the Moral Philosophy of Paley, and the Utilitarianism of Benthamwhich had its share in bringing about the French Revolution of the 18th, as well as the Chartism and Socialism of the 19th century—owes its rise, or, to speak more truly, its revival in England (for the sophists of Greece had anticipated it all,) not, as its advocates pretend, to Bacon, but to the circumstance of Hobbes having a mind to go home.'

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Before entering upon an exposition of his metaphysical system, Hobbes, in the introduction of his book, gives us a glimpse of the length to which he was prepared to carry the materialism, and (so to speak) the mechanical nature of his views. "Seeing," he says, "that life is but a motion of limbs, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels, as doth a watch,) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer ?" We shall have occasion hereafter to observe how Hobbes again and again returns to this idea, in which, as in most things, the Greeks had been before-hand with him, since this principle of all life being motion, formed the very ground-work of the system of the Ionian philosophers. In the

* Tenneman, Ritter, Schlegel, and other high authorities, are all of opinion that the vulgar notion of Bacon having been a mere experimentalist has no foundation in fact. So far from favouring the sensualistic philosophy, he asserts that "enquiry into the sensible and material" is but a secondary kind of philosophy; and (" Advancement of Learning," p. 44; Montague's edit.) he shows that real knowledge does not proceed from "observation and experience," or from the variable representations of the senses, but is concerned about that which 18. Frederick Schlegel well says of Bacon, "The dangerous consequences produced by the injudicious extension of his principles, at the time when his followers and admirers in the 18th century thought they could derive more than he had ever dreamt of from experience and the senses, were indeed alarming and reprehensible, but they cannot with justice be ascribed to the spirit of Bacon. Not only in religion, but even in natural science, this great man believed in many things which have been despised as mere superstitions by his followers and admirers in later times. How little he himself partook in the rude materialism of his followers may be abundantly proved, &c." In fact the systems of Hobbes bore the same relation to that of Bacon as Neo-Platonism did to the Platonic philosophy. (See Coleridge's Friend, vol. 3, essay ix.)

The Ionian philosophers, directing their whole attention to external nature, and observing that the whole of the physical creation was continually undergoing a series of changes, maintained that everything was like a river, in a perpetual flux; and this theory of the flux of all things, of Becoming alone remaining to the exclusion of Being, quickly paved the way to the denial of any general standard of knowledge, and to that assertion, first openly made by Protagoras, that there is no such thing as universal and immutable Truth, but that the individual man is the measure of all truth-the dogma here broadly proclaimed with all its consequences by Hobbes, and afterwards stripped of the plain unadorned garb with which he had invested it, and brought forward, veiled in another and apparently more philosophical form by Locke; for he, in common with the

first part of the "Leviathan," to which I intend to confine my remarks, Hobbes, in a masterly and orderly manner, and in language clear as crystal, and solid as crystal too, sets himself to work to explain and develope his then novel views on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. Well knowing the peculiar force of an unqualified and startling assertion, he commences his book with a "petitio principii" of the very broadest kind. "Concerning the thoughts of men," he says, "the original of them all is what we call SENSE." Before this dogma of Protagoras,* thus revived by Hobbes, could gain any wide-spread belief among men, all imagination must be destroyed. It is, therefore, at the Imagination, the source of all that is noble aud beautiful, that Hobbes aims his next blow. "Imagination," he proceeds, "is nothing but decaying SENSE, and is found in men as well as in many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking, .. so that Imagination and Memory are but one. Mach memory, or memory of many things, is called Experience." Having thus ingeniously reduced Imagination to Experience, he next proceeds to deuy the existence of Ideas. "Whatever we imagine is fiiie; therefore there is no idea nor conception of any thing that we call iufiuite." We may here again observe that Locke's theory of all ideas being acquired by

Ionian sophists, places Truth in observation and experience, i.e. in Perception. Locke's admirer and disciple, Horne Toole, expresses this doctrine in the clearest and fullest manner, when he says. "Truth is nothing but what every man trowelh; there is no such thing as eterual, immmable, everlasting truth; for the truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of another," a passage in which the philology is as faulty as the morality and the metaphysics.

