Hobbes Sentence Examples

The influence of an advancing study of nature, which was stimulated if not guided by Bacon's writings, is seen in the more careful doctrines of materialism worked out almost simultaneously by Hobbes and Gassendi.

He was educated at the Malmesbury grammar school under Robert Latimer, who had numbered Thomas Hobbes among his earlier pupils, and at his schoolmaster's house Aubrey first met the philosopher about whom he was to leave so many curious and interesting details.

By this principle Ferguson endeavours to reconcile all moral systems. With Hobbes and Hume he admits the power of self-interest or utility, and makes it enter into morals as the law of self-preservation.

From these results we see that Shaftesbury, opposed to Hobbes and Locke, is in close agreement with Hutcheson, and that he is ultimately a deeply religious thinker, inasmuch as he discards the moral sanction of public opinion, the terrors of future punishment, the authority' of the civil authority, as the main incentives to goodness, and substitutes the voice of conscience and the love of God.

It is the kernel of the theories of Hobbes, Rousseau, Filmer and Locke.

Among the clearest and most logical exponents of this theory was Hobbes, who in his Leviathan expounded his notion of an agreement by which absolute power was irrevocably transferred to the ruler.

Hobbes (Leviathan), analysing these attributes, enumerates twelve attributes.

For the prolonged conflict between Hobbes and Wallis, see Hobbes, Thomas.

Butler is opposing the psychological hedonism 2 of Hobbes.

It is easy to understand how English empiricism issued at once in the trenchant naturalism of Hobbes.

After a brief stay in the grammar school of Colmar he went to Strassburg in 1651, where he devoted himself to the study of philology, history and philosophy, and won his degree of master (1653) by a disputation against the philosophy of Hobbes.

But the limitations of Hobbes' literary criticism judged from our present standpoint are great.

Hobbes argues in the case of the Pentateuch that two authors are distinguishable - Moses and a much later compiler and editor.

Hobbes, drew attention in particular to the confused mixture of law and narrative in the Pentateuch, the occurrence of duplicate narratives and chronological incongruities.

As a presumptive ruler of England she was, like Cecil, and for that matter the future archbishop Parker also, too shrewd to commit herself to passive or active resistance to the law; and they merely anticipated Hobbes in holding that the individual committed no sin in subordinating his conscience to the will of the state, for the responsibility for the law was not his but the state's.

Hobbes and Locke were wrong in saying that the mind must find in the relation the idea of Power.

Thomas Hobbes was put to school at Westport church at the age of four, passed to the Malmesbury school at eight, and was taught again in Westport later at a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, fresh from Oxford and " a good Grecian."

Apart from this, Hobbes owed little to his university training, which was based on the scholastic logic then prevalent.

In the same year Hobbes was recommended by Wilkinson as tutor to the son of William Cavendish, baron of Hardwick (afterwards 2nd earl of Devonshire), and thus began a lifelong connexion with a great and powerful family.

Hobbes was his companion rather than tutor (before becoming secretary); and, growing greatly attached to each other, they were sent abroad together on the grand tour in 1610.

During this journey, the duration of which cannot be precisely stated, Hobbes acquired some knowledge of French and Italian, and also made the important discovery that the scholastic philosophy which he had learned in Oxford was almost universally neglected in favour of the scientific and critical methods of Galileo, Kepler and Montaigne.

This was the year of the Petition of Right, extorted from the king in the third parliament he had tried within three years of his accession; and, in view of Hobbes's later activity, it is significant that he came forward just then, at the mature age of forty, with his version of the story of the Athenian democracy as the first production of his pen.

Nothing else is known of his doings 1 The translation, under the title Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War, written by Thucydides the son of Olorus, interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greek by Thomas Hobbes, secretary to the late Earl of Devonshire, appeared in 1628 (or 1629), after the death of the earl, to whom touching reference is made in the dedication.

Though Hobbes claims to have performed his work " with much more diligence than elegance," his version is remarkable as a piece of English writing, but is by no means accurate.

The facts that he used to walk with Bacon at Gorhambury, and would jot down with exceptional intelligence the eager thinker's sudden " notions," and that he was employed to make the Latin version of some of the Essays, prove nothing when weighed against his own disregard of all Bacon's principles, and the other evidence that the impulse to independent thinking came to him not from Bacon, and not till some time after Bacon's death in 1626.1 So far as we have any positive evidence, it was not before the year 1629 that Hobbes entered on philosophical inquiry.

