Part 52 (1/2)

As ”The Leviathan” produced the numerous controversies of Hobbes, a history of this great moral curiosity enters into our subject.

Hobbes, living in times of anarchy, perceived the necessity of re-establis.h.i.+ng authority with more than its usual force. But how were the divided opinions of men to melt together, and where in the State was to be placed _absolute power_? for a remedy of less force he could not discover for that disordered state of society which he witnessed.

Was the sovereign or the people to be invested with that mighty power which was to keep every other quiescent?--a topic which had been discussed for ages, and still must be, as the humours of men incline--was, I believe, a matter perfectly indifferent to our philosopher, provided that whatever might be the government, absolute power could somewhere be lodged in it, to force men to act in strict conformity. He discovers his perplexity in the dedication of his work.

”In a way beset with those that contend on one side for too great liberty, on the other side for too much authority, 'tis hard to pa.s.s between the points of both unwounded.” It happened that our cynical Hobbes had no respect for his species; terrified at anarchy, he seems to have lost all fear when he flew to absolute power--a sovereign remedy unworthy of a great spirit, though convenient for a timid one like his own. Hobbes considered men merely as animals of prey, living in a state of perpetual hostility, and his solitary principle of action was self-preservation at any price.

He conjured up a political phantom, a favourite and fanciful notion, that haunted him through life. He imagined that the _many_ might be more easily managed by making them up into an artificial _One_, and calling this wonderful political unity the _Commonwealth_, or the _Civil Power_, or the _Sovereign_, or by whatever name was found most pleasing; he personified it by the image of ”Leviathan.”[352]

At first sight the ideal monster might pa.s.s for an innocent conceit; and there appears even consummate wisdom in erecting a colossal power for our common security; but Hobbes a.s.sumed that _Authority_ was to be supported to its extreme pitch. _Force_ with him appeared to const.i.tute _right_, and _unconditional submission_ then became a _duty_: these were consequences quite natural to one who at his first step degraded man by comparing him to a watch, and who would not have him go but with the same nicety of motion, wound up by a great key.

To be secure, by the system of Hobbes, we must at least lose the glory of our existence as intellectual beings. He would persuade us into the dead quietness of a commonwealth of puppets, while he was consigning into the grasp of his ”Leviathan,” or sovereign power, the wire that was to communicate a mockery of vital motion--a principle of action without freedom. The system was equally desirable to the Protector Cromwell as to the regal Charles. A conspiracy against mankind could not alarm their governors: it is not therefore surprising that the usurper offered Hobbes the office of Secretary of State; and that he was afterwards pensioned by the monarch.

A philosophical system, moral or political, is often nothing more than a temporary expedient to turn aside the madness of the times by subst.i.tuting what offers an appearance of relief; nor is it a little influenced by the immediate convenience of the philosopher himself; his personal character enters a good deal into the system. The object of Hobbes in his ”Leviathan” was always ambiguous, because it was, in truth, one of these systems of expediency, conveniently adapted to what has been termed of late ”existing circ.u.mstances.” His sole aim was to keep all things in peace, by creating one mightiest power in the State, to suppress instantly all other powers that might rise in insurrection. In his times, the establishment of despotism was the only political restraint he could discover of sufficient force to chain man down, amid the turbulence of society; but this concealed end he is perpetually s.h.i.+fting and disguising; for the truth is, no man loved slavery less.[353]

The system of Hobbes could not be limited to politics: he knew that the safety of the people's morals required an _Established Religion_. The alliance between Church and State had been so violently shaken, that it was necessary to cement them once more.