It has already been shown that the error of Protagoras arose from conceiving the material creation to be everything. Seeing everything perceptible by sense to be undergoing a perpetual change, he concluded that Science and Truih must be changeable and uncertain, confusing the conceptious peculiar to physical with those peculiar to moral and dialectical science, and founding that system of cold and barren materialism, which, itself denying Truth, has set up its claim for truth.

Locke, and the large class of moral philosophers who have adopied his system, deny the existence of innate ideas, aud. consequently, all innate moral sense of right and wrong, though, as I have elsewhere shown, these very words, right, wrong, duly, ought, &c., imply those innate moral obligations which the writers of this school are so auxious to disprove. It would be difficult to say how the geometrical idea of a point, as "that which has no parts or magnitude," or of a line, as "length without breadth," could be obtained from any deductions of observation or experience. The German philosopher Novalis has well observed that every science has some ideal aim far above all experience, and impossible to be derived from any experience,-mechanics, its perpetual motion; chemistry, its menstrum universale and philosopher's stone; mathematics, is quadrature of the circle; physics, its vital elixir; politics, its free and perfect form of government; and philosophy, its first principle. (See Novalis's "Schriften," vol. 2, p. 231; and "Comp. Coleridge's Friend," vol. 3, p. 172; "Church and State," p. 11-23; and the " Dialogue between Demosius and Mystes," p. 192.)

observation and experience, i.e. of being mere conceptions, is fairly anticipated by, and evidently founded upon, these principles of Hobbes, which had already extensively leavened the spirit of the age, and disposed it to the more favourable reception of the Lockian philosophy. From this doctrine, that there is no such thing as an idea, it follows that there is no idea of Truth, and therefore the True must consist in mere words. This conclusion Hobbes expresses thus, "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things; and where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood." Hobbes has anticipated many great names in literature. Mr. Hallam has shown* that he anticipated Descartes; we have already seen how he anticipated Locke; and in the passage just quoted he has anticipated Horue Tooke in his celebrated assertion that truth varies with the man, being nothing more or less than that which each man troweih. "Seeing then," proceeds Hobbes, "that truth consists in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he uses stands for." Here we may observe an obvious confusion between real and relative truth; if fact, a curious, if not a cunning, substitution of relative and verbal for real and actual truth.

The next great step in Hobbes's "Theory of Morals," is to confuse between the Reason and the Understanding, as he has already done between Ideas and Conceptions, and between Real and Relative Truth. And here we must bear in mind the Platonic distinction between the Pure Reason and the sensuous Understanding-a distinction which, up to Hobbes's time, had been observed or implied by almost all our great writers by Bacon, Hooker, Shakespere, Harrington, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Leighton, and the other master minds of English literature.†

"Literature of Europe," vol. 3, p. 270. Mr. Hallam thinks that, though Locke must have read Hobbes, he did not borrow from him quite so much as is generally supposed. + All these great men have in their writings pre-supposed some intuitive faculty, corresponding to the vónois of Plato, and the "Reine Vernunft" of Kant, independent of observation and experience, " call it what you will, the pure reason, lumen siccum, vous, pas voεpòv, intellectual tuition, or the like." Bacon terms it "Jumen siccum," "lux intellectus," "divine dialectic," and a "sparkle of the purity of man's first estate;" and opposes it to the "opinio madida," or " humida," i.e. the tuition of the understanding, and to the "reports of the senses," ie., perception. (Advancement of Science, p. 181 and 316.) Hooker's definition is admirable:-" By Reason man attaineth unto the knowledge of things that are and are not sensible." He also calls it "the divine power of the soul," and the "light of the eye of the understanding," from which he expressly distinguishes it. (See "Divine Polity," Bk. I., ch. vii.) Shakespere, too, talks of "large discourse and Godlike reason," answering to Milton's "Reason discursive and intuitive." The whole question is fully discussed by Coleridge, ("Aids to Reflection," see Aphorism ix.,) who defines reason as the power affirming truths which no sense could perceive, uo experiment verify, and no experience confirm," and understanding as "the faculty judging according to sense," or "the power which substantiates phænomena substat eis ie understands."