In the course of the next seven years in Derbyshire and abroad, Hobbes took his pupil over rhetoric, 2 logic, astronomy, and the principles of law, with other subjects.

Hobbes was able to carry out his plan in some twenty years or more from the time of its conception, but the execution was so broken in upon by political events, and so complicated with other labours, that its stages can hardly be followed without some previous understanding of the relations of the parts of the scheme, as there is reason to believe they were sketched out from the beginning.

Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country seething with discontent.

By these events Hobbes was distracted from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan.

The first point is to be noted, because it has often been supposed that Hobbes's political doctrine took its peculiar complexion from his revulsion against the state of anarchy before his eyes, as he wrote during the progress of the Civil War.

In November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded to the Short, and sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower, and Hobbes, who had become, or thought he had become, a marked man by the circulation of his treatise (of which, " though not printed, many gentlemen had copies "), hastened to Paris, " the first of all that fled."

Apparently he remained the greater part of the time in or about 3 Among the Hardwick papers there is preserved a MS. copy of the work, under the title Elementes of Law Naturall and Politique, with the dedication to the earl of Newcastle, written in Hobbes's own hand, and dated May 9, 1640.

About the same time also Mersenne sent to Descartes, as if they came from a friend in England, another set of objections which Hobbes had to offer on various points in the scientific treatises, especially the Dioptrics, appended by Descartes to his Discourse on Method in 1637; to which Descartes replied without suspecting the common authorship of the two sets.

Hobbes was more eager to bring forward his own philosophical and physical ideas than careful to enter into the full meaning of another's thought; and Descartes was too jealous, and too confident in his conclusions to bear with this kind of criticism.

Meanwhile Hobbes had his thoughts too full of the political theory which the events of the last years had ripened within him to settle, even in Paris, to the orderly composition of his works.

Newcastle himself, who was a cousin of Hobbes's late patron and to whom he dedicated the " little treatise " of 1640, found his way to Paris, and was followed by a stream of fugitives, many of whom were known to Hobbes.

The sight of these exiles made the political interest once more predominant in Hobbes, and before long the revived feeling issued in the formation of a new and important design.

Hobbes now entrusted it, early in 1646, to his admirer, the Frenchman Samuel de Sorbiere, by whom it was seen through the Elzevir press at Amsterdam in 1647 - having previously inserted a number of notes in reply to objections, and also a striking preface, in the course of which he explained its relation to the other parts of the system not yet forthcoming, and the (political) occasion of its having been composed and being now published before them.

The State, it now seemed to Hobbes, might be regarded as a great artificial man or monster (Leviathan), composed of men, with a life that might be traced from its generation through human reason under pressure of human needs to its dissolution through civil strife proceeding from human passions.

Du Verdus was one of Hobbes's profoundest admirers and most frequent correspondents in later years; there are many of his letters among Hobbes's papers at Hardwick.

We know the Leviathan only as it finally emerged from Hobbes's pen.

In 1647 Hobbes was overtaken by a serious illness which disabled him for six months.

Mersenne begged him not to die outside the Roman Catholic Church, but Hobbes said that he had already considered the matter sufficiently and afterwards took the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England.

Though Hobbes came back, after his eleven years' absence, without having as yet publicly proved his title to rank with the natural philosophers of the age, he was sufficiently conscious of what he had been able to achieve in Leviathan; and it was 1 The Human Nature corresponds with cc. i.-xiii.

Bramhall, a strong Arminian, had afterwards written down his views and sent them to Newcastle to be answered in this form by Hobbes.

Hobbes duly replied, but not for publication, because he thought the subject a delicate one.

But it happened that Hobbes had allowed a French acquaintance to have a private translation of his reply made by a young Englishman, who secretly took a copy of the original for himself; and now it was this unnamed purloiner who, in 1654, when Hobbes had become famous and feared, gave it to the world of his own motion, with an extravagantly laudatory epistle to the reader in its front.

Upon Hobbes himself the publication came as a surprise, but, after his plain speaking in Leviathan, there was nothing in the piece that he need scruple to have made known, and he seems to have condoned the act.

On the other hand, Bramhall, supposing Hobbes privy to the publication, resented the manner of it, especially as no mention was made of his rejoinder.

