Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/44

34 H B B E 3 beeu able to set clown any finished representation of the fundamental doctrines which it presuppose;!. If his philo sophical plans were disordered and the doctrine of Body w.is still in the air, he had, in the beginning of 1640, written out his doctrine of Man at least, with almost as much elaboration as it ever received from him. When, in six months more, the Long Parliament suc ceeded to the Short, and set to work at once by sending Laud and Strafford to the Tower, Hobbes, who had become, or thought he had become, a marked man by the circula tion of his treatise (of which, &quot; though not printed, many gentlemen had copies &quot;), instantly took fright and hasted away to Paris. He was now for the fourth and last time abroad, and did not see England again for eleven years. Apparently he remained the greater part of the time in or about Paris, though he can be traced to Rouen in 1646. In Paris he was welcomed back into the old scientific coterie about Mersenne, and forthwith had the task assigned him of criticizing the Meditations of Descartes, which had been sent from Holland, before publication, to Mersenne with the author s request for criticism from the most different points of view. Hobbes was soon ready with the remarks that were printed as &quot; Third &quot; among the six (later seven) sets of &quot;Objections&quot; appended, with &quot;Replies&quot; from Descartes, to the Meditations, when published shortly afterwards in 1641 (reprinted in L. IF., v. pp. 249-74). About the same time also Mersenne sent to Descartes, as if they came from a friend in England, another set of objec tions which Hobbes had to offer on various points in the scientific treatises, especially the Dioptrics, appended by Descartes to his Discourse on Method in 1637 ; to which Descartes replied without suspecting the common author ship of the two sets. The result in both cases was to keep the two thinkers apart rather than bring them together. Hobbes was more eager to bring forward his own philoso phical and physical ideas, over which he had now been brooding for ten years, than careful to enter into the full meaning of another s thought ; and Descartes was by nature too jealous, and had become too confident in his hard-won conclusions, to be able to bear with this kind of criticism. He was very cart in his replies to Hobbes s philo sophical objections, and after a little impatiently broke off all correspondence on the physical questions, writing privately to Mersenne (who had continued to act as inter mediary) that he had grave doubts of the Englishman s good faith in drawing him into controversy (L. W., v. pp. 277-307). Meanwhile Hobbes, however eager he might be to keep himself abreast of the general philosophical movement of the time, had his thoughts too full of the political theory which the rush of events in the last years had ripened within him, to be able to settle, even in Paris, to the orderly composition of his systematic works. Though connected in his own mind with his view of human nature and of nature generally, the political theory, as he always declared, could stand by itself. Also, while he may have hoped at this time to be able to add much (though he never did add much) to the first popular sketch of his doctrine of Man contained in the unpublished &quot; little treatise,&quot; he might extend, but could hardly otherwise modify, the sketch he had there given of his carefully articulated theory of Body Politic^ Possibly, indeed, before that sketch was written early in 1640, he may, under pressure of the politi cal excitement, have advanced no small way in the actual composition of the treatise De Give, the third section of his projected system. In any case, it was upon this section, before the others, that he set to work as soon as he was fixed in Paris ; and before the end of 1641 the book, as we know from the date of the dedication (November 1), was finished. He determined, however, though it was forthwith printed in the course of the year 1642, not to commit himself to formal publication, but was content to circulate a limited number of copies privately; 1 and when he found his work received with great applause by his friends (it was praised even by Descartes), he seems to have taken this recognition of his philosophical achievement as but a reason the more for deferring publication till the earlier works of the system were completed. Accordingly, for the next three or four years, he remained steadily at work, and nothing appeared from him in public except a short treatise on optics (Tractatus Opticus, L. W., v. pp. 217-248) included in the collection of scientific tracts pub lished by Mersenne under the title Coyitata Pkysico- Mathematica in 1644, and a highly compressed statement of his psychological application of the doctrine of motion (L. W., v. pp. 309-318), incorporated with Mersennc s Ballistica, published in the same year. Thus or otherwise he had become sufficiently known by 1645 to be chosen, with Descartes, Roberval, and others, a referee in a once famous controversy between Pell, an English mathematician in Amsterdam, and the Dane Longomontanus, over that problem of the quadrature of the circle which was seen later on to have such a fatal charm for himself. But though about this time he had got ready all or most of the materials for his fundamental work on Body, not even now was he able to make way with its composition. New distractions came to tear him away from the orderly exe cution of the fundamental part of his scheme, and when he returned to it after a number of years, he returned a different man. The Civil War had broken out in the middle of 1642, and, after a period of varying fortunes on either side, the royalist cause began to decline from the time of the defeat of the marquis of Newcastle at Marston Moor, in the middle of 1644. Then commenced an exodus of the king s friends. Newcastle himself, a cousin of Hobbes s dead master and the patron to whom he dedicated the &quot; little treatise &quot; of 1640, found his way to Paris, and was followed, especially after the decisive defeat at Naseby in June 1645, by an ever increasing stream of fugitives, many of whom were known to Hobbes from former days. The sight of these exiles, from whom he learned all the details of the fierce work that had been going on in England while he was quietly busy with his studies in Paris, made the political interest once more predominant in Hobbes, and before long the revived feeling issued in the formation, of a new and important design. It first showed itself in the publication of the De Give, of which the fame, but only the fame, had extended beyond the inner circle of friends and critics who had copies of the original impression. Hobbes now entrusted it, early in 1646, to his admirer, the Frenchman Sorbiere, by whom it was seen through the Elzevir press at Amsterdam in 1647, having previously inserted a number of notes in reply to objections, and also a striking preface, in the course of which he explained its relation to the other parts of the system not yet forthcoming, and the (political) occasion of its having been composed and being now published before them. 2 So hopeless, meanwhile, was he growing of being able to return home that, later on in the year, he was on the point of leaving Paris to take 1 The book, of which the copies are rare (one in Dr Williams s library in London), was printed in quarto size (Paris, 1642), with a pictorial title-page (not afterwards reproduced) of scenes and figures illustrating its three divisions, &quot; Libertaa,&quot; &quot; Imperiurn,&quot; &quot;lleligio.&quot; The title Elcmentorum 1 hilosophice Sectio Tcrtia, De Give, expresses its relation to the unwritten sections, which also comes out in one or two back-references in the text. 2 L. W., li. pp. 133-134. In this first public edition (12mo), the title was changed to filemenla Philosophical de Cive, the references in the text to the previous sections being omitted. The date of the dedi cation to the vounsr earl of Devonshire was altered from 1641 to 1646.