Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/259

Rh to an "imperium in imperio," and gives to the sovereign the sole right of determining men's opinions, at least as shown in outward action) follows by a clear and invincible logic. He saw, with the clear vision of an acute rather than comprehensive mind, a vision sharpened by the anxiety of a timid temperament living in troubled times, certain aspects of human nature and civil society.  He saw how deeply the competitive instinct enters into man's intellectual and moral constitution; how much positive right depends on might; and he saw these truths so clearly that he ignored others which modify and complicate them.  And Hobbes' style is the image of his thought, lucid, precise, ordered,—no prose of the century is more so,—but wanting in nuances and harmonies; not so complex ever as Descartes', but a little hard, and wearing after a time; never irradiated with poetry like Bacon's, though he has some of his command of felicitous figure and aphorism; with none of the delicacy, swiftness, and eloquence of Pascal's.

A century so erudite as the seventeenth was not neglectful of history, and the number of works coming under this head is large. Bacon and Raleigh, Daniel and Speed, Drummond and Lord Herbert of Cherbury (poet also and philosopher), Knollys (first historian of the Turks) and Heylin (History of the Reformation, 1640), Fuller (whose work has been mentioned) and Thomas May, who wrote from the opposite point of view from Clarendon his History of the Parliament of England which began November