Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/45

35 H O B B E S 35 up his abode in the south with a French friend, 1 when he was induced to remain as mathematical instructor to the young prince of Wales, who had come over from Jersey j about the month of July. Thus thrown more than ever into the company of the exiled royalists, it was then, if nut earlier, that he conceived his new design of bringing all his powers of thought and expression to bear upon the production of an English book that should set forth his whole theory of civil government in relation to the stupen dous political crisis resulting from the war. The De Cive, presently to be published, was written in Latin for the learned, and gave the political theory without its foundation in human nature. The unpublished treatise of 1640 con tained all or nearly all that lie had to tell concerning human nature, but was written before the terrible events of the last years had disclosed how men might still be urged by their anti-social passions back into the abyss of anarchy. There was need of an exposition at once comprehensive, in cisive, and popular. The State, it now seemed to Hobbes, might be regirded as a great artificial man or monster (Leviathan), composed of men, with a life that might be traced from its generation through human reason under pres sure of human needs to its dissolution through civil strife proceeding from human passions. This, we may suppose, was the presiding conception from the first, but the design may have been variously modified in the three or four years of its execution. Before the end, in 1650-1, it is plain that he wrote in direct reference to the greatly changed aspect of affairs in England. The king being no more, and the royalist cause appearing to be hopelessly lost, he did not scruple, in closing the work with a general &quot; Review and Conclusion,&quot; to raise the question of the subject s right to change allegiance when a former sovereign s power to protect was irrecoverably gone. Also he took advantage of the lax rale of the Commonwealth to indulge much more freely than he might have otherwise dared in rationalistic criticism of religious doctrines ; while, amid the turmoil of sects, he could the more forcibly urge that the preservation of social order, when again firmly restored, must depend on the assumption by the civil power of the right to wield all sanctions, supernatural as well as natural, against the pretensions of any clergy, Calliolic, Anglican, or Presby terian, to the exercise of an imperium in imperio. We know the Leviathan only as it finally emerged from Hobbes s pen. During the years of its composition he re mained in or near Paris, at first in attendance on his royal pupil, with whom he became a great favourite. The engage ment must in any case have come to an end in the year 1648, when the prince removed to Holland, but it was pro bably broken off earlier by an illness that overtook Hobbes in 1617 and disabled him for six months. On recovering from this illness, which nearly proved fatal, he resumed his literary task, and carried it steadily forward to completion by the year 1650, having also within the same time trans lated into English, with characteristic force of expression, his Latin treatise. Otherwise the only thing known (from one or two letters) of his life in those years is that from the year 1648 he had begun to think of returning home ; he was then sixty, and might well be weary of exile. When 1650 came, as if to prepare the way for the reception of his maynum opus, he allowed the publication of his earliest treatise, divided into two separate small volumes (Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, E. W., iv. pp. 1-76, and De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, 1 Described as &quot; nobilis Languedocianus &quot; in Vit. ; doubtless the same with the &quot; Dominus Verdusius, nobilis Aquitanus,&quot; to whom was dedicated the Exam, et Emend. Math. Hod. (L.W., iv.) in 1660. Du Verdus was one of Hobbes s proi oundest admirers and most fre quent correspondents in later years ; there are many of his letters among Hobbes s papers at Hardwick. Moral and Politic, pp. 77-22S). 2 In 1651 3 he published liis translation of the De Give under the title of Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (E. W., ii.). Meanwhile the printing of the greater work was proceeding, and finally it appeared about the middle of the same year, 1651, under the title of Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power o/ a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (E. W., iii.), with a quaint frontispiece in which, from behind hills overlooking a fair landscape of town and country, there towered the body (above the waist) of a crowned giant, made up of tiny figures of human beings and bearing sword and crozier in the two hands. It appeared, and soon its author was more lauded and decried than any other thinker of his time ; but the first effect of its publication was to sever his connexion with the exiled royalist party, and to throw him for protection on the revolutionary Government. No sooner did copies of the book reach Paris than he found himself shunned by his former associates, and though he was himself so little conscious of disloyalty that he was forward to present a manuscript copy &quot; engrossed in vellum in a marvellous fair hand&quot; 4 to the young king of the Scots (who, after the defeat at Worcester, escaped to Paris about the end of October), he was denied the royal presence when he sought it shortly afterwards. Straightway, then, I he saw himself exposed to a double peril. The exiles had among them desperadoes who could slay ; arid, besides I exciting the enmity of the Anglican clergy about the king, j who bitterly resented the secularist spirit of his book, he i had compromised himself with the French authorities by I his elaborate attack on the papal system. In the cit- I cumstances, no resource was left him but secret flight. Travelling with what speed he could in the depths of a I severe winter and under the effects of a recant (second) illness, he managed to reach London, where, sending in his submission to the council of state, he was allowed without trouble to subside into private life. Though Hobbes came back, after his eleven years absence, without having as yet publicly proved his title to rank with the natural philosophers of the age, he was suffi ciently conscious of what he had been able to achieve in Leviathan ; and it was in no humble mood that he now, at the age of sixty-four, turned to complete the fundamental treatise of his philosophical system. Neither were those whom his masterpiece soon roused to enthusiasm, or those whom it moved to indignation, likely to be indifferent to anything he should now write, whether it lay near to or far from the region of practice. Taking up his abode in, London on his return, and continuing to reside there for I the sake of intellectual society, even after renewing his old i ties with the earl of Devonshire, who lived in the country i till the Restoration, 5 he worked so steadily upon the 2 The Human Nature corresponds with cc. i-xiii of the first part of the original treatise. The remaining six chapters of the part stand now as Part I. of the De C orpore Politico. Part II. of the D. C. P. corresponds with the original second part of the whole work. 3 At the beginning of this year he wrote and published in Paris a letter on the nature and conditions of poetry, chiefly epic, in answer to an appeal to his judgment made in the preface to Sir W. Daveuant s heroic poem, Oondibert (E. W., iv. pp. 441-58). The letter is dated Jan. 10, 1650 (165J). 4 This presentation copy, so described by Clarendon (Survey of the Leviathan, 1676, p. 8), is doubtless the beautifully written and finely bound MS. now to be found in the British Museum (Egertou MSS. 1910). 5 During all the time he was abroad he had continued to receive from his patron a yearly pension of 80, and they remained in steady correspondence. The earl, having sided with the king in 1642, was declared unfit to sit in the House of Peers, and though, by submission to Parliament, he recovered his estates when they were sequestered later on, he did not sit again till 1660. Among Hobbes s friends at this time are specially mentioned Selden and Harvey, who each lett him a legacy of 10 on dying, Selden in 1654 and Harvey in 1657. Harvey (not Bacon) is the only Englishman he mentions in the dedi catory epistle prefixed to the De Corpore, among the founders, before himself, of the new natural philosophy.