Thomas Hobbes-Alfred Edward Taylor

0:00Prefatory note of Thomas Hobbes. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librevox.org. Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor. Prefatory note. This brief sketch has throughout been written directly from the original text of Hobbes himself and his contemporary biographer's. Though use has of course been made especially in the first chapter of the labors of such modern students as Professor Crum Robertson, Professor Eptonis and Sir Leslie Steven. The verbal quotations from Hobbes's works are given from the following editions. One elements of philosophy concerning body London 1656 to human nature and a corporal a political from the third edition of Hobbes's

1:03try pose London 1864. Three Leviathan from the reprint of the first edition in the series of Cambridge English Class 61904 which has been carefully compared with my own copy of the edition of 1651 apparently one of the inferior issue. The spelling of these editions has been preserved but the punctuation modified in accord with present day usage allusions to the Latin text of one and three are based on the edition of Hobbes's opera the LaSophica published by Blay O of Amsterdam in 1668. A. E. Taylor, end of Preferatory Note. Chapter one of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal box recording is in the public domain life. The long life of Thomas Hobbes covers

2:08almost the whole of the most critical period alike in the growth of modern science and in the development of the British Constitution. Born in the year of the Armada Hobbes did not die until nine years before the Great Revolution which finally determined the question whether the British island should be ruled constitutionally or absolutely. He lived through the steward attempt to convert England into an absolute monarchy the Puritan Revolution and Great Civil War the political and ecclesiastical experiments of the long parliament and of Cromwell the restoration of the exile line and the beginnings of modern Wigism and Nonconformity. Still more remarkable were the changes which came over the face of science during the same period when Hobbes entered the university as a lad. The sham Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages was still officially taught in its lecture rooms before he died mechanical science had been placed on a secure footing by Kepler Galileo and Descartes. The

3:08foundations of the scientific study of physiology and magnetism had been laid by Harvey and Gilbert the Royal Society for Experimental Research and to Nature had been incorporated for more than a generation and a political geometry had been created by Descartes and the calculus by Leibniz and Newton while it was only eight years after his death that the final exposition of the new mechanical conception of the universe was given by Newton's print Kippia. It is only natural that a philosopher who was also a keen observer of men and affairs living through such a period of crisis should have made the most daring of all attempts to base the whole of knowledge on the principles of mechanical materialism and should also have become the creator of a purely naturalistic theory of ethics and sociology. Thomas Hobbes the second son of the Vicar of Westport now included in the town of Mom's Berry in Wiltshire was prematurely born on Good Friday April 5 1588. His own theory was that both his premature birth and his constitutional timidity were consequences of his

4:12mother's alarm at the impending approach of the great Armada. The father, one of the ignorant Surgeons of Elizabeth's time fell into trouble by assaulting a rival cleric at the church door and was obliged to go into hiding but the boy's education was cared for by a maternal uncle who was a flourishing glover and older man of Mom's Berry. After a period of preliminary schooling at Mom's Berry in Westport where he learned enough of the classical languages to translate Euripides Medea into Latin verse at the age of 14 the lad was sent to Oxford where he was entered at Modem Hall then an important center of Puritanism. It was a time of general relaxation of university discipline and the Acrimonius attacks made by Hobbes and later life from the English universities as Haunts of debauchery, hot beds of disloyalty in places where the elements of mathematics and physics were unknown must have been chiefly based on his undergraduate experiences. He tells us himself of the contempt he conceived for the traditional scholastic logic and physics

5:15expounded by his tutors and of the joy he felt in escaping from their lectures to the bookshops where he could pour over books of travel and maps and follow in imagination the voyages of the great Elizabethan Buccaneers. This rather unprofitable period of university life ended after five years when Hobbes graduated Bachelor of Arts on February 5, 1607 or 8 immediately after which he formed what was to prove a lifelong and honorable connection with the rising family of Cavendish William Cavendish Baron Hardwick afterwards Earl of Devonshire second son by her second marriage of the famous Best of Hardwick being anxious to find a suitable companion and tutor for his eldest son offered the post to Hobbes on the recommendation of the then president of Martin Hall. By all accounts Hobbes' actual services seemed to have been those of companion rather than tutor. Young Mr. Cavendish was a decided spend thrift and it became Hobbes' function to assist him in raising frequent loans. Studies were freely neglected and Hobbes himself

6:16almost forgot his Latin. Fortunately in 1610 the two young men were sent to make the grand tour of the continent and travel together over a great part of France, Germany and Italy. As yet Hobbes appears to have been untouched by the new scientific movement though it was only in the preceding year that Kepler had published the first two of his famous laws in Galileo was at the very height of his glory owing to his recent discovery of the satellites of Jupiter. The main effect of the journey was to revive Hobbes' interest in his neglected literary studies and to send him home with a fixed determination to make himself a thorough scholar. The resolve was executed so successfully that Hobbes not merely became one of the most vigorous and luminous of English writers but learned to handle Latin, still the general language of the learned world, with rare force and fluency. The first fruits of this renewed interest in learning was an English translation of Thucydides published in 1628-9. For the purpose as Hobbes said at the time of educating his readers in the true

7:17principles of statesmanship, afterwards when his absolutist political theories have been fully developed he wished it to be believed that his real object had been to warn Englishman against the dangers of democracy by showing them how much wiser a single great statesman is than a multitude. From Hobbes' at Mara, John Aubrey we learned something about the circles in which he was moving at this time of his life. Foremost among his friends stands Francis Bacon who loved to converse with him and employed him on the translation of some of the famous essays notably that on the true greatness of kingdoms and the states into Latin. This connection can be shown to belong to the year 1621-6 when Bacon, after his political disgrace, was devoting himself entirely to scientific work in his retreat at Gohambarry. The influence of Bacon, however, has left no trace and Hobbes' own matured thought. He barely mentions the chancellor in his writings and has no place for a Baconian induction in his own conception of scientific method. Bacon's deal for experiment, the redeeming

8:20feature in an otherwise chaotic schema thought, is entirely alien to the essentially deductive and systematic spirit of the Hobbian philosophy, other friends of the spirit were Ben Johnson, the reigning literary dictator of London, Edward Herbert, Baron Cherberry, the first of the English deists, the antagonist against whom Locke's attack on innate ideas was afterwards to be directed and the now forgotten Scottish poets Sir Robert Aiden. In 1628, Hobbes' ex-pupil died after two years tenure of the Erldum of Devonshire leaving the family of states heavily encumbered. The necessary retrenchments involved the temporary severance of Hobbes' connection with the Cavendish's and from 1629 to 1631 he acted as tutored to the son of Sir Jervey's clifton gentleman of Nottingham Sher. He accompanied this new people on a foreign tour which apparently extended through France and as far as Venice. He was probably during this period that an incident occurred which was to exercise the lasting and not entirely happy influence on the whole of Hobbes' subsequent thought.

9:25At the age of 40 he was for the first time introduced to the works of Euclid and at once fell in love with geometry being attracted. He says more by the rigorous manner of proof employed than by the matter of the science. Mathematics we must remember were then only beginning to be seriously studied in England. Hobbes tells us that in his undergraduate days geometry was still looked upon generally as a form of the Black Art and it was not until 1619 that the will of Sir Henry Savile, Warden of Merton College established the first professor ships of geometry and astronomy at Oxford. In 1631 Hobbes was recalled from Paris by the widow of his late pupil to take charge of the education. Ever held a send the third Earl of Devinshire, Denneboy of Twel by 1634. The lad was thought old enough to make the continental tour and Hobbes accompanied him on a journey through France and Italy from which the pair did not return until 1637. This third foreign journey was destined to be the turning point of Hobbes' intellectual life. All through the journey he was haunted by a single idea, the thought of the omnipresence of motion in nature and of the apparent variety of

10:30natural objects as a mere effect of diversity of motion in the different parts of body. The origin of this absorption in the notion of motion he derives from the following undated incident. In a company of Learned Men, among whom he was present a chance reference to sensation provoked the contemptuous question and prayed what his sense. Reflecting long on this chance question, Hobbes came to the conclusion that if all bodies were at rest or all moved exactly in the same way, there would be no means of distinguishing any one thing from any other, and therefore no sensation. Hence not only must the whole of physical nature consist as Galileo was already declaring of diversity of motions of homogeneous particles, but the same must be true of the inner world of our so-called mental processes. They must all be but so many diverse motions in what we now call our nervous system. With this conclusion Hobbes's path as a philosopher was marked out, his task was to be the exhibition of all the facts of the universe, and more particularly those of the inner

11:31life-leave of motion and will, as consequences of the primary laws of motion, hence in the preface to the day Capore, after mentioning as the founders of true physical science, Caponeca's Kepler, Galileo and Harvey, he adds that the true doctrine of civil society is no older than his own book, Day Sivway. Evidence discovered by Dr. Ferdinand Ternese has now made it probable that the facts just describe, belonged to a date some years anterior to the journey of 1637, but in any case Hobbes's third residence abroad marks a definite epic in his life. It is the date at which he first takes his place as a recognized member of the band of European thinkers who were aiming at the systematic reconstruction of science. In Italy he met the great Galileo, not yet indeed blind, but confined by the inquisition to his villa and a little tarnished in his renowned by his insincere recantation. Almost more important were the connections formed on the return to Paris in 1637. Here Hobbes became one of the circle which centered around the famous Franciscan fire,

12:35Mara, Mara Sen, who performed what in the absence of scientific journals was the indispensable service of further in the communication of knowledge by bringing learned men together in person or by correspondence. Mara Sen's cell says Hobbes was more to him than all the universities. We may note that this same year saw the publication of the first work of another of Mara Sen's constant correspondence, his old school fellow Renee Descartes, now for years settled in his self-jozen Dutch seclusion. Before the end of 1637 Hobbes and his people were once more in England, where the times as we know now began to be singularly treblous. The next two years saw the trial of Hamden for his refusal to pay ship money. The Edinburgh revolt against the ill-judged attempt to force the Piscopacy on Scotland, the signing of the solemn league and covenant and the Scottish invasion of England. In virtue of his connection with the Devonshire family, Hobbes was just now much in the society of the more moderate royalist leaders such as Falkland and Hyde, and the result was

13:36that early in 1640 about the time of meeting of the short parliament. He put aside his wider philosophical schemes for the composition of a little work and supportive his fundamental political conviction that the anti-social tendencies of human nature are too strong and deproved to be held in check by anything short of an absolute authority. Free from all control, such as the English ground might be made if released from all dependence on parliament. The work which bore the title of the Elements of Law and contains one of the clearest and fullest of Hobbes' expositions of his psychology was not printed but circulated in manuscript. Ten years later, it was published in an imperfect form as two distinct essays of human nature and date, Cropore, Politico. It was not until 1889 that the work was printed in its original shape and with its original title by Dr. Turnie's, when the long parliament met towards the end of the year and showed its temper by it once, proceeding to impeach, strafford, Hobbes' native Timberusness got the better of him, fencing that the author of the Elements of Law might be the next victim. He

14:38promptly escaped to Paris not to return for 11 years. In after days, he oddly represented this success of alarm as giving him an exceptional claim on royal gratitude. His flight brought him back to Paris in the very nick of time, Maris-Saint was busy at daycarts, request and procuring criticisms from Lernemind on the famous meditations than just about to be published. One such set of criticisms he obtained from Hobbes, those which now figure as the third objections, but they failed to achieve their purpose. Daycart was seeking help from the criticisms of persons in sympathy with his general line of thought. What he got from Hobbes was an attack on his fundamental positions by thinkor of radically different convictions. Hansi treated the objections very currently, even refusing to admit that they contained a single valid inference, nor was he more favorably impressed by Hobbes' remarks on the die-up trick published along with the discourse on method 1637, which were also communicated to him by Maris-Saint. On the other hand, Hobbes contracted an enduring

15:39friendship with another of the lights of Maris-Saint's circle, Pierre Gasson, the Reviver of Epicureanism, during 1641, Hobbes recast and Latin his exposition of his psychological and political doctrines. The work was printed in a very limited edition in 1642 under the title Day-Siveway and was highly appreciated even by daycart. It was reissued five years later from the press of the El-Zavirz at Amsterdam as Elementa, Fila, South Africa, Days-Siveway. Hobbes had meanwhile been 1646, appointed mathematical tutor to Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II, who had just come over from Jersey. The engagement Kenneth had lasted beyond 1648 when the Prince withdrew to Holland, and was possibly ended earlier by a dangerous illness which overtook Hobbes in 1647. In after years he was accustomed to meet doubts as to his religious orthodoxy by an appeal to his acquiescence during the illness in the administrations of Dr. Cousins afterwards Bishop of Durham.

