A philosophical system, moral or political, is often nothing more than a temporary expedient to turn aside the madness of the times by substituting 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 442 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 circumstances.” 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 shifting 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 444 factions:[354] he therefore asserted 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 445 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 447 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 448 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 worship, 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 assailants. “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 449 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 worship 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 shiftings and turnings which the equivocal 450 possessor may practise with an unwary assailant. 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 participation of Wood, who resented it 451 with his honest warmth, was only an arrow snatched 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 assign a reason for not liking:
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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 Devonshire’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 assassination; an ideal poniard indeed might scare even a materialist. But Bishop Atterbury, in a sermon on the Terrors of Conscience, illustrates 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 452 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 assassin 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 space 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.