Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/627

611 the result, the presence or absence of consciousness making little difference to Hobbes.

The problem before him now is, how can these atoms, each blindly seeking its own preservation, obtain the evident benefits arising from harmonious action? How can law be introduced among the lawless? His solution is the only one possible for his mechanical philosophy, to which the idea of organic development was foreign. The familiar contract theory was adapted by him to his purpose. In order to escape the evils consequent on the war of all against all, in which the life of no one was safe, each man agreed to give up all his natural rights to one person, on condition that every other should do the same. To this one person belong now the collective powers of the community, and from him must proceed all laws, moral and political. Against the sovereign the subject possesses no rights, save those the infringement of which would defeat the original end for which government was formed. Society and morality are thus the product of convention.

In spite of this fact, however, Hobbes holds firmly to the existence of natural laws, which are by no means superseded by those from the sovereign, and he gives a long list of such laws, corresponding roughly to those of ordinary morality. These he holds to be "immutable and eternall; for Injustice, Ingratitude, Arrogance, Pride, Iniquity, Acception of persons, and the rest, can never be made lawfull. For it can never be that Warre shall preserve life and Peace destroy it." That is, they are the natural laws governing the best growth of the individual and society. Their infringement would result in loss and destruction to those subject to them. This conception of self-preservation as the supreme law of the individual is brought out again in Hobbes' definition of natural right, or jus naturale, as "the liberty each man hath, to use his own power as he will himselfe for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life." Not even in the state of nature is the individual's power unlimited. The laws