16:40In 1651 came out an English version of the Dessieway, philosophical rudiments concerning government and society. During the same year Hobbes was busy with the composition of the work by which he is now best known to the general student Leviathan or the matter of form and power of a common wealth ecclesiastical and civil which appeared in London at the end of the year. The book consists of a restecment of the general philosophical argument for absolutism with the addition of long and bitter polemic against admitting any independent ecclesiastical authority other than the civil sovereign, especially handsome copy of that manuscript was presented to Charles II, now King of Scotland, as returned appears after the adventures escaped from Worcester, but the Anglican Royless who identified the cause of monarchy with the cause of the English church where it naturally incensed at the authors consistent arrest, deonism and anti-claricalism, and for a time contrived to keep Hobbes from access to the King between this and his concern is the way in which the anti-papal doctrines of Leviathan might be received by the French clergy Hobbes once more

17:41took a long and made his way back to London at the end of 1651 sending in his formal submission to the Council of State shortly after. There was just now amid the general confusion following on the abolition of the Old Constitution no censorship of the press in England to interfere with his publications. Thus he came about that the Leviathan could be published in London and that so much of the great systematic work on philosophy as was ever completed appeared after all on English soil. Among Hobbes' personal friends of this period we have to note the famous Selden and that still more famous Harvey with Milton the chief man of letters among the anti-royless he had no relations though it is recorded that Milton did not like him but would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts. Hobbes for his part declared comparing Milton's famous defense of the people of England with Salam Masius's defense of the King they are very good Latin both and hardly to be judged which is better and both very ill-reasoning hardly to be judged which is worse. Hobbes was now at last at the age of 64 working on the reasoned exposition of his

18:45system when completed the scheme was to contain three divisions one of body the presentation of the fundamental principles of the new science of motion and the deduction from them of a doctrine of physics two of man a further deduction from the same principles of human physiology and psychology three of the body politic a deduction of ethics politics and sociology from the results reached in the previous sections. Thus the final achievement would have been the deduction of social science as a body of corollaries from that principles of mechanics from the first the execution of this plan was delayed by controversies largely provoked by Hobbes's own mistakes and the great scheme never reached fulfillment the first section was indeed completed but the second remained a mere fragment and the third is represented only by works like the day, day, way and Leviathan originally composed as independent treatises the day capore though in the press in 1654 did not appear into 1655 the reason of the delay being that during the interval Hobbes had discovered flaws

19:46in the quadrature of the circle which he fancied himself to have found and of which he had been rather rashly boasting in advance by the time of publication he had further become implicated in the eternal dispute about the freedom of the will and the consequence of his double controversy with the mathematicians and the theologians was that when the day homine at last appeared in 1658 it turned out to contain nothing but a few chapters on optics along with a brief sketch of elementary psychology for many years after 1655 Hobbes's career as an author is mainly the history of a series of aquimonious disputes with mathematical and theological opponents the theological disputes go back ultimately to the year 1646 when Hobbes had held a verbal discussion with Graham Hall Bishop of London dairy and afterwards Archbishop of Armag in which he maintained the determinist view of human action against the Armenian and high Anglican doctrine of free will both parties had afterwards reduced the substance of their contentions to writing though with an understanding that nothing should be published on either side in 1654 however an unknown person who had procured a copy

20:50of Hobbes's manuscript which contains one of the clear statements ever made of the argument for determinism published it under the title of a discourse concerning liberty and necessity Graham Hall angered at what he supposed to be the bad faith of Hobbes replied in 1655 by publishing his own original contribution to the controversy Hobbes rejoining in that next year with a fresh set of questions concerning liberty necessity and chance the questions were in turn attacked by Graham Hall in 1658 in a work to which was appended a violent attack on Leviathan fissitiously style the catching of Leviathan the great whale Hobbes took no notice of this onslaught beyond drawing up ten years later 1668 a reputation of Graham Hall's imputations of impiety which like most of his writings of that time was not published until after his death more damaging for Hobbes was his violent quarrel with the Oxford mathematicians itself an outgrowth of his attacks on the universities like many other persons who have never quite made themselves at home in geometry Hobbes and luckily conceived the notion that he had solved the famous and insoluble problems of

21:53a quadrujure of the circle and the subdivision of the angle into any given number of equal parts in palliation of his delusion it may be pleaded that neither problem was definitely known in his day to be insoluble by the methods of elementary geometry in fact the insulubility of the more famous of the two that of the quadrujure has only been finally demonstrated in our own time by Linda Mann though a sounder mathematical instinct would no doubt have suggested to Hobbes that it probably was not to be solved his fault laid not so much in attempting to grapple with the is in the obstinacy with which he refused to recognize the futility of his results even when they had been repeatedly exposed by the first mathematicians of the day a few words must be said as to the history of the quarrel Hobbes hadn't lobifin made up bitter attack on the universities which he regarded as the chief supporters of clerical pretensions and had particularly enlarged their ignorance of mathematics and natural science he did not know or forgot that the Oxford of 1651 was a very different place from the Oxford of Hava Center earlier the civilian professor

22:56ships had done much to raise the standard of mathematical and physical knowledge in Oxford was already the home of an eager band of scientific workers who were subsequently to form the nucleus of the royal society the resentment of the Oxford men of science against Hobbes undeserved strictures had already found expression in the Vin Dick Giai Akka Demaria um 1654 of Seth Ward civilian professor of astronomy ever joined it to an attack on the universities by the Reverend John Webster also honorably known as one of the first writers against the belief in which craft Ward however Tercone a minor part in the long and angry controversy which followed on the publication of the day Corre Poirey Hobbes is principal as silent being Ward's associate John Wallace civilian professor of geometry the most eminent English mathematician of the generation before Newton three months after the issue of the day Corre in 1655 followed Wallace's lunches due or metric I Habe and I exposing the fallacies of Hobbes's quadrature improving with

23:59the aid of an unbound copy of the work that his solutions such as they were had been repeatedly modified owing to their authors discover of errors and then after they have been sent to the press in 1656 they came out an English version of the day Corre made by Hobbes's instruction but not from his own hand concerning body 1656 here the solutions were given as mere aggressions or approximations but as I set off the book contained an appendix six lessons to the Oxford professors decrying the whole of Wallace's mathematical work Wallace rejoined in three months with a due correction for Mr Hobbes which in its term provoked in 1657 and abuse of reply from Hobbes and the inevitable count to reply from Wallace in 1660 Hobbes returned to the fray with five Latin dialogues examinatio get mn.io methamaticae ho de yern na next year he proceeded to bring out a profess solution of the third of the famous ancient problems the duplication of the cube which was as usual duly refuted by Wallace in 1662 Hobbes went on to aim a blow at the recently incorporated

25:03royal society in which Wallace was a prominent figure by attacking Boyle's experiments with the endeavoring to show that mere experimentation as nothing to our insight into nature. Boyle replied with an examine of Mr Hobbes his dialogueus and Wallace with the scathing satire and Hobbes's mathematics hobby is how done Timmo room menace Hobbes wisely left this exposure unanswered but avenged himself signaling upon Wallace's incidental political insinuation against him of having favored cromwells use her patient by a letter on the reputation of Wallace in manners and religion of t h in which Wallace was reminded of the servicie adent to the parliamentarians by deciphering the papers of Charles the first captured at nayspe for some years after this the controversy slumbered but was revived again by Hobbes in 1666 Wallace continued to refute Hobbes as various mathematical papers as they came out until 1672 and then allowed the dispute to drop Hobbes first parts still kept up the game even in his latest work date cameron see a low jugum produced when he was over 90

26:10contrived to insert a new demonstration of the equality of a straight line to an arc of a circle meanwhile the restoration had made some change in the philosopher's position he was met in warmly welcomed by Charles the second a few days after his return to england encouraged to present himself a court had his portrait painted at the king's expense and received a pension of 100 pounds which unfortunately was not always regularly paid court favor however could only partly protect the author of Leviathan from the animosity of the clergy me at hand also roughly in connection with the bill brought into the commons in 1666 under the influence of the emotions aroused by the plague in the great fire for the suppression of atheism and profanity of committee was appointed to receive informations against atheistic oblasts were missing profane books among which the viathan was specified by name the bill fell through in the lords but Hobbes who began to fear that he was in personal danger made a dissettish show of conformity and took care and reprinting the viathan and latin to add an appendix intended to show that his doctrines did not formally contradict the nice scene creed even took the

27:10trouble to draw up a dissertation on the state of the english law of heresy to prove that he could not legally be burned from this time on Hobbes only retained court protection on condition of abstention from all publications on political and religious topics for the latin addition of his opera omnia which appeared in 1668 he had to find a publisher in holland and peeps records in his diary for a september 3rd of the same year that a second hand copy of leviathan which had originally come out at eight shillings costing 24 shillings and that the price was still rising as the book could not be reprinted similarly a new treatise of the same date behemoth the history of the civil wars were described by the censor in spite of age and rebuffs Hobbes still continue to write on a variety of topics ranging from mathematics to english law and church history was frequently visited on account of his famous escolar and philosopher by foreign admirers of learning who found themselves in england in 1669 his clerical enemies found a characteristic method of annoying him Daniel of scargel a disreputable fellow of corpus christie college gameries was deprived of his degree

28:15and expelled from the university for having publicly maintained theses taken from leviathan scargel was persuaded to make an edifying recantation in which the blame for his loose life was laid on that supposed immoral principles he had imbibe from the books of Hobbes who thanks to the censorship was unable to protest against the imputations five years later Oxford followed suit dr fell dean of christ church the hero of a well-known uncomplimentary epigram to get advantage of his connection with the university press to strike out of that Latin version of anthony wood's history and antiquities of octet all the appreciative epithets which the english original happer stood on Hobbes and replaced them by terms of abuse Hobbes was this time permitted by the king to publish a letter of remonstrance but the only effect was to draw from dr fell an outrageous additional note to the book in which Hobbes was very viled more coarsely than before meanwhile the old man had for a while amused himself by return to the literary pursuits of his earlier days in 1672 composed a six-sinked account of his life works in various controversies and

29:17elev jokes in in 1673 and the year or two following a complete version of the elite in Odyssey in english rhyme us sufficiently arduous task for an old man well on towards his 19th year in 1675 three finally left London residing for a few years of life still left to him ultimately at the two derby sure seats of the devinshire family chats worth and hard work his last work day Cameron does he a loge come was as we have already seen produced in 1670 at the age of 90 at the end of the following year when the family moved as usual from jazzwork to hardwick for the winter Hobbes refused to be left behind but the journey proved too much for us to think in a few days after reaching hard with the old philosopher was struck by paralysis of which he died on December 4 1679 at the age of 91 years and eight months the body was laid to rest in a modest graven the parish church of halt Hucknell just outside the park gates Hobbes's personal appearance as well known to us from various portraits and from the description of his friend Aubrey he was all erected and strikingly

30:20handsome of face though sickly in youth in manhood and later age he was exceptionally healthy and vigorous being able even at 75 to enjoy an occasional game of tennis his personal habits were regular and in later age of steamias though according to Aubrey he owned to having been drunk about a hundred times in his life a moderate allowance in those days especially as the good gentleman seems to have regarded occasional drunkenness as medicinal there is a report of the existence of a natural daughter for me is said to have provided with respect to his character there's little to be objective against except his natural timidity and a certain lack of emotional warmth which did not however prevent him from proving a benefactor to his relatives and a steady and constant friend in spite of his rather cynical theories of human nature appears to have been reasonably charitable to real distress and it is highly creditable to him as well as to his protectors the family of Camindish that having once resolved in that life of a scholar and thinker he avoided all temptations to desert his modest position for the sake of worldly advantage and that so much care was taken to make that position compatible with his unchecked pursuit of his chosen studies if

31:23we look in vain in his life and writings for any traces of deep spirituality and ethical inwardness the same thing maybe set of daycart and in fact of most of the eminent thinkers of an exceedingly worldly and unspiritual age it is not often that we find as we do in play to the combination in one person of intense spiritual earnestness with the faculty of cool and keen rash molestic analysis apart from its blended trust and the competence of the human intellect to discover the truth of things there is not much in Hobbes's philosophical scheme to arouse the enthusiasm of the young and ardent and more than a little which is positively repellent but there are a few writers whose work is more fruitful of suggestions for the matured and reflective intellect which has grown suspicious of all enthusiasm even of its own and demands before all things calm and impartial reason analysis perhaps the best proof of Hobbes is real genius as that even his worst errors are so much more instructed than the truths of lesser men end of chapter one

32:31chapter two part one of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal vox recording is in the public domain chapter two part one philosophy its scope and methods Hobbes' main influence on the thought both of his own and of subsequent times has been felt almost exclusively in the domain of ethics and politics he is primarily important to us as the herald of our new epic in English thinking an epic which we might fairly say was closed only the other day by the death of Herbert Spencer when we think of him it is usually as the first in the long succession of English empirical psychologists the earliest English writer of many who have sought to found a purely naturalistic system of moral and political science on the basis of biological and psychological fact but it is equally true that Hobbes ends an epic he is the last English philosophical writer with

33:34a single exception of Spencer to understand the word velocity in the wide sense put upon it in the middle ages as the systematized and codified body of all rational human knowledge with his immediate successor lock begins that distinction between science and velocity by which the scope of the latter is closely restricted to epistemological inquiries into the conditions and nature of knowledge in general and psychological investigations into its growth while the task of extending the contents of our knowledge of the extra subjective world is made over exclusively to the sciences a distinction which has ever since foregooded in bad dominated English philosophy from Hobbes's own point of view then his doctrine of man and society cannot be fully appreciated unless we consider it in connection with the rest of his system as an integral part of that body of deductions from the general laws of motion which constitutes science for this reason as well as

34:41for the intrinsic value of many of his thoughts on the nature and methods of science it is essential to examine Hobbes's general theory of the range and the procedure of science before considering his achievements as a theorist in the fields of morals and sociology the definition of philosophies given at the beginning of that day corporate our citations are from the English version of 1656 runs thus philosophy is such knowledge of effects or appearances as we acquire by true rationalization from the knowledge we have first of their causes or generations and again of such causes or generations as maybe from knowing first their effects hear the words by true rassu-sination are intended to exclude from philosophy knowledge directly given in sense perception or resting merely upon unsystematized experience well the expression such causes as