As our philosopher had been terrified in his politics by the view of its contending factions, so, in religion, he experienced the same terror at the hereditary rancours of its multiplied sects. He could devise no other means than to attack the mysteries and dogmas of theologians, those after-inventions and corruptions of Christianity, by which the artifices of their chiefs had so long split them into perpetual factions:[354] he therefore a.s.serted that the religion of the people ought to exist, in strict conformity to the will of the State.[355]

When Hobbes wrote against mysteries, the mere polemics sent forth a cry of his impiety; the philosopher was branded with Atheism;--one of those artful calumnies, of which, after a man has washed himself clean, the stain will be found to have dyed the skin.[356]

To me it appears that Hobbes, to put an end to these religious wars, which his age and country had witnessed, perpetually kindled by crazy fanatics and intolerant dogmatists, insisted that the _crosier_ should be carried in the _left_ hand of his Leviathan, and the _sword_ in his right.[357] He testified, as strongly as man could, by his public actions, that he was a Christian of the Church of England, ”as by law established,” and no enemy to the episcopal order; but he dreaded the encroachments of the Churchmen in his political system; jealous of that _supremacy_ at which some of them aimed. Many enlightened bishops sided with the philosopher.[358] At a time when Milton sullenly withdrew from every public testimonial of divine wors.h.i.+p, Hobbes, with more enlightened views, _attended Church service_, and strenuously supported _an established religion_; yet one is deemed a religious man, and the other an Atheist! Were the actions of men to be decisive of their characters, the reverse might be inferred.

The temper of our philosopher, so ill-adapted to contradiction, was too often tried; and if, as his adversary, Harrington, in the ”Oceana,” says, ”Truth be a spark whereunto objections are like bellows,” the mind of Hobbes, for half a century, was a very forge, where the hammer was always beating, and the flame was never allowed to be extinguished. Charles II. strikingly described his worrying a.s.sailants. ”Hobbes,” said the king, ”was a bear against whom the Church played their young dogs, in order to exercise them.”[359] A strange repartee has preserved the causticity of his wit. Dr. Eachard, perhaps one of the prototypes of Swift, wrote two admirable ludicrous dialogues, in ridicule of Hobbes's ”State of Nature.”[360] These were much extolled, and kept up the laugh against the philosophic misanthropist: once when he was told that the clergy said that ”Eachard had crucified Hobbes,” he bitterly retorted, ”Why, then, don't they fall down and _wors.h.i.+p_ me?”[361]

”The Leviathan” was ridiculed by the wits, declaimed against by the republicans, denounced by the monarchists, and menaced by the clergy.

The commonwealth man, the dreamer of equality, Harrington, raged at the subtile advocate for despotic power; but the glittering bubble of his fanciful ”Oceana” only broke on the mighty sides of the Leviathan, wasting its rainbow tints: the mitred Bramhall, at ”The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale,” flung his harpoon, demonstrating consequences from the principles of Hobbes, which he as eagerly denied. But our ambiguous philosopher had the hard fate to be attacked even by those who were labouring to the same end.[362] The literary wars of Hobbes were fierce and long; heroes he encountered, but heroes too were fighting by his side. Our chief himself wore a kind of magical armour; for, either he denied the consequences his adversaries deduced from his principles, or he surprised by new conclusions, which many could not discover in them; but by such means he had not only the art of infusing confidence among the _Hobbists_, but the greater one of dividing his adversaries, who often retreated, rather fatigued than victorious. Hobbes owed this partly to the happiness of a genius which excelled in controversy, but more, perhaps, to the advantage of the ground he occupied as a metaphysician: the usual darkness of that spot is favourable to those s.h.i.+ftings and turnings which the equivocal possessor may practise with an unwary a.s.sailant. Far different was the fate of Hobbes in the open daylight of mathematics: there his hardy genius lost him, and his sophistry could spin no web; as we shall see in the memorable war of twenty years waged between Hobbes and Dr.

Wallis. But the gall of controversy was sometimes tasted, and the flames of persecution flashed at times in the closet of our philosopher. The ungenerous attack of Bishop Fell, who, in the Latin translation of Wood's ”History of the University of Oxford,” had converted eulogium into the most virulent abuse,[363] without the partic.i.p.ation of Wood, who resented it with his honest warmth, was only an arrow s.n.a.t.c.hed from a quiver which was every day emptying itself on the devoted head of our ambiguous philosopher. Fell only vindicated himself by a fresh invective on ”the most vain and waspish animal of Malmesbury,” and Hobbes was too frightened to reply. This was the Fell whom it was so difficult to a.s.sign a reason for not liking:

I don't like thee, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell, But I don't like thee, Dr. Fell!