About this time Hobbes had begun to be hard pressed by other foes, and, being never more sure of himself than upon the question of the will, he appears to have welcomed the opportunity thus given him of showing his strength.

As perhaps the first clear exposition and defence of the psychological doctrine of determinism, Hobbes's own two pieces must ever retain a classical importance in the history of the free-will controversy; while Bramhall's are still worth study as specimens of scholastic fence.

Among Hobbes's friends at this time are specially mentioned John Selden and William Harvey,.

This Answer was first published after Hobbes's death."

We may now follow out the more troublesome conflict, or rather series of conflicts, in which Hobbes became entangled from the time of publishing his De corpore in 1655, and which checkered all his remaining years.

In 1654 Seth Ward (1617-1689), the Savilian professor of astronomy, replying in his Vindiciae academiarum to some other assaults (especially against John Webster's Examen of Academies) on the academic system, retorted upon Hobbes that, so far from the universities being now what he had known them in his youth, he would find his geometrical pieces, when they appeared, better understood there than he should like.

In the chapter (xx.) of that work where Hobbes dealt with the famous problem whose solution he thought he had found, there were left expressions against Vindex (Ward) at a time when the solutions still seemed to him good; but the solutions themselves, as printed, were allowed to be all in different ways halting, as he naively confessed he had discovered only when he had been driven by the insults of malevolent men to examine them more closely with the help of his friends.

Obtaining an unbound copy of the De corpore, he saw by the mutilated appearance of the sheets that Hobbes had repeatedly altered his demonstrations before he issued them at last in their actual form, grotesque as it was, rather than delay the book longer.

Obtaining also a copy of the work as it had been printed before Hobbes had any doubt of the validity of his solutions, Wallis was able to track his whole course front the time of Ward's provocation - his passage from exultation to doubt, from doubt to confessed impotence, yet still without abandoning the old assumption of confident strength; and all his turnings and windings were now laid bare in one of the most trenchant pieces of controversial writing ever penned.

Wallis's Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae, published in 1655 about three months after the De corpore, contained also an elaborate criticism of Hobbes's whole attempt to relay the foundations of mathematical science in its place within the general body of reasoned knowledge - a criticism which, if it failed to allow for the merit of the conception, exposed only too effectually the utter inadequacy of the result.

Taking up mathematics when not only his mind was already formed but his thoughts were crystallizing into a philosophical system, Hobbes had, in fact, never put himself to school and sought to work up gradually to the best knowledge of the time, but had been more anxious from the first to become himself an innovator with whatever insufficient means.

Swift as before to strike, in three months' time he had deftly turned his own word against the would-be master by administering Due Correction for Mr Hobbes, or School Discipline for not saying his Lessons right, in a piece that differed from the Elenchus only in being more biting and unrestrained.

Having an easy task in defending himself against Hobbes's trivial criticism, he seized the opportunity given him by the English translation of the De corpore to track Hobbes again step by step over the whole course, and now to confront him with his incredible inconsistencies multiplied by every new utterance.

Wallis having been betrayed originally by his fatal cleverness into the pettiest carping at words, Hobbes had retorted in kind, and then it became a high duty in the other to defend his Latin with great parade of learning and give fresh provocation.

One of Wallis's rough sallies in this kind suggested to Hobbes the title of the next rejoinder with which, in 1657, he sought to close the unseemly wrangle.

Irritating as it was, it did not avail to shake Hobbes's determination to remain silent; and thus at last there was peace for a time.

Before the strife flamed up again, Hobbes had published, in 1658, the outstanding section of his philosophical system, and thus completed, after a fashion, the scheme he had planned more than twenty years before.

It consisted for the most part of an elaborate theory of vision which, though very creditable to Hobbes's scientific insight, was out of place, or at least out of proportion, in a philosophical consideration of human nature generally.

Hobbes then tried another tack.

Wallis, who had deftly steered his course amid all the political changes of the previous years, managing ever to be on the side of the ruling power, was now apparently stung to fury by a wanton allusion in Hobbes's latest dialogue to a passage of his former life (his deciphering for the parliament the king's papers taken at Naseby), whereof he had once boasted but after the Restoration could not speak or hear too little.

He got, however, upon more dangerous ground when, passing wholly by the political insinuation against himself, he roundly charged Hobbes with having written Leviathan in support of Oliver's title, and deserted his royal master in distress.