35:45maybe in the second cause of the sentence alludes to Hobbes's view thereby reasoning backward from effects to their causes we can never discover the cause of a given effect but only one or more alternative causes by any one of which the result might have been produced philosophy then is in short reason knowledge and if we ask why we ought to set a value on such knowledge Hobbes replies even more emphatically than bacon for the sake of its practical consequences the end of knowledge is power and the use of theorems is for the construction of problems and lastly the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action or thing to be done concerning body one six in particular the utility of moral and civil philosophy is to be measured by the calamities which arise from ignorance of it all the avoidable calamities of human life says Hobbes

36:51with characteristic exaggeration are due to war and then go to war not because they wish to do so or because they do not know that war is productive of evil effects but because they do not know the true causes of war and peace that is they are uninstructed in the true principles of civil and political obedience which had in fact according to Hobbes been formulated for the first time in 1642 in his own day C. Way a true system of philosophy in which the principles of morals and politics should be rigorously deduced from the fundamental axioms of science with therefore actors a universal peacemaker philosophy then is sharply distinguished by its reasoned form from history the mere record of past experience where sense and memory are but knowledge of fact which is a thing past and

37:52irrecoverable science is the knowledge of consequences and dependence of one fact upon another Leviathan 105 the peculiarity of philosophy or science is that its results are at once universal and exact experience concluded nothing universally but nothing is produced by reason out right but general eternal and immutable truths it is a notable peculiarity of Hobbes's doctrine that while he agrees with the ordinary empiricist that the first beginnings of knowledge are the fantasms of sense and imagination he almost entirely neglects the problem of inductive logic how general eternal and immutable truths can be deduced from these particular isolated fantasms from the definition above given it follows at once that since philosophy treats only

38:52of generations or causal processes there can be no philosophical knowledge of any being which has no cause and consequently no philosophy of anything eternal hence there is no science of God since God is by definition and uncaused and eternal being theology is thus at a stroke excluded from the range of scientific knowledge similarly since all causation is production of one motion by another there is no science of anything except bodies the profession of philosophy is to search out the properties of bodies from their generation or their generation from their properties Hobbes will not even allow the we can form any intelligible concept of anything in corporeal and contains that when God is said by the official anglican theology to be without body this is a mere vague expression

39:54of reverence in strictness according to him there is no definite concept attached to the name God and it is on this ground that he criticizes day cards argument from my possession of an idea of God to the actual existence of God Hobbes replies third objections to the meditations that the inference is worthless since I have no idea of God at all all knowledge of God requires revelation and revelation needs to be accredited by miracles since miracles have ceased a point on which Hobbes agrees with orthodox Protestants no one can now claim to be heard when he alleges a divine revelation as a reason for disobedience to his civil sovereign it is our duty to accept the theology promulgated by the state not because it is true but because it is official religion is not philosophy

40:57but law Hobbes's general position as to the limits of science as thus closely akin to that which should nowadays called positivistic science extends only so far as the world of bodies moving in accord with fixed mechanical law and no further what distinguishes Hobbes from most modern representatives of this view is that he does not combine it as they do with the further assertion that the whole of the knowledge of us acquired is merely relative or concerned solely with phenomena which are manifestations of an underlying unknown and perhaps unknowable reality that bodies really and objectively exist and that the laws of their emotion can be discovered he simply assumes as an unquestionable fact he has no inkling of the deeper problem of day cards meditations how it is possible for the individual mind to be assured of anything outside

42:03the circle of its own states from the definition of philosophy as the knowledge of bodies the three full division of a subject that once follows for bodies are either natural or artificial natural bodies again include among others one class which is of supreme importance in as much as it is the object of all our psychological study of sensation thought and emotion the bodies of human beings an artificial body is what we commonly call a society or commonwealth the society or commonwealth is just as much a single body and governed just as completely by the general laws of the motion of bodies as the individual organism it's only distinctive characteristic is that it is artificial that is it owes its origin to the voluntary agreement of the person who form its constituent

43:04members hence philosophy as a whole falls into three parts the doctrine of body in general the doctrine of the human body in particular the doctrine of the artificial body or commonwealth two chief kinds of bodies and very different from one another offer themselves to such as search after their generation and properties one where of being the work of nature is called a natural body the other is called a commonwealth and is made by the wills and agreement of men and from the east bring the two parts of philosophy called natural and civil in the first place therefore after I have set down such premises as a pertain to the nature of philosophy in general I will discourse of bodies natural in the second of the dispositions and manners of men and in the third of the civil duties of subjects concerning body one nine by the premises which

44:11I pertain to the nature of philosophy in general are meant of course the general principles of logic and method and it is from the account of them that we have to collect obses views on the theory of knowledge scientific method then has two branches reasoning from general principles definitions and axioms to their consequences or as Hobbes phrases it from causes to their effects and this is synthesis reasoning from the facts to the principles involved from effects to causes and this is analysis synthesis and analysis thus correspond to our popular distinction between the deductive and inductive uses of logic only the former the purely deductive type of reasoning is rigidly certain and yields perfectly determinate conclusions the latter is essentially hypothetical and consists merely in pointing out such principles as would lead deductively to the observed results

45:12hence Hobbes like Epicurus explicitly maintains that different theories as to the cause of an observed fact maybe equally true if each would equally lead to consequences which agree with observed facts in modern language his theory of method makes induction to consist simply in the in the formation of explanatory hypothesis apart from the further task of complete verification by showing that any explanation other than that adopted would lead to results which conflict with fact like Geven's he regards induction as being merely the inverse operation corresponding to the direct operation of deduction as division or integration corresponds to multiplication or differentiation and see how that the royal society was proceeding on altogether false lines in attempting to advance physical science by direct experiment rather than by reasoning deductively from pre assumed general theories hence to his uniform silence as to the inductive method of bacon the about

46:19object of which was to eliminate the anticipation of nature by the framing of initial hypotheses altogether from the work of science now the ultimate first principles of deductive science are all according to Hobbes definitions that is statements of the meaning of names everything in science therefore turns upon the original definitions science is merely the correct deduction of the consequences implied in the giving of names and names Hobbes holds were originally given arbitrarily for it is true that for example man is a living creature but it is for this reason that it please meant to impose both those names on the same thing concerning body three eight this point comes out clearly in the famous definition of a name ibb two four a name is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark which may raise in our minds a thought like to some thought we have before in which being pronounced others may be to them a

47:20sign of what thought the speaker had or had not before in his mind consistently with this view Hobbes adopts an ultra nominalist position in logic the only names which directly denote realities are singular names of individual bodies general terms are common names do not directly denote an object at all there is for example no such object as man in general this word universal is never the name of anything existent in nature nor of any idea or fantasam formed in the mind but always the name of some word or name so that when a living creature a stone a spirit or any other thing is said to be universal it is not to be understood that any man stone etc ever wars or can be a universal but only that these words are universal names that is names common to many things ibb two nine a proposition is a speech consisting of two names populated by which he that speaker

48:23signifies he conceives the later name to be the name of the same thing wherever the former is this named ibb three two thus Hobbes is doctrine us to the import of propositions as that their whole meaning is that the predicate is the name of the same thing as the subject or the case of negative propositions that the subject and predicate are not names for the same thing he is careful however to mitigate the extreme nominalism of this account by adding that the use of a copula in english is to make us think of a reason why the two names are both given to the same thing searching criticism might here find an occasion for attacking Hobbes out of his own mouth since this last remark as to the function of a copula clearly sets limits to the alleged arbitrary ness of the employment if not to the arbitraryness of the invention of names reasoning now receives an equally non-nalist definition it is and the phrase sounds curiously prophetic of the modern

49:27discovery that logic is really a mathematical calculus the computation of the consequences of names and maybe regarded as consisting entirely of addition the formation of complex concepts by putting words together and subtraction that is abstraction the formation of more general concepts by analysis of a complex name into its simpler components concerning body one two three four six Leviathan 104 now apart from any minor objections which might be raised as to Hobbes' tacitly implied theory of the way in which language has historically developed this whole account of the nature of reasoning involves an obvious and tremendous difficulty of principle a difficulty which meets us again in the doctrine of those modern mathematicians and logicians who regard the written or printed symbols of arithmetic and algebra as the actual objects with which mathematical thought

50:31is concerned as we have seen Hobbes holds that the whole body of the conclusions of deductive science is a mere consequence of the initial definitions a point on which he was afterwards followed by lock and as he is careful to point out the sense which the introducer of a new word or other symbol is to put upon his invention is a matter of his own choice the definition then being merely a declaration of the sense in which I intend to employ a hitherto unused word or other sign is properly speaking neither true nor false his Hobbes himself puts it concerning body six fifteen it is not necessary to dispute whether definitions are to be admitted or no for when a master is instructing his scholar if the scholar understand all the parts of the thing defined which are resolved in the definition and yet will not admit of the definition there needs

51:31no further controversy but tricks them at being all one as if he refused to be taught since all our conclusions then are simply logical consequences of arbitrarily constructed definitions which are themselves neither true nor false it would seem to follow that the whole of knowledge is a mere ingenious sporting with puzzles like the solving of chess problems the ultimate rules of the game being like the rules of chess neither true nor false but purely arbitrary in what intelligible since then can our conclusions be said to be themselves true it is this difficulty which liveness has in his mind when he urges against the extreme nominalists that though names are artificial they are not arbitrary for instance quite different symbols might be chosen to represent the concepts we commonly symbolize by the signs two three five

52:34plus equals and in that case the truth we now write in the form two plus three equals five would be expressed by a very different set of symbols but the numerical truth meant or symbolized by both groups of signs would be one and the same for every true proposition expressed in our familiar notation about relations between numbers there would be one and only one corresponding proposition in the other set of symbols the particular sign selected to denote the different numbers and the different operations which can be performed upon them may be largely arbitrary but there is nothing arbitrary about the laws of their combination and chapter two part one chapter two part two of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal vox recording is in

53:39the public domain chapter two part two the secret of Hobbes is mistake in fact lies in the insidious error into which he falls about the logical character and function of definitions it is not true as he supposes that for example in geometry the definitions are the real premises from which the theorems are inferred technically as Hobbes himself has seen a definition is a mere verbal abbreviation a mere substitution of a single hitherto unemployed word or other symbol for a more complicated set of words or signs of already known import hence you could eliminate the definitions from the science altogether by merely replacing every defined symbol in a demonstration by the group of symbols for which as its definition declares it is an abbreviation the only difference such a

54:46proceeding would make would be that our demonstrations would be thus rendered painfully long and cumbers this is why Hobbes is perfectly correct in holding got a scientific definition as really neither true nor false since it is in fact not a proposition at all but a mere convention between different thinkers as to the sense to be put on a particular abbreviation but what Hobbes does not see is that it follows at once from this correct view of the function of definitions that the definitions are never the premises from which our scientific demonstrations are inferred the real premises of all demonstrations are partly logical axioms that is assertions which declare that certain propositions imply formally the truth of certain others partly postulates or unprovable existence theorems that is assertions that certain objects exist or have a certain relation to one another an instance of the form of kind of premise in Euclid is the first axiom

55:52which states that if the magnitude of a is the same as that of b and the magnitude of b is the same as that of c then it follows that the magnitude of a is the same as that of c examples of the second kind are the unexpressed postulate that there exists the class of entities called points or the explicitly enunciated postulate of the existence of the straight line that is of an entity which is completely determined when two of its points are given and when we carry our analysis of the presuppositions of demonstrative signs far enough we shall always find that just as the ultimate logical axioms are for the simple reason that they are preconditions of all proof themselves unprovable so the ultimate existential postulates because they are preconditions of all definition are all assertions of the existence of kinds of entities which are indefinable

56:52now these ultimate axioms and postulates being thus neither arbitrary nor mere declarations of that signification of names we escape the conclusion to which Hobbes's view would lead that there is in the end no sense in asking whether the propositions of science are true or not and science comes after all to be something very different in kind from a curiously complicated chess problem to return however to the exposition of Hobbes's thought as we have already seen Hobbes starts with the assumption as ultimate scientific postulates of the fundamental propositions of rigid mechanical materialism the only things which we really know to exist are bodies and bodies are only known to us as vehicles of motion all the facts of external nature and of mental life must therefore for science be varieties of motion in the parts of body and nothing more

57:54hence a completed philosophy would amount to a vast system of deductions by which all the truths of physical mental science would be shown to be logical consequences of the ultimate simple laws of motion laid down by mechanics from the purely philosophical point of view it is Hobbes's chief merit that he has undertaken the task of performing such a deduction with greater consistency and with a fuller consciousness of what it implies than any writer before or after him he is the one consistent philosophical materialist in the history of thought as far as that history is known to us whose intelligence rises above mediocrity and whose candor at the same time leaves no doubt as to his exact meaning hence it is most instructive as throwing light upon the inherent defects of materialism as an ultimate philosophical standpoint to observe at what points his initial

58:58postulates fail him. Such a failure occurs with the consequence that Hobbes is forced to abandon historically deductive method at two critical points in his exposition when he enters upon the realm of our inner mental life in his account of sensation he has to abandon the attempt to deduce our perception of the various qualities of bodies their colors, savers, odors and the like from a mathematical theory of the external motions which are commonly called their causes or stimuli and to accept the correlation of the various sense qualities with certain external stimuli simply as given and unexplained facts of experience and in the same way when he advances to the theory of human conduct he finds it quite out of the question to exhibit the fundamental passions of human nature as movements of particles within the organism mechanically determined by similar movements on the part of external bodies. The fundamental passions like the simple

