Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/257

Rh Latin style, and translate Thucydides into clear, strong English. It was the reading of Euclid, and a second tour in 1634 with the son of his former pupil, that brought him into contact with the scientific thought of the Continent, opened his eyes to the charm of the deductive method of mathematics, and gave him the conception of a work on body, human nature, and the body politic. The first sketch was contained in the originally entitled Elements of Law, consisting of two parts, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, which circulated in manuscript. The latter was further elaborated in the De Cive, published at Paris in 1642 and 1647. Finally, the sketch of human nature, and the more fully elaborated political doctrine, were combined in the English Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, which appeared in London in 1651. Hobbes' later Latin treatises, and his unfortunate excursions into mathematics, need not be enumerated. He composed verse translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, and in the dialogue Behemoth (1679) described the origin and progress of the Civil War from his own absolutist and Erastian point of view.

Hobbes was the friend and occasional secretary of Bacon; but the method he pursued in his treatises was not the inductive one, but the deductive method of Descartes, extolled by Pascal in the De l'Esprit Géométrique. His theory of the Commonwealth, its origin, and the absolute character of the sovereign, are presented as a deduction from the description or definition of human nature which he gives in