The propositions on the circle, forty-six in number (shattered by Wallis in 1662), were omitted by Hobbes when he republished the Dialogues in 1668, in the collected edition of his Latin works from which Molesworth reprints.

In the part omitted, at p. 154 of the original edition, Hobbes refers to his first introduction to Euclid, in a way that confirms the story in Aubrey quoted in an earlier paragraph.

After a time Hobbes took heart again and began a third period of controversial activity, which did not end, on his side, till his ninetieth year.

Hobbes's energy was not yet exhausted.

Two or three days after Charles's arrival in London, Hobbes drew in the street the notice of his former pupil, and was at once received into favour.

He had, besides, a relish for Hobbes's wit (as he used to say, " Here comes the bear to be baited "), and did not like the old man the less because his presence at court scandalized the bishops or the prim virtue of Chancellor Hyde.

He even went the length of bestowing on Hobbes (but not always paying) a pension of £loo, and had his portrait hung up in the royal 4 Wallis's pieces were excluded from the collected edition of his works (1693-1697), and have become extremely rare.

These marks of favour, naturally, did not lessen Hobbes's self-esteem, and perhaps they explain, in his later writings, a certain slavishness toward the regal authority, which is wholly absent from his rational demonstration of absolutism in the earlier works.

At all events Hobbes was satisfied with the rule of a king who had appreciated the author of Leviathan, and protected him when, after a time, protection in a very real sense became necessary.

On the 17th of October it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred " should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness, or against the essence and attributes of God, and in particular the book published in the name of one White, 1 and the book of Mr Hobbes called the Leviathan, and to report the matter with their opinion to the House."

Hobbes, then verging upon eighty, was terrified at the prospect of being treated as a heretic, and proceeded to burn such of his papers as he thought might compromise him.

The only consequence that came of the parliamentary scare was that Hobbes could never afterwards get permission to print anything on subjects relating to human conduct.

White (who died 1676) and Hobbes were friends.

Though Behemoth was kept back at the king's express desire, it saw the light, without Hobbes's leave, in 1679, before his death.

For some time Hobbes was not even allowed to utter a word of protest, whatever might be the occasion that his enemies took to triumph over him.

And, amid all his troubles, Hobbes was not without his consolations.

As already suggested, it cannot be allowed that Hobbes falls into any regular succession from Bacon; neither can it be said that he handed on the torch to Locke.

Backwards, Hobbes's relations are rather with Galileo and the other inquirers who, from the beginning of the 17th century, occupied themselves with the physical world in the manner that has come later to be distinguished by the name of science in opposition to philosophy.

But even more than in external nature, Hobbes was interested in the phenomena of social life, presenting themselves so impressively in an age of political revolution.

The construction was, of course, utterly premature, even supposing it were inherently possible; but it is Hobbes's distinction, in his century, to have conceived it, and he is thereby lifted from among the scientific workers with whom he associated to the rank of those philosophical thinkers who have sought to order the whole domain of human knowledge.

Finally, the psychology of Hobbes, though too undeveloped to guide the thoughts or even perhaps arrest the attention of Locke, when essaying the scientific analysis of knowledge, came in course of time (chiefly through James Mill) to be connected with the theory of associationism developed from within the school of Locke, in different ways, by Hartley and Hume; nor is it surprising that the later associationists, finding their principle more distinctly formulated in the earlier thinker, should sometimes have been betrayed into affiliating themselves to Hobbes rather than to Locke.

Entering the university of Leiden he took his degree in philosophy in 1689, with a dissertation De distinctione mentis a corpore, in which he attacked the doctrines of Epicurus, Hobbes and Spinoza.

These lectures, first printed separately, were afterwards published together under the title of A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, in opposition to Hobbes, Spinoza, the author of the Oracles of Reason, and other Deniers of Natural and Revealed Religion.

The materialism of Hobbes, the pantheism of Spinoza, the empiricism of Locke, the determinism of Leibnitz, Collins' necessitarianism, Dodwell's denial of the natural immortality of the soul, rationalistic attacks on Christianity, and the morality of the sensationalists - all these he opposed with a thorough conviction of the truth of the principles which he advocated.

Hobbes developed the nominalism which had been the hallmark of revolt against scholastic orthodoxy, and, when he brings this into relation with the analysis and synthesis of scientific A notable formula of Bacon's Novum Organum ii.

Though he makes his bow to mathematical method, he, even more than Hobbes, misses its constructive character.