1:00:01sensible qualities of things have to be treated as unexplained given facts and the assertion that they are really motions of particles of the body and nothing more remains a mere unproved assertion which is of no significance for the further development of Hobbes' ethical scheme. There is thus no real logical connection between Hobbes' metaphysical materialism and his ethical and political doctrine of human conduct. The whole of the latter might in fact be equally well grafted upon a pronounced spiritualistic metaphysics such as that of Descartes. Even the rejection of the doctrine of free will is, in point of fact, based upon assumed psychological grounds which in no way involved the metaphysical postulate that all existence is bodily. In short, the only advantage which Hobbes really derives from his materialism is that it furnishes him with a plausible excuse for his refusal to take theology seriously. Of Hobbes' theory of

1:01:08the passions, it will be time enough to speak in the next chapter, but something must be said here of the effect of his materialistic assumptions upon his doctrine of perception. It is an immediate consequence of the postulate that all physical change is motion, that the various appearance sensible qualities of external bodies cannot be objectively real. Colors, smells, and the rest must be mere appearances within the precipiant of realities which are in truth mere motions of material particles. All which qualities, call sensible, are in the object that caused of them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presses our organs diversely, the viath in 101. Hobbes is thus at one with Galileo and Descartes and the rest of the founders of modern mechanical science in proclaiming the doctrine of the subjectivity of sensible, or as locked

1:02:12named them secondary qualities. They are not real after abuse of external things, but simply effects produced by the action of external things upon the mind, or the nervous system of the precipiant. But Hobbes does not stop at this point, as a consistent materialist he is bound to hold that the mind or nervous system is, like everything else, a body, in consequently that the only effect that can be produced upon it by any external agent is the same kind of effect which one external agent can produce on another a modification of its previous motions. The sensible quality, for example, a color must not merely be a mere subjective effect of external motion, it must itself as a subjective effect be a motion and nothing more. So he adds immediately after the words just quoted, neither in us that are pressed, are they anything else but divers motions. For motion

1:03:16produces nothing but motion. Thus we are left to face the paradox that the whole world of perceived sensible qualities is an illusion, while there is not and on the principles of strict materialism cannot possibly be, any one to be eluded. Colors, tones, smells, tastes have first been declared to be subjective effects produced upon the individual precipiant by the impact of particles themselves devoid of all quality. Then since it has to be recognized that, according to materialism, the subject in which these effects are produced must be itself, just one collection of such particles, among others, it is announced that the effects themselves cannot really be there. If the average materialist stops short of enunciating this intolerable paradox, it is only because he is so far, Hobbes' inferior, in logical power, or encander, or in both.

1:04:22The conception of the subjectivity of sensible qualities is still so commonly regarded as an established result of modern science that it is worth our while to pause over it for a few moments and to ask whether it can be maintained in a form which does not lead to the hobby and paradox. Suppose that Hobbes had so far relaxed his materialism as to recognize the real existence of immaterial states of consciousness might he not have held without any paradoxical consequences that will we commonly call the secondary or sensible qualities of external things are in truth states of our own consciousness which are caused by the action of an external world of bodies totally devoid of quality. Such a view was widely current in the ancient philosophical schools and was revived in Hobbes' own day by Galileo and Descartes from the latter of whom it passed as an almost unquestioned axiom into modern science. Yet it is clear, I think, that the doctrine will not

1:05:28bear serious examination the very ground upon which the sensible qualities are declared to be subjective, to be in us and not in the things outside us is the assumption that all the processes of the physical world however variants they may seem to be are in actual fact purely mechanical. If this principle is true it must hold just as much for the living organism which after all is just one body among others as for everything else the effects of a stimulus upon the organism whatever they may seem to be must in reality be as entirely mechanical as the stimulus itself as Hobbes very properly said. Even if a color or a sound could be set without absurdity to be a state of consciousness the principles of a mechanical philosophy would absolutely forbid our calling that state and effect of an external stimulus. The effect of the stimulus would have to be simply the

1:06:31X hypothesis, psi purely mechanical changes and do spiked in the nervous system and with these changes the state of consciousness would have really no discoverable relation but the temporal relation of simultaneity. The whole of our intellectual life would become as it has sometimes been called an epiphenomenon a series of events occurring simultaneously with certain mechanical changes in the world of bodies but standing absolutely outside the series of causes and effects. And if we carried analysis a step further we should at once be confronted by a still more formidable difficulty for it would readily become apparent that whatever sensible qualities may be they are certainly not states of a mind. When in common parlance I am said to see a blue flower it is really ridiculous to say that in truth it is my mind which is blue. My judgment that flower is blue may be true or it may be false but in either case one thing is quite clear it is not being blue

1:07:37but believing that the flower is blue which is in that moment a state of my perceiving mind. And this simple reflection is in itself enough to dispose of the whole doctrine of the subjectivity of sensible qualities. There are really only two alternative possibilities in the case either all the propositions in which a sensible quality is described to a thing are merely false as Hobbes' account logically implies or else there are at least some bodies which really have the sensible qualities of color, saver and so forth. It would be no way of escape to suggest that perhaps what is really blue is neither the flower nor my mind but some part of my optical apparatus. For example the stimulated region of my retina. For on such a theory there is at least one body which really has the sensible quality vis my retina. Bit of so why not other bodies as well and what becomes

1:08:41of the postulate that the only objectively real properties of body are mechanical. The fact is that Hobbes like all the philosophers who have taught the subjectivity of sensible qualities commits the grave error of trying to combine two really inconsistent conceptions of the relation between the external world and our perception. He tries to think of the world of bodies as being at once the cause of perception and also the object which perception apprehends. What our last two paragraphs have gone to show is that both these conceptions cannot be true at once. If the external world is the cause of perception it cannot be the object apprehended in perception. In fact perception in that case can have no object at all and all supposed knowledge about anything must be a mere illusion as was pretty clearly seen by human. On the other hand since the external world

1:09:41is certainly the object of our perception how far that perception is correct or erroneous makes no difference to the argument the relation of the world to the perceiving subject cannot possibly be a cause or one. When we have once grasped this truth we shall see that the accuracy of our perception of sensible qualities of body is a question to be argued in every special case on its own merits and cannot be impugned by any general a priori arguments drawn from the principle of causality. Nor does this conclusion in any way conflict with the fullest recognition of the right of physical science to treat the external world for its own purposes as if it were devoid of sensible qualities and consistently let us say of vibratory motions of different rates of frequency. All that is required to justify such a proceeding is that there should be a uniform one to one

1:10:41correlation between each sensible quality for example each shade of color and a particular kind of vibration. We may then treat the color for all purposes of mathematical physics as if it actually were the vibration just as an ordinary analytical geometry we can treat a point in a plane as if it were actually a couple of numbers where the physicist so often goes wrong when he strays into the domain of philosophy is in hastily assuming that two things which have a one correspondence to each other are really the same thing as for the further a post-eorory arguments by which Hobbes tries to establish the subjectivity of sense qualities for example in the first chapter of Leviathan they are all of the type sense made familiar by Barclay and his followers appeals to dreams to hallucinations etc. Their conclusive force whatever it may be would be equally

1:11:42great if we applied them through the primary mechanical properties of body or even to Hobbes's supreme reality motion itself since all these may be the subject of dreams and hallucinations just as colors or smells might be. In truth all that is proved by arguments of this type which seem to be that it is possible to make erroneous judgments about external things a proposition which no sober philosophy is called on to deny. In one respect Hobbes goes beyond most of the English writers who have since the spells the doctrine that sensible qualities are subjected he maintains the same thing about space and time themselves they also are merely fantasms that is they are not the accident or affection of anybody they are not in the things without us but only in the thought of the mind concerning body seven three more precisely space is the fantasme of a thing existing without the mind simply that is to say that

1:12:47fantasme in which we consider no other accident but only that it appears without us time is the fantasme before and after in motion. Ibbid seven two three the ground given by Hobbes for this assertion is that if the whole world could be suddenly annihilated except one man that man was still retain his consciousness of space and time. I confess I do not see that this consideration proves anything except perhaps that space and time are not bodies nor do I see how Hobbes could think that motion the success of occupation of different positions by the same thing is objectively real and yet hold that space and time are mere subjective ideas of our own. His statement it should be noted bears no real resemblance to Kant's famous doctrine of the ideology of the forms of perception space and time are regarded by him not as universal forms of perception impressed by the mind upon a manifold of sensations received from without

1:13:51and merely as constituent elements of the manifold itself. The whole distinction between a formal element in perception which comes from the perceiving subject and a material element contributed by the external world belongs to a later and more developed stage of the theory of knowledge it is indeed a signal advance upon the Kantian position to recognize clearly that the formal element in perception is no less objective than the material but the recognition seems inconsistent with sensationalism as a theory of knowledge Hobbes is able to be consistently sensationalist precisely because it does not occur to him to draw any distinction between the formal and the material in our knowledge. End of chapter 2 Part 2 chapter 3 of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal box recording is in the public

1:14:56domain chapter 3 empirical psychology the nature of man we may now proceed to consider main outlines of the analysis of cognition and volition which as erned for Hobbes the well-merited title of founders empirical psychology that chief contribution of the English speaking people's mental science this analysis will be found by the English reader most fully set forth in two works the human nature the first part of the treatise on the elements of law originally composed in 1640 and the opening chapters of Leviathan published in 1651 we must bear in mind however that Hobbes is chiefly interested in the psychology of the individual mind less for its own sake than because it furnishes him with a logical foundation for his naturalistic doctrine of ethics and politics his psychology is consequently only worked out so far as is necessary for the achievement of this

1:16:01ulterior and Hobbes as we have seen does not attempt to deduce the principles of psychology let alone these of ethics and politics from the general doctrine of motion that falls back upon immediate experience of the main facts of human nature as we find them in ourselves he is so to speak in empiricist malgray louis and it is one of the entertaining ironies of history that the English philosopher who of all others is most strongly insistent upon the deductive character of genuine science should be chiefly remembered by that part of his work which is most flagremly inconsistent with his own conception of strictly scientific method from the axiom that neither within nor without is there any reality but motion there is in truth no road to moral and political science Hobbes starts in his doctrine of man from the usual empiricist assumption that all mental life is a development from beginnings in sensation where there is no conception in a man's mind which

1:17:06hath not at first totally or by parts then begotten upon the organs of sense the rest are derived from that original Leviathan 101 sensation as we have seen is according to him a motion caused in these organs by a previous motion in some external body why the sensible qualities that's begotten are supposed to belong to external bodies he explains by the theory that all sensation gives rise to motor reaction from the heart which he like the Aristotelians regards as the center of the nervous system towards the periphery of the body it is the outward flowing direction of these reactions which causes sensible objects to appear without us a crude version of the now seriously discredited doctrine of feelings of innervation he immediately adds a doctrine of that relativity of sensation sensation requires a constant variety of stimuli persistent exposure to an unvering stimulus would readily give rise to

1:18:09total unconsciousness it being almost one for a man to be always sensible of one and the same thing and not to be sensible at all of anything concerning body 25 5 that is consciousness depends upon contrast from sensation hops goes on next to derive imagination and memory imagination is simply decaying sense that is the persistence in a less intense form of the organic process excited by a stimulus after the stimulus itself has been withdrawn this persistence itself again is a consequence of what Newton was afterwards to call the first law of motion when a body is once in motion it moves it unless something else hindered eternally and whatsoever hindrathic cannot in an instant but in time and by its grease quite extinguish it and as we see in the water though the wind sees the waves give not over rolling for a long time after so also it happened within that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man then when he sees dreams etc for after the

1:19:15object is removed or the eyes shut we still retain an image of the things seen the more obscure than when we see it imagination therefore has nothing but decaying sense Leviathan 102 how in the general subjectivity of all sensation we are to know whether the object has really been withdrawn or not is a problem which hubs which scares the have found it easy to solve memory is now explained to be simply imagination of what is past when we would express the decay and signify that the senses fading old and past it is called memory so that imagination and memory are about one thing which for divers considerations have divers names ibn it is clear that we are here again confronted by a difficulty which observes superficial appeals to physical analogies cannot conceal for imagination is by no means exclusively of things past we can imagine our future as readily as we can remember

1:20:16our past and we often divert ourselves by imagining a state of things which neither has existed nor will ever exist now how do we come to make these distinctions between different imaginations if imagination a memory are merely two names for the same thing looked at from two different points of view why is not all imagination in distinct wishable from reminiscent in other words what a psychological analysis of memory ought to account for is not the mere fact that we can imagine what is actually past but the fact that in doing so we recognize the events imagined as belonging to the past and not to the future or to no time at all the secret of Hobbes is failure to give any satisfactory account of memory is not hard to find and it is also the secret of much more that is defective in his psychological analysis what must happen to any really consistent sensationalist in psychology has happened to him in his derivation of mental life from passively received sensations he has

1:21:20forgotten the presence of selective attention as an ever present factor which actively determines the course of all mental processes it is only when we have learned to distinguish that from which attention is turning away from that towards which it is moving that we acquire bases for the distinction between imagination of what is no longer an imagination of what is not yet Hobbes next advances to the analysis of complex strains of thought Leviathan 103 he begins by laying down the general doctrine of association of ideas giving a crude account of the psycho physical dependence of the process upon the formation of paths of conduction in the nervous system and recognizing association by contiguity more explicitly than association by resemblance though the letter is not entirely overlooked when a man thinketh on anything whatsoever his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be not every thought to every thought succeeds in differently but we have

1:22:25no transition from one imagination to another where if we never had the like before in our senses the reason we're up is this all fancies are motions within us relics of those made in the sense and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense in so much as the former coming again to take place and to be predominant the later follow-with by coherence of the matter moved he distinguishes however between mere random association and thought guided or regulated by the presence of a definite end or purpose which controls the formation of associations for example the orderly thinking out of a series of steps towards the gratification of a given desire this letter ought really to present a difficulty to him since it most obviously involves the presence of purpose of attention as actively determining the current

