work ; 2 and there cannot be the least question that together they make &quot; the little treatise &quot; just mentioned. We are therefore to understand, first, that lie 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 Give (L. W., ii. p. 151), that he wrote this third part of his system before he had 2 Among the Hardwick papers there is preserved a MS. copy of the work, under the title Elementcs 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 Mature, in 1650. XTI. .&amp;lt;;