With Hobbes logic is a calculus of marks and signs in the form of names.

Hume derived from him the explanatory formula of the association of ideas, 8 which is, however, still with Hobbes a fact to be accounted for, not a theory to account for facts, being grounded physically in " coherence of the matter moved."

Drawing upon Gassendi for his psychological atomism and upon Hobbes for a thoroughgoing nominalism, he reproduces, as the logical conclusion from Locke's premises, the position of Antisthenes.

Bacon's form has already in transmission through Hobbes been transmuted into cause as antecedent in the time series.

Mandeville's ironical paradoxes are interesting mainly as a criticism of the "amiable" idealism of Shaftesbury, and in comparison with the serious egoistic systems of Hobbes and Helvetius.

Robertson, Pioneer Humanists (1907); P. Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville and die Bienenfabel-Controverse (Freiburg i/Br., 1897), and compare articles Ethics, Shaftesbury, Hobbes.

Hobbes, when he laid it down that the state of nature is a state of war, and that civil organization is the source of all moral laws, was under the influence of two great aversions, political anarchy and religious domination.

Hobbes's conception of the state of nature antecedent to civil organization as a state of war and moral anarchy was obviously very offensive to churchmen.

Both these writers, more particularly the latter, had postulated in controverting Hobbes the existence of a moral sense to explain the fact that we approve benevolent actions, done either by ourselves or by others, which bring no advantage to ourselves.

Cudworth criticizes two main forms of materialistic atheism, the atomic, adopted by Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes; and the hylozoic, attributed to Strato, which explains everything by the supposition of an inward self-organizing life in matter.

It is an answer to Hobbes's famous doctrine that moral distinctions are created by the state, an answer from the standpoint of Platonism.

In this connexion, however, it is important to notice that Hobbes, who had been Bacon's secretary, makes no mention of Baconian induction, nor does he in any of his works make any critical reference to Bacon himself.

There is no mention, for example, of Hobbes throughout Spinoza's political writing, and only one casual reference to him in a letter, although the obligation of the Dutch to the English thinker lies on the surface.

It was synodically condemned along with Hobbes's Leviathan and other books as early as April 1671, and was consequently interdicted by the states-general of Holland in 1674; before long it was also placed on the Index by the Catholic authorities.

The Tractatus politicus develops his philosophy of law and government on the lines indicated in his other works, and connects itself closely with the theory enunciated by Hobbes a generation before.

He received instruction in mathematics from Hobbes, and was early initiated into all the vices of the age by Buckingham and Percy.

The keynote of this tendency had been struck by Hobbes, in whose philosophy man was regarded as a mere selfish sensitive machine, moved solely by pleasures and pains.

Such analysis had been already attempted by Hobbes, and the result he came to was that man naturally is adapted only for a life of selfishness, - his end is the procuring of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

In England the new philosophy had broken with time-honoured beliefs more completely than it had done even in France; Hobbes was more startling than Bacon.

Blount adopted and expanded Hobbes's arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and, mainly in the words of Burnet's Archeologiae philosophicae, he asserts the total inconsistency of the Mosaic Hexaemeron with the Copernican theory of the heavens, dwelling with emphasis on the impossibility of admitting the view developed in Genesis, that the earth is the most important part of the universe.

No two thinkers could well be more opposed than Shaftesbury and Hobbes; yet sometimes ideas from both were combined by the same writer.

In Paris he read Vesalius with Hobbes, who was then preparing his Tractatus opticus, and it is said that Petty drew the diagrams for him.

He occupied himself during this time in meditating upon what he had read in the works of Grotius and Hobbes.

In the De jure naturae et gentium Pufendorf took up in great measure the theories of Grotius and sought to complete them by means of the doctrines of Hobbes and of his own ideas.

He combated Hobbes's conception of the state of nature and concluded that the state of nature is not one of war but of peace.

The metaphysical works of Descartes had appeared a few years before he went to Oxford, and the Human Nature and Leviathan of Hobbes during his undergraduate years.

A paper on the " Roman Commonwealth" which belongs to this period, expresses convictions about religious liberty and the relations of religion to the state that were modified and deepened afterwards; objections to the sacerdotal conception of Christianity appear in another article; short work is made of ecclesiastical claims to infallibility in the interpretation of Scripture in a third; a scheme of utilitarian ethics, wider than that of Hobbes, is suggested in a fourth.

