Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/258

238 the first book, as that itself is from the materialistic principle that sense and appetite are ultimately movement. The strength and clearness of Hobbes' reasoning follow from his method; while its weaknesses illustrate the difficulties which beset the method when applied to subjects whose definitions are not so simple and arbitrary as those of geometry. Hobbes' conclusions follow from his principles; but these are incomplete, or fictions, or ambiguous terms. The materialistic account of human nature which he gives in the first book is acute and suggestive, but necessarily superficial and inadequate. The state of nature and the contract from which civil society originates are fictions; and the effectiveness of the contract depends upon an ambiguity in his use of the word "right." Equivalent to "might" in the state of nature, when all men are equal and life "nasty, brutish, and short," it becomes in the sovereign, the Leviathan whom men, guided by the law of nature, establish by covenant among themselves, a "right" that Hobbes would have to be independent both of the sovereign's power to enforce it and the subject's contented acquiescence. It is clear that no covenant could establish such a right unless those who formed it had already in a state of nature a conception of right different from might,—a conception of right which implies already the mutual recognition of each other's claims. But overlook Hobbes' fallacy, and all that he says of sovereignty in the second book, and in the third (where he disputes the Church's claim