A curious incident in the history of the mind of this philosopher, was the mysterious panic which accompanied him to his latest day. It has not been denied that Hobbes was subject to occasional terrors: he dreaded to be left without company; and a particular instance is told, that on the Earl of Devons.h.i.+re's removal from Chatsworth, the philosopher, then in a dying state, insisted on being carried away, though on a feather-bed. Various motives have been suggested to account for this extraordinary terror. Some declared he was afraid of spirits; but he was too stout a materialist![364]--another, that he dreaded a.s.sa.s.sination; an ideal poniard indeed might scare even a materialist. But Bishop Atterbury, in a sermon on _the Terrors of Conscience_, ill.u.s.trates their nature by the character of our philosopher. Hobbes is there accused of attempting to destroy the principles of religion against his own inward conviction: this would only prove the insanity of Hobbes! The Bishop shows that ”the disorders of _conscience_ are not a _continued_, but an _intermitting_ disease;” so that the patient may appear at intervals in seeming health and real ease, till the fits return: all this he applies to the case of our philosopher. In reasoning on human affairs, the shortest way will be to discover human motives. The spirit, or the a.s.sa.s.sin of Hobbes, arose from the bill brought into Parliament, when the nation was panic-struck on the fire of London, against Atheism and Profaneness; he had a notion that a writ _de heretico comburendo_ was intended for him by Bishop Seth Ward, his _quondam_ admirer.[365] His spirits would sink at those moments; for in the philosophy of Hobbes, the whole universe was concentrated in the small s.p.a.ce of SELF. There was no length he refused to go for what he calls ”the natural right of preservation, which we all receive from the uncontrollable dictates of NECESSITY.” He exhausts his imagination in the forcible descriptions of his extinction: ”the terrible enemy of nature, Death,” is always before him. The ”inward horror” he felt of his extinction, Lord Clarendon thus alludes to: ”If Mr. Hobbes and some other man were both condemned to death (which is the most formidable thing Mr. Hobbes can conceive)”--and Dr. Eachard rallies him on the infinite anxiety he bestowed on his _body_, and thinks that ”he had better compound to be kicked and beaten twice a day, than to be so dismally tortured about an old rotten carcase.” Death was perhaps the only subject about which Hobbes would not dispute.

Such a materialist was then liable to terrors; and though, when his works were burnt, the author had not a hair singed, the convulsion of the panic often produced, as Bishop Atterbury expresses it, ”an intermitting disease.”

Persecution terrified Hobbes, and magnanimity and courage were no virtues in his philosophy. He went about hinting that he was not obstinate (that is, before the Bench of Bishops); that his opinions were mere conjectures, proposed as exercises for the powers of reasoning. He attempted (without meaning to be ludicrous) to make his _opinions_ a distinct object from his _person_; and, for the good order of the latter, he appealed to the family chaplain for his attendance at divine service, from whence, however, he always departed at the sermon, insisting that the chaplain could not teach him anything. It was in one of these panics that he produced his ”Historical Narrative of Heresy, and the Punishment thereof,” where, losing the dignity of the philosophic character, he creeps into a subterfuge with the subtilty of the lawyer; insisting that ”The Leviathan,” being published at a time when there was no distinction of creeds in England (the Court of High Commission having been abolished in the troubles), that therefore none could be heretical.[366]

No man was more speculatively bold, and more practically timorous;[367]

and two very contrary principles enabled him, through an extraordinary length of life, to deliver his opinions and still to save himself: these were his excessive vanity and his excessive timidity. The one inspired his hardy originality, and the other prompted him to protect himself by any means. His love of glory roused his vigorous intellect, while his fears shrunk him into his little self. Hobbes, engaged in the cause of truth, betrayed her dignity by his ambiguous and abject conduct: this was a consequence of his selfish philosophy; and this conduct has yielded no dubious triumph to the n.o.ble school which opposed his cynical principles.

