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Rh are alone concerned at present; and, in this point of view, what a space is filled in the subsequent history of our domestic literature, by his own works, and by those of his innumerable opponents! Little else, indeed, but the systems which he published, and the controversies which they provoked, occurs, during the interval between Bacon and Locke, to mark the progress of English Philosophy, either in the study of the Mind, or in the kindred researches of Ethical and Political Science.

Of the few and comparatively trifling exceptions to this remark, furnished by the metaphysical tracts of Glanville, of Henry More, and of John Smith, I must delay taking notice, till some account shall be given of the Cartesian philosophy; to which their most interesting discussions have a constant reference, either in the way of comment or refutation.

“The philosopher of Malmesbury,” says Dr Warburton, “was the terror of the last age, as Tindall and Collins are of this. The press sweat with controversy; and every young churchman militant, would try his arms in thundering on Hobbes’s steel cap.” Nor was the opposition to Hobbes confined to the clerical order, or to the controversialists of his own times. The most eminent moralists and politicians of the eighteenth century may be ranked in the number of his antagonists, and even at the present moment, scarcely does there appear a new publication on Ethics or Jurisprudence, where a refutation of Hobbism is not to be found.

The period when Hobbes began his literary career, as well as the principal incidents of his life, were, in a singular degree, favourable to a mind like his; impatient of the yoke of authority, and ambitious to attract attention, if not by solid and useful discoveries, at least by an ingenious defence of paradoxical tenets. After a residence of five years at Oxford,