His Treatises on Government were meant to vindicate the Convention parliament and the English revolution, as well as to refute the ideas of absolute monarchy held by Hobbes and Filmer.

The modern treatment of the problem from Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibnitz down to Kant is too much inwoven into the metaphysical systems of individual great philoso phers to afford the possibility of detailed treatment in the present article.

Hobbes is the great exponent of materialistic determinism.

But the materialism of modern times is more subtle than that of Hobbes.

The nature of this answer was determined by the psychological views to which Hobbes had been led, possibly to some extent under the influence of Bacon,' partly perhaps through association with his younger contemporary Gassendi, who, in two treatises, published between the appearance of Hobbes's De cive (1642) and that of the Leviathan (1651), endeavoured to revive interest in Epicurus.

Hobbes's psychology is in the first place materialistic; he holds, that is, that in any of the psychophysical phenomena of human nature the reality is a material process of which the mental feeling is a mere " appearance."

This, at any rate, is Hobbes's cardinal doctrine in moral psychology, that each man's appetites or desires are naturally directed either to the preservation of his life, or to that heightening of it which he feels as pleasure.2 Hobbes does not distinguish instinctive from deliberate pleasureseeking; and he confidently resolves the most apparently unselfish emotions into phases of self-regard.

On the other hand Hobbes yields to no one in maintaining the paramount importance of moral regulations.

Hence Hobbes's ideal constitution naturally comes to be an unquestioned and unlimited - though not necessarily monarchical - despotism.

It is perhaps easy to understand how, in the crisis of 1640, when the ethico-political system of Hobbes first took written shape, a peace-loving philosopher should regard the claims of individual conscience as essentially anarchical, and dangerous to social well-being; but however strong might be men's yearning for order, a view of social duty, in which the only fixed positions were selfishness everywhere and unlimited power somewhere, could not but appear offensively paradoxical.

There was, however, in his theory an originality, a force, an apparent coherence which rendered it undeniably impressive; in fact, we find that for two generations the efforts to construct morality on a philosophical basis take more or less the form of answers to Hobbes.

From an ethical point of view Hobbism divides itself naturally into two parts, which by Hobbes's peculiar political doctrines are combined into a coherent whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected.

It is this latter aspect of the system which is primarily attacked by the first generation of writers that replied to Hobbes.

In his treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality his main aim is to maintain the 1 In spite of Hobbes's uncompromising egoism, there is a noticeable discrepancy between his theory of the ends that men naturally seek and his standard for determining their natural rights.

He argues that Hobbes's atomic materialism involves the conception of an objective physical world, the object not of passive sense that varies from man to man, but of the active intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore, he urges, an inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in morals, and an objective world of right and wrong, which the mind by its normal activity clearly apprehends as such.

The truth is that, while Locke agrees entirely with Hobbes as to the egoistic basis of rational conduct, and the interpretation of " good " and " evil" as " pleasure " and " pain," or that which is productive of pleasure and pain, he yet agrees entirely with Hobbes's opponents in holding ethical rules to be actually obligatory independently of political society, and capable of being scientifically constructed on principles intuitively known, - though he does not regard these principles as implanted in the mind at birth.

Thus, on the whole, the impressive earnestness with which Clarke enforces the doctrine of rational morality only rendered more manifest the difficulty of establishing ethics on an independent philosophical basis; so long at least as the psychological egoism of Hobbes is not definitely assailed and overthrown.

In his Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit he begins by attacking the egoism of Hobbes, which, as we have seen, was not necessarily excluded by the doctrine of rational intuitions of duty.

Hobbes's moral man, who, if let loose from governmental constraint, would straightway spread ruin among his fellows, is not what we commonly agree to call good.

Hobbist, although Butler fairly treats it as having a philosophical basis in Hobbes's psychology.

Hobbes had said " the natural state of man is non-moral, unregulated; moral rules are means to the end of peace, which is a means to the end of self-preservation."

But the quasi-theistic assumption that what is natural must be reasonable remained in the minds of Hobbes's most docile readers, and in combination with his thesis that egoism is natural, tended to produce results which were dangerous to social well-being.

The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume's way or in Adani Smith's; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses.

Before concluding this sketch of the development of English ethical thought from Hobbes to the thinkers of the 19th century, it will be well to notice briefly the views held by different moralists on the question of free-will, - so far, that is, as they have been put forward as ethically important.