A genius more luminous, sagacity more profound, and morals less tainted, were never more eminently combined than in this very man, who was so often reduced to the most abject state. But the anti-social philosophy of Hobbes terminated in preserving a pitiful state of existence. He who considered nothing more valuable than life, degraded himself by the meanest artifices of self-love,[368] and exulted in the most cynical truths.[369] The philosophy of Hobbes, founded on fear and suspicion, and which, in human nature, could see nothing beyond himself, might make him a wary politician, but always an imperfect social being. We find, therefore, that the philosopher of Malmesbury adroitly retained a friend at court, to protect him at an extremity; but considering all men alike, as bargaining for themselves, his friends occasioned him as much uneasiness as his enemies. He lived in dread that the Earl of Devons.h.i.+re, whose roof had ever been his protection, should at length give him up to the Parliament! There are no friends.h.i.+ps among cynics!

To such a state of degradation had the selfish philosophy reduced one of the greatest geniuses; a philosophy true only for the wretched and the criminal.[370] But those who feel moving within themselves the benevolent principle, and who delight in acts of social sympathy, are conscious of pa.s.sions and motives, which the others have omitted in their system. And the truth is, these ”unnatural philosophers,” as Lord Shaftesbury expressively terms them, are by no means the monsters they tell us they are: their practice is therefore usually in opposition to their principles. While Hobbes was for chaining down mankind as so many beasts of prey, he surely betrayed his social pa.s.sion, in the benevolent warnings he was perpetually giving them; and while he affected to hold his brothers in contempt, he was sacrificing laborious days, and his peace of mind, to acquire celebrity. Who loved glory more than this sublime cynic?--”_Glory_,”

says our philosopher, ”by those whom it displeaseth, is called _Pride_; by those whom it pleaseth, it is termed _a just valuation of himself_.”[371] Had Hobbes defined, as critically, the pa.s.sion of _self-love_, without resolving all our sympathies into a single monstrous one, we might have been disciplined without being degraded.

Hobbes, indeed, had a full feeling of the magnitude of his labours, both for foreigners and posterity, as he has expressed it in his life.

He disperses, in all his works, some Montaigne-like notices of himself, and they are eulogistic. He has not omitted any one of his virtues, nor even an apology for his deficiency in others. He notices with complacency how Charles II. had his portrait placed in the royal cabinet; how it was frequently asked for by his friends, in England and in France.[372] He has written his life several times, in verse and in prose; and never fails to throw into the eyes of his adversaries the reputation he gained abroad and at home.[373] He delighted to show he was living, by annual publications; and exultingly exclaims, ”That when he had silenced his adversaries, he published, in the eighty-seventh year of his life, the Odyssey of Homer, and the next year the Iliad, in English verse.”

His greatest imperfection was a monstrous egotism--the fate of those who concentrate all their observations in their own individual feelings. There are minds which may think too much, by conversing too little with books and men. Hobbes exulted he had read little; he had not more than half-a-dozen books about him; hence he always saw things in his own way, and doubtless this was the cause of his mania for disputation.

He wrote against dogmas with a spirit perfectly dogmatic. He liked conversation on the terms of his own political system, provided absolute authority was established, peevishly referring to his own works whenever contradicted; and his friends stipulated with strangers, that ”they should not dispute with the old man.” But what are we to think of that pertinacity of opinion which he held even with one as great as himself? Selden has often quitted the room, or Hobbes been driven from it, in the fierceness of their battle.[374] Even to his latest day, the ”war of words” delighted the man of confined reading. The literary duels between Hobbes and another hero celebrated in logomachy, the Catholic priest, Thomas White, have been recorded by Wood. They had both pa.s.sed their eightieth year, and were fond of paying visits to one another: but the two literary Nestors never met to part in cool blood, ”wrangling, squabbling, and scolding on philosophical matters,” as our blunt and lively historian has described.[375]