1:23:26of thought and leading to sequences and imagination quite independent of previous sequences in our senses and it seems manifest that such attention cannot be analyzed into a mere succession of subjective effects of physical stimuli on obsis theory as on any theory which treats association as more than a subordinate factor in determining the course of thought whenever we think of a given thing a our next thought should be of a thing b which is either very like a or has been most commonly perceived or thought of in close connection with a in actual fact in proportion as our thinking is truly rational or as Hobbes would say regulated the b which the thought of a calls up is that which it is most relevant to our present object to think of next and this b may be something quite unlike a and something which has never been thought of in this particular connection with a before it is really only unregulated random thinking which is dominated by association in an

1:24:29orderly train of purpose of thinking association appears as often as not as a disturbing factor and source of pure irrelevance obs now proceeds the via thin 106 to a similar analysis of voluntary motions that is the whole cognitive side of mental life like most precontion psychologists e-reconcee feeling and emotion among the forms of conation conation is in every case nothing but incipient motion within the nervous system and such incipient outward directed reaction Hobbes calls general name endeavor endeavor again has to contrast the directions it is either endeavor two or from a perceived object the words to and from being understood quite literally of direction and space endeavor towards an object is what we call appetite or desire endeavor from an object is called a

1:25:30version other names for the two directions of endeavor are love and hate because going speaking and the like voluntary motions depend always upon a precedent thought of wither which way and what it is evident that the imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motions and although unstudied men do not conceive any motion at all to be there where the thing moved is invisible or the space it is moved in is for the shortness of it insensible yet that that's not hinder but that such motions are these small beginnings of motion within the body of man before they appear in walking speaking striking and other visible actions are commonly called endeavor this endeavor when it is toward something which causes it is called appetite or desire and when endeavor is from word something it is generally called a version that which men desire they are also said to love

1:26:33and to hate those things from which they have a version so that desire and love are the same thing say that by desire we always signify the absence of the object by love most commonly the presence of the same so also by a version we signify the absence and by hate the presence of the object EBIT 106 whatever is the object of appetite or desire to a man he calls good whatever is the object of a version he calls evil hence since the desires of different men and even of the same men at different times are very various good and evil are purely relative terms and there can be no common measure of them except in civil society where they are determined by the command of the ruler hence again the absolute necessity for the civil sovereign and his laws if moral energy is to be avoided these words are ever used with relation to the person that use of them there being nothing simply and absolutely so nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken

1:27:36from the nature of the objects themselves but from the person of the man when there is no common or in a commonwealth from the person that representative it or from an arbitrator or judge who men disagree shall by consent set up and make his sentence the rule thereof the viathan 106 in other words there is no such thing as a moral law equally binding upon all persons except in an organized political community and in such a community itself what we call the moral law is a consequence a re-flux in the consciousness of the end of the joe man of the habit of obedience to the commands of a political ruler it follows from this purely naturalistic conception of the primary meaning of the words good and evil that of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself ibit 114 the proposition is in fact tautologous since according to Hobbes's definition of good

1:28:38good means what a man desires and as we are to see immediately his psychology is unable to draw any real distinction between desire or appetite and volition thus on the ground that the object of a man's desire is the object of his desire Hobbes bases the conclusion that all voluntary action is in the last resort purely egoistic though it appears that the good at which an action aims may in some cases be the suppression of the pain we feel at the side of another person suffering and room is thus made for a limited and rather inferior kind of benevolence it should further be noted that Hobbes oddly confounds pleasure and pain with the consciousness of appetite and of aversion respectively a gross blunder in analysis which is forced on him by the necessity of bringing all features of our mental life under one of the two heads cognition and motor impulse similarly he is obliged to falsify his analysis of deliberation and volition deliberation is

1:29:44nothing more than a succession of alternating impulses or appetites towards and from the same object when in the mind of man appetites and aversion hopes and fears concerning one in the same thing arise alternately and divers good and evil consequences of the doing or omitting the thing propounded come successively into our thoughts so that sometimes we have an appetite towards it sometimes an aversion from it the whole sum of desires aversion hopes and fears continued till the thing be either done or thought impossible is that we call deliberation the via thin 106 it follows of course that deliberation is no prerogative of man but common to him with the brews will is simply the last member of this series the appetite or aversion which immediately precedes the visible bodily reaction the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action or to the omission thereup is that we call the will and beasts that have deliberation must

1:30:48necessarily also have will from the definition of good and evil it follows that Hobbes adopts a purely and crudely determinist view on the question of free will a man inevitably aims at that which at the moment appears good to himself in fact all that we mean by saying that it appears good to him is that he does so aim at it Hobbes's essay on liberty and necessity still remains one of the clearest and most forcible statements of the case for this kind of rigid determinism against any admission of contingency or genuine freedom in human action this whole theory of evolution obviously suffers from grave psychological defects which in their turn lead to equally grave ethical and sociological errors the secret source of Hobbes's worst mistakes in ethical theory must be sought in the absurd inadequacy of his analysis of deliberation from the standpoint of a really

1:31:50thorough psychology nothing can be more ludicrous than his confusion of rational deliberation without mere sea saw of conflicting animal impulses rational deliberation as distinguished from mere hesitation implies the successive examination of alternative possibilities of action with a preconceived plan or purpose which is already fixed in its main outlines but receives further special determination as to its details by each of these successive comparisons the final selection of one of the alternatives as the line to be followed is an act totally different in its psycho character from the blind translation into overt movement of an irrational impulse hence it is that we can actually desire what we do not will and will much that we do not desire thus we find in Hobbes's account of evolution precisely the same blindness to the importance of selective attention which we have found in

1:32:54his analysis of cognition this has a further most momentous consequence for his ethical and social doctrine from the identification of a relation with mere animal appetite it follows that civilization can provide us with no new object civilization it can merely increase our command over the means of gratifying desires which remain identical with those of the savage or supply additional motives such as for example fear of the police or the gallows strong enough to check the gratification of such desires we are all still savages at heart though we are better informed than the savage as to the probable consequences of gratifying our appetites and I've also contrived to attach artificially various new unpleasant consequences to the gratification of some of them not of course that Hobbes was himself ethically on the level of a savage the acquisition of a rational

1:33:57comprehension of life to which Hobbes' labors were so unremittingly devoted is itself an object of desire impossible to a mere savage before such objects his crude psychological analysis has provided no place it is a direct consequence of this analysis and at the same time the real foundation of his whole moral and social theory that competition for objects of desire which can only be enjoyed by one man on the condition that all others are prevented from enjoying them is still as it always has been the law of human life and that this competition will always make ordered society impossible unless there is a ruler with the admitted right to set limits to it and the power to enforce his regulations by penalties however strongly some of the facts of the period of revolution through which England was passing during Hobbes' manhood might suggest such a conception it should be manifest to a dispassionate student of human history that it does infinitely

1:34:58less than justice to the extent to which as civilization advances the objects of human desire become more and more of a non-competitive kind or of a kind which are positively unattainable by one man except on the condition of their equal attainment by his fellows Hobbes develops these portentous ethical consequences of his psychology in much detail in the 11th and 13th chapters of Leviathan the supreme aim of every man is to obtain power that is in a short command over the means of future gratification of desire the reason why this passion persists so obstinately throughout life being not so much that man is never content with the degree of satisfaction he has already attained as the uncertainty whether he will continue to retain it undiminished in the first place I put for general inclination of all mankind a perpetual enressedness desire of power after power that sees

1:35:58that only in death and the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight or that he cannot be content with moderate power but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he has present without the acquisition of more the Leviathan 111 now Hobbes also holds that there is no great natural difference between one man and another either in physical or mental capacity as to the strength of body the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself and as to the faculties of the mind I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength EBIT 113 consequently the natural state of man that is the condition into which he is born and in which he remains so far as he does not artificially put an end to it by the creation of a political system is one of universal competition or as Hobbes who likes to give his ideas the most

1:37:03startling and provocative wording phrases it one of war of every man against every man in which there is no moral law since the recognition of moral law is only possible among men living in civil society and respecting their mutual rights and duties do this war of every man against every man this also is consequent that nothing can be unjust the notions of right and wrong justice and injustice have there no place where there is no common power there is no law where no law no injustice force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues it is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety that is property no dominion no mine and thine distinct but only that to be every man's that he can get and for so long as he can get keep it EBIT this state of universal anarchy we

1:38:04must remember is not in the least Hobbes's ideal as it has sometimes been falsely represented to be by unscrupulous controversy list on the contrary he abhor's it and is at great pains to point out its horrors so long as it lasts there can be no settled industry or commerce no science no arts or letters and which is worst of all continuous fear and danger of violent death and the life of man solitary poor nasty brutish and short EBIT the salvation of man in fact as we shall see depends on the fact that though nature has placed him in so evil a condition she has also endowed him with a possibility to come out of it whatever we may think of Hobbes's analysis of human nature it must not be forgotten for a moment that its object is not the repudiation of law and morality but the vindication of them as the only safeguards against general anarchy and misery improve of the correctness of the dark picture thus drawn of what human life would be without a

1:39:09firmly established political authority to protect me against one another and against their own anti social appetites Hobbes appeals one to the actual condition of savages to to the absence of all moral restraint shown in the mutual relations of independent states who have no common superior towards each other and three with special reference to the columnators who charged him with a desire to undermine the authority of the existing moral law to the precautions which men take against one another even in settled and civilized states either fairly retorts that he only puts into words what is implied in the conduct of his critics themselves when they bar their chests locked their doors or carry arms win on a journey Hobbes's account of the state of nature is of course as is shown in particular by the 17th chapter of Leviathan expressly intended to contradict the doctrine of Aristotle revived and made popular in his own time by the famous work

1:40:12of Grotesque the Jure Belliette Parkes that man is naturally a political animal that is that the rudiments of sociability and social organization are never absent from any group of human beings living together this implies contrary to Hobbes's psychological analysis that human impulses are not exclusively egoistic so Hobbes reverts to a notion ultimately derived from the old Greek sophists who taught that morality is the result of convention the notion that mankind originally existed in a state of nature which was one of sheer lawlessness and that all settled morality is the result of a bituation to obedience to political rules which must have been originally set up by voluntary agreement or contract it is easy to point out that Hobbes exaggerates the extent to which morality is a mere effect of civil obedience and to show in the light of later research that

1:41:13even savages who have no subtle political organization really possess a rudimentary morality based on traditional tribal custom it is equally true that he exaggerates the defects even of the 17th century when he maintains that independent nations recognize no moral restrictions whatever in their dealings with their neighbors yet is reflections on the character of international morality as well as on the precautions taken even by the citizen of a law abiding community against his fellows retain even today a great deal of unpleasant significance we are after all in many things nearer the savage than we like to think and it is well that we should not be allowed to forget the fact and it is at least an important part of the truth that our moral codes are too largely merely the effect of unreasoned acquiescence in long established custom while there can be no doubt that Hobbes is much near the truth than the sentimental writers before and after him who have glorified

1:42:18the relatively lawless condition of the pre-civilized man as a golden age of superior in a sense or virtue and there is an element of truth in Hobbes's polemic against Aristotle's conception of the way in which the family has widened into the village community and the village community into the city or nation by a process of peaceful expansion we know enough now of the steps by which historical Greece came into existence to be sure that what lay behind the formation of the Greek Poles was more often than not invasion conquest massacre and the anarchy produced by the violent subversion of older settled morality if we abandon the empty dream of ever discovering historical information as to the primitive condition of mankind and content ourselves with the more modest question what state of things preceded the growth of that which we call Western civilization whether Hellenic or Germanic we shall find that Hobbes has after all given us a large part

1:43:21though not the whole of the truth especially if we take his picture with his own qualifying remark that it was never generally so all over the world and that his prime purpose is not to write ancient history but to show back philosophical analysis what manner of life there would be where there were no common power to fear by the manner of life which men that had formerly lived under a peaceful government used to degenerate into a civil war the vizon 113 in the chapter three chapter four of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal vox recording is in the public domain the making of the Leviathan we have seen in the last chapter what is Hobbes' conception

1:44:23of the state of nature the condition of which man found himself at the dawn of civilization and into which he tends to degenerate when the bonds of political allegiance are gravely relaxed it is a condition of which the machinery provided by government for the restraint of men's fundamentally anti social impulses is entirely absent and in which there is nothing to take its place how then could any number of men ever pass out of this state of anarchy into a state of settled order Hobbes replies that there is a possibility to escape from the state of nature into one of civil society which is founded partly on men's passions partly on men's reason partly on their passions and among these there are several which make four peace and orderly existence such as fear of death

1:45:23desire of such things as are necessary to commodity is living and are hope by their industry to obtain them the vizon 113 partly on reason since it is reason which suggests to mankind the proper means of securing gratification for these unbelicose passions or as Hobbes puts it suggestive convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement if it we might perhaps ask how men living by the unregulated promptings of egoistic appetite ever come to listen to these suggestions of reason but here two Hobbes is ready within answer we all of us he says have our calmer moments when rational reflection is understood by passion and it is then that the voice which suggests articles of peace makes itself heard like the great

1:46:28majority of the political theorists from hooker in the 16th century to ruse so in the 18 Hobbes thus assumes that the transition from savagery to civil society must have begun with an express agreement or contract the so-called social compact hence with him as with the others it becomes the first object of political theory to discover the terms of this original contract the articles of peace already mentioned since it is by these terms that we have to ascertain the limits of the rightful authority of political rulers the ruler is legitimately entitled to just so much authority over his subjects and no more as can be logically deduced from the examination of the terms of the contract by which civil subjection was first instituted whatever in the practice of actual rulers