But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid any stress on the relation of free-will either to duty generally or to justice in particular.

Neither the doctrine of Hobbes, that deliberation is a mere alternation of competing desires, voluntary action immediately following the " last appetite," nor the hardly less decided Determinism of Locke, who held that the will is always moved by the greatest present uneasiness, appeared to either author to require any reconciliation with the belief in human responsibility.

And in fact almost all the systems described, from Hobbes downward, have been of essentially native growth, showing hardly any traces of foreign influence.

In the 17th century, indeed, the treatise of Pufendorf on the Law of Nature, in which the general view of Grotius was re- stated with modifications, partly designed to effect a compromise with the doctrine of Hobbes, seems to have been a good deal read at Oxford and elsewhere.

A comprehensive work on Hobbes was never completed, though part of the materials were used for an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and another portion was published as one of Blackwood's "Philosophical Classics."

Locke (Treatise on Government) differed from Hobbes in so far as he described the pre-social state as one of freedom, and held that private property must have been recognized, though there was no security.

Had not Bodin, Hobbes and Bossuet taught that the force which gives birth to kingdoms serves best also to feed and sustain them?

The self-love theory of Hobbes, with its subtle perversions of the motives of ordinary humanity, led to a reaction which culminated in the utilitarianism of Bentham and the two Mills; but their theory, though superior to the extravagant egoism of Hobbes, had this main defect, according to Herbert Spencer, that it conceived the world as an aggregate of units, and was so far individualistic. Sir Leslie Stephen in his Science of Ethics insisted that the unit is the social organism, and therefore that the aim of moralists is not the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," but rather the "health of the organism."

What Hobbes is concerned to deny is not that there is something called benevolence.

Hobbes also founded his Leviathan State upon the otherwise unconquerable chaos, the bellum omnium contra omnes, of individualistic society.

But when the murders startup again with the same pattern as Edgar's, Hobbes is suspicious of a copycat killer.

Hobbes and Cavendish shared pessimism about human nature, and an anxiety about ethical and linguistic relativism.

Hobbes started his political philosophy with a psychological profile of his contemporary, seventeenth-century Englishmen.

The anonymous objections are very much the statement of common-sense against philosophy; those of Caterus criticize the Cartesian argument from the traditional theology of the church; those of Arnauld are an appreciative inquiry into the bearings and consequences of the meditations for religion and morality; while those of Hobbes (q.v.) and Gassendi - both somewhat senior to Descartes and with a dogmatic system of their own already formed - are a keen assault upon the spiritualism of the Cartesian position from a generally " sensational " standpoint.

He allowed the royalists Hobbes and Cowley to return to England, and lived in friendship with the poet Waller.

Thomas Hobbes, a rough and anomalous but vigorous thinker, is the fountainhead of a more formidable empiricism.

In the view of Hobbes, the difficulty of the genesis of conscious minds is solved by saying that sensation and thought are part of the reaction of the organism on external movement.

The theory of the origin of society put forth by Hobbes, though directly opposed in most respects to modern ideas of social evolution, deserves mention here by reason of its enforcing that principle of struggle (bellum omnium contra omnes) which has played so conspicuous a part in the modern doctrine of evolution.

He attacked the philosophy of Hobbes in his Mr Hobb's State of Nature considered; in a dialogue between Philautus and Timothy (1672), and in his Some Opinions of Mr Hobbs considered in a second dialogue (1673).

Occam, on the other hand, maintains in the spirit of Hobbes that the act of abstraction does not presuppose any activity of the understanding or will, but is a spontaneous secondary process by which the first act (perception) or the state it leaves behind (habitus derelictus ex primo actu = Hobbes's " decaying sense ") is naturally followed, as soon as two or more similar representations are present.

Shaftesbury's philosophical importance (see Ethics) is due mainly to his ethical speculations, in which his motive was primarily the ref utaticn of Hobbes's egoistic doctrine.

Ecclesiastes) whose traditional antiquity is left unquestioned by him are in reality of far more recent origin; (c) to eliminate the earlier sources or elements in the writings which Hobbes was content to date mainly or as a whole by their latest elements (e.g.

Besides the sermons and tracts above mentioned, and various others on the "Popish" controversy, Tenison was the author of The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined (1670) and Baconia, or Certain Genuine Remains of Lord Bacon (1679).