These intellectual giants saw, that if we would attain unto wisdom, we must separate Truth and Being from the Perceived and the Perceptible, and that before we can do this, we must also separate that infinitely higher power in man, the "godlike Reason," (as Shakespere calls it,) cognisant about Truth and Being, from its proper subject, the sensuous Understanding cognisant only about the Perceived and the Perceptible.

But Hobbes thought differently. He opined that Reason was a talent for mathematics; and so he says, "When a man reasoneth he doth nothing else than conceive a sum total from addition of parcels, or conceive a remainder from subtraction of one sum from another. Reason is nothing but RECKONING, (i.e. adding and

subtracting.) as sense and memory, born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is, but attained by industry. Children, therefore, are not endued with reason at all till they have attained the use of speech, but are called reasonable creatures, for the possibility apparent of having the use of reason in time to come." So that, according to Hobbes, children differ in nothing from the beasts of the field, but in having five fingers on each hand, and in nothing whatever from the young monkey, to which they are often assimilated. Thus Hobbes has anticipated not only Descartes and Horne Tooke, but also Helvetius and Lord Monboddo. According to his beautiful science of moral arithmetic, reason is a talent for mathematics, and "this fair world” a world of calculating machines.

From this it appears that reason is not,

Before we proceed with our analysis of the " Leviathan," we must recall to mind that it is Hobbes's object to prove that Might=Right ;that the monarch for the time being is the rightful monarch, and that, therefore, Hobbes, or any other man, might, without compromising his honesty, loyalty, or patriotism, acknowledge Cromwell as his liege lord and master. Thus it became necessary to degrade all those inward passions and feelings, which would naturally rise up in rebellion against such a doctrine by making them out to be nothing more than mere sensations.

In order to do this, he first (as we have seen) assumes, with the Ionian sophists, that all things are in a perpetual flux or state of motion; and that to this motion (kivnois or pópa,) every thing spiritual, intellectual, and bodily, is to be referred. The motion on the organs of man's body, caused by the action of things we see, hear, or touch, is, according to him, called sense.* This motion he divides

"Sense is motion in the organs and interior parts of man's body, caused by the action of the things we see and hear."—Leviathan.

into motion towards something (poopópa), which he calls Appetite,* and motion from (àropópa), which he calls Aversion. Appetite he also calls Desire, or Love,† and aversion Hate; and "those things which we neither desire nor hate, we are said to contemne, Contempt being nothing else but an IMMOBILITY." In order to establish the reign of Motion, under the forms of Appetite or motion to, Aversion or motion from, and Contempt, or freedom from all motion, Hobbes next proceeds to deny the existence of any absolute good or evil. "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is what he, for his part, calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil. For these words, good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them; there being nothing simply or absolutely so, nor any common rule of good or evil to be taken from the objects themselves, but from the person of the man, where there is no commonwealth, or in a commonwealth from the person that representeth it.” The sense of Appetite, or Aversion to or from an object, Hobbes calls Delight or Trouble. Those delights which arise from the sense of an object present he calls Pleasures of Sense ;those which arise from expectation of consequences, Joy. In the like manner, displeasures are some in the sense, and called Payne: others in the expectation of consequences, and called Grief." And then Hobbes proceeds to pack all human passions and feelings into this theory of his, resolving them all into motion to or from, i.e. into Appetite or Aversion, under the different forms of desire, love, and joy, hate and grief. Even with the aid of his great petitio principii, it is curious to see what manifold turnings and windings he has to make what violence he is obliged to put upon the plain meaning of common words, in order to prevent them giving the lie to his system. Hope he defines to be "appetite, with opinion of attaining;" Kindness, "love of persons, society;" Admiration, "joy from apprehension of novelty;" "sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter."§ Thus love, reverence, admiration, kindness and hope, are all referred to Appetite, i.e. to Motion. Again, "Aversion,

It is a curious instance of Hobbes's acuteness, that the meaning which he gives to the word peto, is precisely that attributed to it by modern philologists.-See Key's Latin Grammar, p. 541.

+ "Desire and love," he says, " are the same thing."

"These simple passions called appetite and desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief, have their names for divers considerations diversified."

§ In the "Human Nature," his definition of laughter is "A sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own family, for men laugh at the follies of themselves past."