1:47:35is not covered by these terms is usurpation this method of deducing the rights of a government over its subjects from a supposed original contract which had in point of fact come down to the thinkers of the 16th century from the medieval ledges and schoolmen who were seeking a rational basis for their various theories of the divisional power between the pope and the secular authorities or between the pope and the general councils received his death blow towards the end of the 18th century from Bentham and Burke both of whom insist in different ways that the rights of governments must be based on the actual needs of society and not on any theory of the primitive rights of man Bentham's arguments which will be found in his fragment on government are mainly directed against black stones attempted to determine the rights of the British crown by deductions from the compact between king and people supposed to be made in the coronation oath

1:48:39Burke's against the onslaught of the French Revolution acting in the name of the rights of man upon the vested interests which he chooses to regard as established rights of the nobility and clergy in the 19th century the growth of historical research into social origins made the conception of government as having arisen at a definite time by means of a definite voluntary compact even more unreal by revealing the enormous extent to which definite political institutions have arisen out of an earlier stage of customary law indeed when we look the matter squarely in the face it becomes evident that free association by voluntary agreement belongs to the culmination rather than to the beginnings of civilization and that the recognition of the binding force of such agreements presupposes the existence of a highly organized public opinion against their violation so that contract depends upon society more than society upon contract it is therefore

1:49:41quite impossible for us to take obsis account of the compact by which savagery is ended and civilized life begun as serious historical fact yet it is possible to suspect that the reaction against theories of the origin of government in contract may perhaps have been carried too far even on the historical side history itself at least gives us reason to believe that many a famous community has sprung from combinations of broken men relics in a period of general disintegration from many distinct ruined tribes or cities who have somehow been thrown together and entered into a new alliance among themselves and in such cases the new community must clearly have rested upon the voluntary agreement to unite in mutual support but in any case the substance of Hobbes' reason plea for absolutism is quite independent of the largely mythical form in which it is clothed by the author however governments originate it is at least true that their permanency depends

1:50:46upon the recognition by governors and governed alike of certain general principles defining the functions of the governor and the obligations of the governed and such recognition may not unsuitably be represented to the imagination has an implicit bargain these principles Hobbes and the 17th century publicists in general call by a name borrowed from the Roman lawyers who in their turn had borrowed it from the stoic philosophers the laws of nature the curious result of this appeal to the terminology of the Roman jurists being that in effect the theorists of the social contract can drive to apply to political institutions of a very un-Roman character the doctrines of the Roman law of corporations there is of course no inconsistency between the phrase laws of nature and Hobbes' doctrine that a law in the sense of a command by a superior is impossible until the creation of a public authority to give the command since Hobbes is careful to explain

1:51:48the laws of nature are not commands but rules of reason through universal propositions as to the conditions upon which settled well-being is obtainable they are laws in the sense in which we apply the name to the principle of excluded middle or to that of the syllogism not in the sense in which it is given to the statute of mortemain or the British North American act a law of nature lex naturalis is a precept or general rule found out by reason by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or take it the way the means of preserving the same and to omit that by which he think of it may best be preserved clavathan 114 Hobbes' employment of the word forbidden in this sentence is of course metaphorical his meaning is simply that since every man desires to live reflection shows us that it would be irrational to endanger our lives or to fail to protect them it is in this and not in any mere idealistic sense that we have to understand the

1:52:50declaration in the first chapter of the day corporate political that the law of nature is identical with reason it is not that reason is thought of as supplying us with ends of action the ends of action are already given by the fundamental root passions and appetites what reason does is to indicate general rules as to the means by which such foregone ends may be most certainly obtained that of such general rules found out by reason there are according to Hobbes a considerable number but all are deducible from a single supreme rule that every man ought to endeavor peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it and where he cannot obtain it that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war the first branch of which rule contained it the first and fundamental law of nature which is to seek peace and follow it the second the sum of the right of nature which is by all means we can to defend ourselves the vath in 114 of course by saying that we ought to seek peace

1:53:54Hobbes means no more than that in virtue of the hazards and dangers of the war of all against all it is manifestly to our advantage to do so where we can in immediate corollary which figures as the second law of nature is that each of us should be willing when the rest are equally willing to abandon the general claim to act exactly as he thinks fit so far as the renunciation is necessary for peace that a man be willing when others are so too as far forth as for peace and defense of himself each I think it necessary to lay down this right to all things and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself ibid briefly then the second law is do not to others what you are not prepared to allow them to do to you a precept which Hobbes characteristically enough confuses with the golden rule of the gospel it is upon this rule that the whole possibility of contract and consequently according to Hobbes of political society depends for what the rule provides for is the laying aside by each member of a

1:54:57body of men of some part of his original right as described in the first of Hobbes's rules of reason to act exactly as he thinks fit now rights laid aside are either merely renowned store when they are resigned for the benefit of an expressly designated personal persons transferred to that personal persons such transference being a voluntary act is necessarily interested since the object of every voluntary act is some good to myself the contracting parties then in every case act each without view to his own ultimate advantage also since there are certain things for the surrender of which no man can receive an equivalent there are things which cannot be made the subjects of contract rights which cannot be transferred a man cannot for example divest himself of the right to resist an assault upon his life or an attempt to bloom or imprison him more generally since the object of our transference of rights is to obtain an increased security of life and the means of

1:55:57enjoying life no actor word of mind can reasonably be interpreted as showing an intention of divesting myself of the means of self-preservation these considerations will meet us again as furnishing some limits even to the power of the sovereign Hobbes now proceeds to deduce from this second law a third which is the immediate foundation of the rest of his social theory when two parties make a bargain for their mutual advantage it frequently happens that one of them is called upon to perform his part of the contract first and to trust the other to discharge his part as some future time in this case the contract is called from the point of view of the second party a covenant from the second law nature we can then deduce the third which Hobbes treats as the foundation of all moral obligation that men perform their covenants made Leviathan 115 this follows because if I break my agreement with you then since your object in the original agreement was to secure some good to yourself in my failure to perform what I undertook as frustrated that object you have no longer any

1:57:01inducement to fulfill your part of the bargain that's the whole purpose of making covenants has been defeated covenants are in vain and but empty words and the right of all men to all things remaining we are still in the condition of war ibbid on this law of the sacredness of a covenant depends the distinction of justice from injustice and indirectly the whole of social morality since the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of covenant and whatsoever is not unjust is just ibbid note incidentally that Hobbes thus like Schopen-Ara treats wrongdoing as a concept logically prior to right doing this definition explains what Hobbes had meant by saying that in a state of nature there can be no injustice injustice is breach of covenant but the mutual trust upon which the making of covenants depends is only possible when there is a coercive power which can affect breaches of covenant with penalties severe enough to make it to my interest to abstain from them that is under a civil government for the same reason it is only under civil government that there can be property

1:58:06it is a natural question why if the motive for loyalty to my agreements is always some prospect of advantage to myself i should be morally bound to keep them in cases where treachery promises to be still more advantageous the fact of the obligation Hobbes does not dispute even maintains expressly that a promise to begin to pay a certain sum on condition of being released is binding unless declared invalid by a properly constituted court of law but he is not altogether successful in the reasoning by which he supports his view partly he replies that a promise breaker is not likely to gain in the long run since no one will trust him after his detection partly he obscures hints that there may be a final judgment of God to be reckoned with apparently this suggestion is not merely made for the benefit of the orthodox reader but represents a lot of inconsistency in the author's own views i believe that honesty is not merely the best policy but has a higher sanctity of his own which Hobbes's analysis and morality fails to account for

1:59:08perhaps he was more deeply influenced than he knew by the traditional English hatred of a lie has something inherently base Hobbes now enumerates no less than 16 subsidiary laws of nature that his conditions without which peaceable common existence would be impossible the general character of these laws is negative they are prohibitions of various forms of behavior which may be expected to lead to a breach of the peace and the deduction in each case takes the form of an appeal to self-interest for example if i show myself revengeful or arrogant or unwilling to refer a dispute between myself and my neighbor to a distanced and impartial arbitrator i'm doing what lies in me to prolong the state of war and i'm thus losing the increased security of life and enjoyment of its good things which peace would have given me the whole body of the 19 laws Hobbes says maybe summed up in the simple formula which had already been given as an equivalent for the second law to leave all men unexcusable they have been contracted into one easy sum

2:00:13intelligible even to the meanest capacity and that is do not that to another which they'll which is not have done to thyself which show with him that he has no more to do in learning the laws of nature but when weighing the actions of other men with his own they seem too heavy to put them into the other part of the balance and his own into their place that his own passions and self-love may add nothing to the weight and then there is none of these laws of nature that will not appear unto him very reasonable the viet and 115 we see then that Hobbes's laws of nature looked at as a whole afford a fair formulation of the fundamental negative condition upon which the maintenance of social order depends no man is to expect more from his neighbors than he is willing that they should expect from him and no man is to interfere with the doings of his neighbors in any way in which they may not equally interfere with his the competitors in the great struggle of life are to start fair and to play the game what we should seek in vain in any of Hobbes's

2:01:18expositions of his social doctrine is the great Hellenic conception of the state or community is having a further positive function a duty to enobo the lives of its members so that each of them may if he will climb to spiritual heights which he could not have scaled alone Hobbes can hardly be said to have any real belief in social institutions as the instruments embarrass a progressive civilization he treats them as merely so much machinery for the preservation of a status quo he is mastered only the first half of Aristotle's famous dictum that the city comes into being that men may live but continues to be that they may live well we may now pass it once to a demonstration of the necessity of the organized state and his machinery the laws of nature are indeed in themselves us sufficient code of conduct and if they were always observed peaceful social existence would be guaranteed with all its accompanying benefits but in the state of nature we can have no security that they will be obey they oblige in foro in turno that is to say they

2:02:23bind to a desire they should take place but in foro external that is to the putting them in act not always sense a man who persisted in keeping them while all his neighbors broke them would infallibly lose by his conduct and it is impossible in Hobbes's theory of human nature that a man should persist in doing what he knows to be contrary to his private interest thus they are rightly speaking not as yet laws so long as men remain in a state of nature for law means a command given and enforceable by a definite person these dictates of reason men used to call by the name of laws but improperly for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conducive to the conservation and defense of themselves whereas law properly is the word of him that by right half command over others Leviathan 115 what is needed then to secure actual obedience to them is that they should be converted into commands issued by an authority which has rightful claims to obedience and has also sufficient force that is disposal to secure obedience by the inflection of such penalties for

2:03:29disobedience as may make it always to a man's own advantage to obey what is needed is in fact the institution of a ruler or sovereign and with the creation of the ruler we have passed it once into a state of civil society or political subjection this is why with Hobbes the creation of a ruler or chief magistrate is identical with the creation of society itself and rebellion against the ruler equivalent to the dissolution of the social bond itself before we go on to examine the way in which the ruler is created there are two points to which it is essential to call attention if Hobbes is not to be greatly misjudged in spite of his insistence upon the view that the dictates of reason do not become actual commands until there is someone to enforce them Hobbes is not justly chargeable with the identification of the moral law with the caprice as of an autocrat the validity of the moral law though not his character as law is with him anterior to the establishment of the ruler and depends upon what he takes to be the demonstrable coincidence the morality with the general

2:04:31interest what the rulers needed for is to provide the individual with a standing adequate incentive to behave morally and Hobbes is a great pains to urge that his favorite constitution and absolute monarchy is precisely the form of society in which the ruler is least likely to have any personal interest independent of the well-being of the community and may therefore be most safely trusted to see that his laws embody nothing but the conditions necessary for peace and security and again though Hobbes's arguments amounts to a defense of absolutism the defense is throughout based on rationalistic and consequently democratic grounds he is entirely free both from the super station of a divine hereditary right inherent in monarchs such as the stewards laid claim to and from the doctrine that mere force itself constitutes right his optic to show that the absolute authority of the sovereign has a foundation in right by tracing it back to its supposed origin in a voluntary transference of right on the part of the subject a transference made in the

2:05:35interests of the subject himself and so to legitimate absoluteism by giving it a utilitarian basis the jury duena roilis were thus completely justified in their instinctive distress of Hobbes when once it is granted that absolute sovereignty is only defensible if it can be shown to be for the general interest the doors open for further inquiry whether absoluteism really is for the general interest or not and if it cannot be shown that it is not for the rejection of absoluteism itself thus Hobbes's theories really contain the germs of the constitutionalism which he combated to declare that absoluteism requires and utilitarian justification is to be already halfway on the road to revolution there is much more community of spirit between Hobbes and Locke or Sydney or even Rousseau than between Hobbes and Filmer the immediate object of Hobbes's deduction of the rights of the sovereign is closely connected with the political controversies of his own time he is anxious to

2:06:37disprove the claims made by parliament against the British Crown to be in a special sense the representative of the people and of popular rights he therefore sets himself to argue that in every society the supreme executive authority is already itself the true representative of the whole community the community consequently cannot be again represented by any other institution and all claims made by such institutions to authority go ordinate with or superior to that of the executive on the plea of their representative character must be new territory to affect this proof he has recourse to the technical terms of the Roman law of corporations and their legal representation he starts with the legal definition of a person a person means any being whose words and acts are considered in law as issuing either from himself or from any other man or a thing to whom they are attributed in the latter case where the words and acts of such a person are legally regarded as belonging to some other being or beings whom he represents the representative is an