The idea of putting forward political and philosophical principles under the fiction of an ideal state was doubtless taken from Plato's Republic. The Utopia in turn suggested the literary form adopted by Bacon, Hobbes, Filmer, and other later writers; and the name of the book has passed into the language as signifying optimistic but impracticable ideals of reform.

Hobbes went on for a time living in the household; but his services were no longer in demand, and, remaining inconsolable under his personal bereavement, he sought distraction, in 1629, in another engagement which took him abroad as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, of an old Nottinghamshire family.

Among Hobbes's papers preserved at Hardwick, where he died, there remains the boy's dictation-book, interspersed with headings, examples, &c. in Hobbes's hand.

To as much of this diatribe as concerned himself Boyle quickly replied with force and dignity, but it was from Hobbes's old enemy that retribution came, in the scathing satire Hobbius heauton-timorumenos (1662).

When the first storm of opposition from smaller men had begun to die down, thinkers of real weight, beginning with Cumberland and Cudworth, were moved by their aversion to his analysis of the moral nature of man to probe anew the question of the natural springs and the rational grounds of human action; and thus it may be said that Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole of that movement of ethical speculation that, in modern times, has been carried on with such remarkable continuity in England.

There is more, however, in Hobbes, than the paradox of nominalism.

Atomic atheism is by far the more important, if only because Hobbes, the great antagonist whom Cudworth always has in view, is supposed to have held it.

From these sources they attempted to evolve a philosophy of religion, which would not only refute the views of Hobbes, but would also free theology finally from the errors of scholasticism, without plunging it in the newer dangers of unfettered rationalism (see ETHIcs).

According to Hobbes (Leviathan), men lived originally in a state of nature in which there were no recognized criteria of right and wrong, no distinction of meum and tuum.

He also developed a very influential interpretation of the ideas of the great seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

This is the strain that runs from Hobbes through the classical utilitarian philosophers.

The award-winning series starred Sarah Jessica Parker as glitterati Carrie Bradshaw, Kristen Davis as demure Charlotte York, Kim Cattrall as sexpot Samantha Jones and Cynthia Nixon as workaholic Miranda Hobbes.

They are also the direct antitheses to the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal, to the materialism of Gassendi and Hobbes, and to the superstitious anthropomorphism which defaced the reawakening sciences of nature.

Every moment one expects to find Descartes saying with Hobbes that man's thought has created God, or with Spinoza and Malebranche that it is God who really thinks in the apparent thought of man.

In doing what he did, Descartes actually exemplified that reduction of the processes of nature to mere transposition of the particles of matter, which in different ways was a leading idea in the minds of Bacon, Hobbes and Gassendi.

His chief opponent was Samuel Parker (1640-1688), bishop of Oxford, who, in his attack on the irreligious novelties of the Cartesian, treats Descartes as a fellow-criminal in infidelity with Hobbes and Gassendi.

Such a motive weighed much with Hobbes and with the French materialists of the 18th century, such as La Mettrie and d'Holbach.

In England materialism has been endemic, so to speak, from Hobbes to the present time, and English materialism is more important perhaps than that of any other country.

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and Herbert Spencer are not systematic materialists, but show tendencies towards materialism.

In that sense, living under a professedly Christian ruler, Hobbes himself is a Christian.

Thus, by the criterion of harmony, Shaftesbury refutes Hobbes, and deduces the virtue of benevolence as indispensable to morality.

Names like Shakespeare, Grotius, Bacon, Hobbes appear in half a dozen different places.

The suggestion that the last chapter only, not the whole Pentateuch, was written later, is met by Hobbes by reference to Gen.

There is little noticeable in Hobbes' dating of the prophets, though he considers it " not apparent " whether Amos wrote, as well as composed, his prophecy, or whether Jeremiah and the other prophets of the time of Josiah and Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai and Zechariah, who lived in the captivity, edited the prophecies ascribed to them.

Except in strangely making Zephaniah contemporary with Isaiah, Hobbes' conclusions, in so far as they differ from the traditional views, have been confirmed by the more thorough criticism of subsequent scholars.

Young Cavendish was hardly younger than Hobbes, and had been married, a few months before, at the instance of the king, to Christiana, the only daughter of Edward, Lord Bruce of Kinloss, though by reason of the bride's age, which was only twelve years, the pair had no establishment for some time.

Calvin and Hobbes is art.