2:07:40artificial person for example an advocate speaking from his brief is an artificial person who represents his client what he says is taken in law as if it were uttered by and committed not the advocate himself but his client when the being thus represented by another owns the words and acts of his representative he is said to authorize them and the representative speaks and acts with authority so that an act done by authority always means an act done by a commission or license from him who's right it is this at once leads to the conclusion that by the law of nature any being who has authorized another to represent him is bound by all engagements entered into by his representative on his behalf so far as they come within the scope of the authorization exactly as if they were his own words or acts to repudiate them as to be guilty of a breach of the law that governance when made or to be kept this point being granted it only remains to establish the proposition that all governments must be regarded as originating in a commission bestowed by a whole

2:08:45community upon the government to represent it and the logical defense of absolutism is complete accordingly Hobbes now proceeds to reason as follows an aggregate of individual men can only become a true society insofar as it exhibits a unity of will and purpose it is this unity of will which constitutes the multitude into a community but there is properly speaking no such thing as a general will or will of society at large which is not that of individuals only by a legal fiction can we speak of anything but individual beings as in doubt with will consequently the unity of society is only possible by means of representation the will of the society becomes a real thing when the original aggregate agree to a point a determinant man or body of men they're representative that is to take the volitions of that man or that body of men as authorized by every individual composing the aggregate in this way and only in this way an aggregate may by legal fiction become one person

2:09:49that is a collective subject of legal rights and duties a multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man or by one person represented so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular for it is the unity of the representative not the unity of the represented that make it the person one and it is the representative that beareth the person and but what person and unity cannot otherwise be understood in multitude and because the multitude naturally is not one but many they cannot be understood for one but many authors of everything their representative say or death in their name every man giving their comment representative authority from himself in particular and owning all the actions the representative death the vif and 116 the only way then in which an aggregate of men can form themselves into a society for mutual defense against outsiders and against one another's anti social tendencies is by unanimous agreement to a point

2:10:49some definite man or number of men to act as their representative whose commands each of the aggregate is henceforth regard as issuing from himself and by whose actions each henceforth is to regard himself as bound exactly as though they have been performed by himself in this way the laws of nature the conditions of peace and security become actually operative since by making such an agreement the represented implicitly authorize their representative to employ their united physical force as though were his own in restraint of all disobedience to his commands and thus create a coercive power adequate enough to give every individual personal motives to obey the only way to erect such a common power is to confer all their power and strengthen upon one man or upon one assembly meant that may reduce all their wills viperality of voices unto one will which is as much as to say to a point one man or assembly meant to bear their person in every one to own and acknowledge himself to be the author of whatsoever heed that so bear their personal shall act or cause

2:11:53to be acted in those things which concern the common peace and safety and they're in to submit their wills to his will and their judgment to his judgment this is more than consent or concord it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person made by covenant of every man with every man this done the multitude so united in one person is called a commonwealth this is the generation of that great Leviathan or rather to speak more reverently of that mortal god to which we under the immortal god are peace and defense for by this authority given him by every particular man in the commonwealth he hath use of so much power and strength conferred on him that by terror the of he is unable to form the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies are broad and in him consisted the essence of the commonwealth which to define it is one person of whose acts a great multitude by mutual covenants one with another have made themselves every one the author to the end that he might use the strength and means of them all as he shall think

2:12:55expedient for their peace and common defense and he that carried this person his call sovereign and said to have sovereign power and everyone besides his subject Leviathan 117 one of two points in this deduction call perhaps for a special remark one it should be clear that in spite of his absolutist leanings what helps is trying to express by the aid of his legal fictions is the great democratic idea of self-government the coerce of powers of the ruler are only but jitimated in his eyes by the thought that they give effect to what is at heart the will of the whole people over whom he rules the sovereign is an effective incarnation of the national will but as his philosophy will not allow him to admit the reality of any purpose which is not that of a definite man he has to conceive of this national spirit and purpose as having no actual existence until it is embodied in a representative of flesh and blood the nation is one man with a will and purpose of its own but it is one only by the legal fiction which treats the acts of an agent or representative

2:14:00as if they were those of that which he represents to borrow an analogy from the case of the individual the sole of the great artificial body politic is not diffused over the whole organism all in every but definitely located in a central organ or brain this is why Hobbes is so careful to insist that legitimate sovereignty must be based on an express or tacit consent of every member of the subject body and also why he is after was a great pains to argue that his favorite form of government the absolute sovereignty of a single man is just the one in which from that nature of the case the ruler is least likely to have any private interests of his own distinct from those of the community and in fact is most nearly a mere mouthpiece of the national will too with Hobbes as we see the creation of a commonwealth and the creation of a central coercive or executive power form one and the same act it is by the constitution of an executive that the laws of nature which bid men to seek peace and ensue it cease to be amiable but impracticable ideals and become

2:15:04operative realities he is thus the author of the doctrine revived in the 19th century by Austin and his disciples that sovereign power is in its nature one and indivisible and that there can be no real distinction between the different functions of government so that the making of laws may belong to one set of persons the enforcing them by penalties to a second and the interpretation of them in particular cases to a third it is on this point that Hobbes's political theory is most strikingly at variance with those of his best known successes when locked formulated the philosophy of the revolution wigs in his treatises on civil government he was inevitably led in the attempt to justify resistance to a chief magistrate who violates his trust to make a distinction which is opposed to the central thought of Hobbes with lock the fundamental and original social compact consists simply in the determination of a number of men to live in future under a known and common law of action instead of being guided by the uncertain and fluctuating dictates of

2:16:07individual judgment that is in the will to establish a common legislature the appointment of a definite set of persons armed with power to put the decisions of this legislature into act the creation of executive officials is a later proceeding and the chief magistrate thus becomes a mere delegate of the legislature a trustee who may lawfully be removed whenever he transgresses the limits of the powers delegated to him lock is thus the author of the famous doctrine of the division of powers between distinct branches of government and of the theory of the importance of constitutional checks by which one branch may be handed from usurping the functions of the others three we might perhaps have that invert you of his definition of the ends of government as exhausted by the preservation of peace and common defense Hobbes may be regarded as a former owner of the negative laissez allé doctrine of the functions of the state the sovereign is there in fact to remove certain standing obstacles to the secure prosecution by a subject of their individual aims to keep society

2:17:11from relapsing into primitive anarchy with his defective theory of volition Hobbes can not refine no place for any conception of the state as an organization for the positive promotion among its members of the good life or civilization or progress or whatever else we may please that ideal of life by which the rationally free man is distinguished from the barbarian the very existence of moral and social progress is in fact just the one striking feature of historical civilization which is account of human nature to be consistent with itself is bound to ignore in the chapter four chapter five of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this the Bravaks recording is in the public domain the powers of the sovereign that the legitimate powers of a sovereign are absolute

2:18:15and that all resistance to his authority must be a breach of covenant and therefore unjust our consequences which follow directly from Hobbes's conception of the fundamental conditions of social existence the sovereign has in fact been authorized by me if I am a member of the commonwealth to make what regulations he thinks fit for the preservation of order and peace and he used a whole physical force of the community to punish or prevent violations of those regulations refusal to obey or resistance to the execution of the sovereign's command is thus a distinct breach of my given promise and against that law of nature that is the rational consideration that covenants ought to be kept that is that the making of them is useless unless they are kept hence the duty of unconditional obedience on the part of the subject but there is

2:19:22no corresponding duty on the part of the sovereign he has been expressly authorized to make such regulations as he thinks fit and consequently no violation of compact can be pleaded against him no matter what commands he may think good to issue Hobbes throws this latter part of his argument which James at justifying the stewart claim of irresponsibility of the kings of England do their subjects into curiously artificial form the argument by which the sovereign is set up is he says one between each individual member of a crowd and every other there has been no agreement between the whole community as such on the one part and the sovereign on the other before the creation of the Leviathan in fact the community has no corporate existence as such and the sovereign is as yet

2:20:24no sovereign but only one man or a number of men among others and therefore there are no such parties as sovereign and public to bargain with one another or even if we suppose that the person finally created sovereign had procured his nomination by private bargaining with individual members of the crowd yet when once he has been declared sovereign all these bargains become invalid since he now as sovereign has the right to say what agreements shall or shall not be considered binding hence no act of a sovereign towards any of his subjects can be unjust in a commonwealth justice in fact simply means observing the rules of conduct which the sovereign has laid down Leviathan 118 but if I plead that I was not a party to the original agreement of every man with every man

2:21:30to accept this particular sovereign and to acknowledge his acts as if they were my own then he is not my sovereign at all and I am no member of the society which as such is created by his elevation towards him and them I'm still in the state of nature and made without in justice be treated as an enemy and subject to all that is incidental to the war of all against all it follows that a sovereign once instituted can in no case be guilty of an injustice towards any of his subjects and Hobbes bids us take note that in the psalm which according to the notions of the 17th century expresses David's penitence for adultery and murder no acknowledgement is made that the author had done a wrong

2:22:34to Eureia in first corrupting his wife and then accomplishing his death it is for sin against God that the psalmist and treats forgiveness not for wrong done to man so Hobbes concludes it is the teaching of scripture as well as of reason that the ruler can never be unjust to his subject and therefore never lawfully accused judged or condemned by those who have themselves agreed to take his orders as the measure of just and unjust still it is admitted a ruler may abuse his power as David did and if this is not injustice to the subject it is at least an equity for which the ruler is amenable to the judgment of God though the action be against the law of nature as being

2:23:36contrary to equity as was the killing of Eureia by David yet it was not an injury to Eureia but to God not to Eureia because the right to do what he pleased was given him by Eureia himself and yet to God because David was God's subject and prohibited all iniquity by the law of nature which distinction David himself when he repented the fact evidently confirmed saying to the only have I sinned the viofen 121 as in a former case this suggestion of a divine judgment to which even the irresponsible sovereign is amenable leaves us in a perplexing uncertainty how far it is a concession to the weaknesses of orthodox readers or how far it may represent a genuine feeling

2:24:38on the writers part that there is after all a moral authority more ancient and august than the various leviathins men have made for themselves it must not of course be supposed that it is only a monarch who can be absolute hops is careful to point out that it follows from his theory of the social compact that every government when once duly established whatever its form may be is clothed with the same absolute authority over its subjects indeed it is in the case of a democracy that is a state in which the whole assembly of citizens is itself the sovereign body that he thinks the fact of absolute authority most patent women assembly men is made sovereign then no man imagineth any such covenant to have passed in the institution for no man is so dull as to say for example the people of Rome made a covenant

2:25:43with the Romans to hold the sovereignty on such and such conditions which not performed the Romans might lawfully depose the Roman people that men see not the reason to be alike in a monarchy and in a popular government proceeded from the ambition of some that are kinder to the government of an assembly where they may hope to participate then of monarchy which they despair to enjoy the viathin 118 hops is however of opinion that of all forms of government monarchy best answers the purpose for which sovereignty is instituted and that for several reasons one a monarch's private interest is more intimately bound up with the interests of his subjects then can be the case with the private interests of the members of a sovereign assembly the riches power and honor of a

2:26:48monarch arise only from the riches strength and reputation of his subjects where is in a democracy or aristocracy the public prosperity confers not so much to the private fortune of one that is corrupt as death many times a perfidious advice a treacherous action civil war ibit 119 a sentence upon which the history of the relations of the restored stewards with the quarterfrance surely affords and entertaining commentary to a monarch is freer to receive advice from all quarters and to keep that advice secret than an assembly three whereas the resolutions of a monarch are subject only to the inconstancy of human nature those of an assembly are exposed to

2:27:49a further inconstancy arising from disagreement between its members monarchy thus offers the maximum of security for continuity of policy for a monarch cannot disagree with himself out of envy or interest but an assembly may and that to such a height as may produce a civil war ibit 119 against these advantages of monarchy may be pleaded to disadvantages one the ill effects produced by the influence of flatters and favorites with the monarch and to the disorders which arise when the monarchy descends to an infant or an imbecile these however are discounted by considering one that flatters and favorites in the form of interested demagogues are as common in popular

2:28:53as in monarchical government and under the former have more power to do harm and less to do good than under the latter for to accuse requires less eloquence such as man's nature than to excuse and condemnation then absolution more resembles justice leviathan 119 and that the powers of an infant or imbecile monarch can always be placed in the hands of a qualified body of regents and therefore any disturbances that arise must be attributed not to the inherent effects of monarchical government but to the ambition of subjects and ignorance of their duty ibit as we have already seen Hobbes' conception of human nature and the ends of action precludes his reckoning with what are more idealistic philosophy with probably regard as the chief objection to despotism even when it is

2:29:59both benevolent and capable there's the conviction that freedom and self-government are in themselves goods of the highest order and that a slight increase in efficiency is dearly bought by their sacrifice from the principle that all authority is in its nature absolute Hobbes has no difficulty in vindicating for the English crown the leading powers which have been challenged by the Puritan revolution in particular we may note one that the monarch is in no wise bound to govern in modern phrase in accord with the acts of parliament parliament is merely a body called together by the monarch to advise him as to the state of the kingdom and the measures to be taken for the common peace the claim of an elected parliament to be in a special sense the representative of the

2:30:59people is entirely unfounded the people are already completely represented by their sovereign the monarch and consequently cannot be represented over again what powers parliament has it enjoys simply as a voluntary gift on the part of the real representative of the people who is therefore free to follow its advice to reject it or to promulgate laws of his own without consulting it as he thinks best ibbid 122 to the monarch has likewise the right to supreme command of all the forces of the community by land and sea he has been instituted to take charge of the common and therefore must be understood to be entrusted with the means necessary to the execution of the task thus the demand of the long parliament for control of the militia was an active use or patient three the monarch again has the sole right to levy taxes at his own discretion a right specially

2:32:05insisted upon by harbsmith reference to the controversy about ship money four he has also the right arising from his position as the authority from whom all the rules of justice emanate of hearing and deciding all controversies which may arise concerning law either civil or natural or concerning fact levyathan 118 since apart from this right there is no protection of one subject against another it would follow then that the opposition to the extraordinary jurisdiction of the star chamber the ecclesiastical commission and the council of the north was entirely illegitimate five the monarch also has and this is the most important point of all the sole right to judge what opinions in church and state may safely be tolerated for it is his function as keeper of the

2:33:06general peace to be judge of what opinions and doctrines are averse and what conducing to peace it follows therefore that it is for him and for him alone to decide on what occasions how far and what men are to be trusted with all in speaking to multitudes of people and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they be published for the actions of men proceed from their opinions and in the well governing of men's opinions consist of the well governing of men's actions in order to their peace and concord the vithin 118 of the bearing of this conclusion upon harbsmith views of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the sovereign as you'll have something to say in the next chapter it must be observed that the highly doctrinaire character of this defense of the roilous position at once lays it open to a damaging attack which harbs does nothing to meet he is proved

2:34:09conclusively if you grant the truth of his peculiar view of human nature that peace and concord are only attainable in political society he is also shown that in every political society there must be somewhere a center of authority in doubt with plenary powers and only restrained in the exercise of them by the consideration that governmental authority pushed beyond a certain point will provoke rebellion and so defeat its own ends what he has not proved but is contempt simply to assume is that as a matter of historical fact this plenitude of power is under the constitution of England reposed in the person of the king or in other words that the government of England is really a monarchy in his sense of the term now this was precisely what the parliamentarian statesman denied according to them the powers of the English crown were in point of fact and had always been

2:35:11circumscribed by a superior authority which is described for example in the petition of right as the laws and statutes of the realm the laws and customs of this realm and they had as we know sound historical reasons to urge in support of this view of the case as harbs never takes issue on the historical question his leading opponents would have been perfectly justified in calling his argument as applied to the proceedings of the parliamentarians and elaborate ignore rotio elenchi the question that is you between Charles the first and hampton or pin was not whether the ultimate seat of authority in England is absolute or not but where that seat of authority lies harbs his evasion of the real question throws a flood of light upon the fundamental weakness of the theory which treats government as legitimated by contract such a hard and fast theory is bound

2:36:20to be at some point or other discrepant with the actual facts of the historical situation a constitution is not a thing which is made once for all by the wisdom of a particular set of persons it is something which grows up gradually under all sorts of perceptible and imperceptible influences in any given time the various formulae by which it is described by those who live under it are sure to be only imperfectly consistent with one another. Nay further since the formulae for the most part are things devised to fit a past state of affairs which continue to be repeated long after the situation they describe has been profoundly modified in fact they are almost certain to be largely false when accepted as an account of the state of development actually reached long before they lose their inherited prestige and of development and progress as great social facts harbs as we saw has as good as no conception from his

2:37:28examination of the powers of the sovereign harbs advances to a consideration of the liberties of the subject one might be tempted to think that the letter must be non-existent in such a scheme as his but there are certain inevitable limits even to the most unrestricted absolutism and there are others which suggest themselves as soon as absolutism itself is treated as only defensible on a utilitarian basis what these limits are according to Hobbes is explained in chapter 21 of the Leviathan the liberty of the subject is simply that part of the supposed original right of every man to everything of which he cannot possibly have divested himself or of which he cannot be supposed to have divested himself without defeating his purpose in entering into the social compact vis the preservation of himself he is free then one to refuse even when

2:38:31commanded by the sovereign to kill or main himself or to submit without resistance to those who are charged to kill or main him to to refuse to confess a crime except upon previous promise of pardon three to refuse to execute in order to kill another man and more generally to decline any dangerous or dishonorable office by executing which he imperils that very self-preservation for the sake of which he has entered into social life on this ground Hobbes justifies the refusal of men of feminine courage like himself to do personal service as soldiers provided they are ready to furnish a sufficient substitute even a band of rebels he holds made without injustice refused to capitulate except on a promise of pardon do these elementary liberties we subsequently find added complete liberty of conscience so far as private thoughts are concerned thought is

2:39:37absolutely free simply because it is impossible to subject it the expression of thought in words as we have seen is not freed all it being for the sovereign to decide what thoughts may be made public without danger to the peace it is only to be added that the authority of a sovereign of course only lasts so long as he is able to ensure the general safety for no covenant can deprive the man of his right to protect himself when he has no other protector political allegiance is therefore terminated the life of the Leviathan extinguished when a monarch is captured in war and purchases his personal liberty by submission to the conqueror or when he voluntarily releases his subjects from their obedience and so declares that he no longer embodies the public will for self protection in chapter 5 chapter 6 of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal box recording is in the public domain

2:40:48church in state since it has been already declared that the sovereign in the interests of the general peace as a soul right to determine what opinions may be safely taught in the commonwealth it follows at once that Hobbes can allow of no division between a civil and a spiritual power in fact he holds as a man of the 17th century not un reasonably might that the most potent of all sources of anarchy and civil disorder is precisely the claim of the clergy of various churches to possess an inherent right not depending on any grant from the political authority to declare what religious doctrine shall be taught in what form of church discipline permitted and to depose or rebel against civil rulers who refuse to submit to their dictation on these points writing as he did in the 17th century Hobbes found it necessary to plead the cause of arastianism not only on grounds of reason but by the aid of an appeal to scripture and the consequences that nearly a half of Leviathan

2:41:50has taken up by the ecclesiastical controversy in which he has to oppose at once the Romanist the scotch covenanter and the ordinary anglican high churchman it is impossible in a short sketch like the present to do more than indicate the general character of the singular result that which he arrives the key to his hope position must be sought in his bithy aphorism that religion philosophy but law that is the sovereign authorizes the preaching of certain doctrines and prohibits others not because the former are scientifically true and the latter falls in fact we saw long ago that all doctrines about god lie outside the limits of human knowledge but because the former are conducive to peace and the latter to discord and our profession of faith in the authorized religion is to be understood not as a declaration of our philosophical belief but as a declaration of our submission to the rightful political authority of the sovereign. Hobbes says then to meet the

2:42:51objection that on his view our duty to the sovereign must whenever the sovereign is an infidel lead us into disobedience to god the infidel sovereign commands us to practice a false religion god commands in his word to embrace the true are we then to obey man rather than god and mess the martyrs who died for the faith be accounted criminals. Hobbes's reply is in principle that we have to learn what is the true religion from the canonical scriptures and that a writing depends for is canonical character upon its authorization as such by the sovereign who also inverts your his general right to prohibit dangerous teaching is the final court of appeal as to the interpretation of scripture. It must therefore be vain to plead our interpretations of some work which we regard as inspired in justification of our refusal to submit to the sovereign as for the martyrs of history no man can be a martyr or witness for the truth of our revelation from god except its immediate

2:43:56recipient all that any other martyr can testify to is his belief in the veracity of the person who claims to have received the revelation to reject his witness is thus not to reject his commands of god but merely to reject the claims of a certain person to have had communications with god. Now the only way in which a man can prove his divine commission is by the performance of miracles and since miracles have ceased no one can now establish his claims to be believed as a messenger of god except indirectly by the agreement of his teaching with that of Christ and the apostles but Christ and the apostles taught both by precept and by example the duty of submission to civil authorities hence no man can claim their authority in favor of disobedience to the sovereign in the purely hypothetical case of a man receiving today a direct command from god to disobey his he must no doubt be prepared to obey god who can make it his highest interest to do so rather than the sovereign but since he is unable to prove his divine commission by miracles he has

2:45:01no ground for complaint if the sovereign refuses to believe in it and punishes him as an offender to make this doctrine more palatable to his readers Hobbes combines it with an elaborate scriptural exegesis of his own in the development of which he rivals or outdoes his orthodox antagonists in profusion of blebical quotations and ingenuity of interpretation not infrequently throwing out remarkable anticipations of more modern criticism the fundamental proposition of the whole scheme is that the kingdom of god spoken of in scripture is not an ecclesiastical system but a civil government in which god as represented by a visible human lieutenant reigns as civil sovereign this kingdom was first instituted when Moses was directly installed by god as his representative in the government of the Jews but suspended when that people revolted from their lawful rulers the successors of Moses and set up the kingdom of Saul the mission of Jesus was to announce his

2:46:06not in his lifetime but in an age yet to come when the righteous are to rise from the dead and be reigned over personally by Jesus as God's representative in Palestine hence the only condition imposed from the first as necessary for entrance into the church was the acknowledgement of the belief that Jesus is the Messiah that is the destined monarch of the coming kingdom of god all that a Christian is obliged to therefore as a condition of salvation is the belief that is some future time Jesus will reappear on earth as a civil sovereign and the intention of then obeying his authority in the meanwhile the Christian is bound by the expressed language of scripture itself to complete submission to the existing civil power as for the church which sometimes claims to be the kingdom of god announced by Jesus and consequently to have a first lean so to say on the obedience of Christians Hobbes gives us a choice of alternatives if it be one

2:47:07person it is the same thing with the Commonwealth of Christians called a Commonwealth because it consists of men united in one person their sovereign and a church because it consisted in Christian men united in one Christian sovereign but if the church be not one person then it have no authority it can neither command nor do any action at all nor has any will reason nor voice for all these qualities are personal by them 133 it is then argued at length that the only commission given by Christ to his apostles and by them to their successors was to teach and persuade and the only weapon with which they were armed against the recalcitrant power of excommunication that is the threat of exclusion from the future kingdom of god such power as the clergy now exercising Christian countries then is derived from independent on the political sovereign who is the single fountain at once of temporal and spiritual authority they are in fact so far as concerns their

2:48:08social status about each civil servants and nothing more and Hobbes declares that whereas the King of England as responsible to know tribunal on earth may rightly claim to rule dee gratia a bishop holds his sea by the grace of god and the king's permission the fourth and last division of Leviathan is devoted to an unsparing attack conducted chiefly with an eye to Balar means arguments for papal supremacy upon the kingdom of darkness that is the church organized as a society independent of the authorization of the civil power and claiming an independent spiritual jurisdiction to be enforced at its peril by the secular arm through the medium of temporal disabilities and penalties the origin of this kingdom of darkness is sought in the ambition of the Roman clergy which led them first to accept support and grant support from the Christian Roman emperors and finally in the general decay of the imperial system to usurp the place of their

2:49:12original protectors if a man says Hobbes in one of his most famous epigrams considers the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heath and power Leviathan 147 the ghost Hobbes adds has partly been exercised in England first by the tutors sovereigns who overthrew the power of the pope then by the presbyterians of the long parliament who put down the bishops and finally we must remember that this sentence which does not appear in the modified Latin text of 1669 was written in 1651 by the independence who destroyed the domination of presbyterianism and so we are reduced to the independence of the primitive Christians to follow

2:50:13Paul or seaface or Apollos every man as he like it best which if it be without contention is perhaps the best if it but he adds the exorcism will never be complete until a bold ruler takes in hand the universities the chief sources of the two of high ecclesiastical pretensions and compels them to instruct their students in the true rudiments of political science and the true grounds of political submission that is set as critics until the Leviathan is officially made the sole textbook of political science in of chapter six conclusion of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor this liberal vox recording is in the public domain conclusion the true measure of Hobbes' greatness as a philosopher was hardly recognized either by his own

2:51:18contemporaries in England or by their successors of the 18th century the innumerable attacks of the orthodox upon his theories on the ground of their alleged irreligious and immoral tendency are mostly of an ephemeral kind but the attitude of Locke and Barclay who had capacity enough to understand him if they had cared to do so and who would have found his nominalism at least entirely to their taste is more significant Locke never mentions his name at all throughout the essay and when accused by stealing fleet of arriving at results similar to those of Hobbes retorts with a sarcasm upon the good bishop's familiarity with a suspected author Barclay mentions him once in his al-Safran along with Spinoza and Venini as a typical atheist the war burden with his usual love for a paradox

2:52:25provided himself and having been the first person to discover the real strength of Hobbes' position real appreciation of his merits in England begins with the utilitarians of the early 19th century Austin, Grote and Moe's worth to the last of whom we owe the only approach as yet made to a complete edition of Hobbes' works down to their time Hobbes' chief influence on English thought lay in the stimulus his ethical theories afforded to a profound moral analysis and a deeper study of human nature on the part of antagonists who sought to vindicate the originality of disinterested and debased morality upon grounds independent of positive law. The ethical work of Cutworth of Shaf's spirit of Cumberland of Butler is throughout inspired by the felt need to meet and

2:53:28overcome a conception of human nature which goes back in the end to the philosopher of Mom's Barry. On the continent the direct influence of Hobbes made itself more immediately and more permanently felt. Within the philosopher's own lifetime Spinoza had adopted as the basis of the theory of government given in his unfinished tractatus politicus of you of natural right and the social compact which is in all fundamentals identical with that of Hobbes whose influence is also visibly traceable in the argument for the freedom of philosophy from theological restraints set forth in the famous tractatus theological politicus. Leibniz II in his youthful recoil from scholasticism was powerfully attractive by Hobbes' clear cut logical nominalism and outspoken materialism

2:54:28nor did he cease to express his admiration for the Englishman's genius after he had finally arrived at his own mature doctrine of spiritual realism. It has been shown that throughout the 18th century, down to the time of Kant, Hobbes continued to be an object of philosophical interest in Germany but the detail facts as to his influence at home and abroad belong to the general history of modern thought and necessarily fall outside the limits of a brief sketch like the present. End of conclusion End of Thomas Hobbes by Alfred Edward Taylor