The Mathematical War between Hobbes and the celebrated Dr. Wallis is now to be opened. A series of battles, the renewed campaigns of more than twenty years, can be described by no term less eventful. Hobbes himself considered it as a war, and it was a war of idle ambition, in which he took too much delight. His “Amata Mathemata” became his pride, his pleasure, and at length his shame. He attempted to maintain his irruption into a province he ought never to have entered in defiance, by “a new method;” but having invaded the powerful natives, he seems to have almost repented the folly, and retires, leaving “the unmanageable brutes” to themselves:
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Ergo meam statuo non ultra perdere opellam Indocile expectans discere posse pecus. |
His language breathes war, while he sounds his retreat, and confesses his repulse. The Algebraists had all declared against the Invader.
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Wallisius contra pugnat; victusque videbar Algebristarum Theiologumque scholis, Et simul eductus Castris exercitus omnis Pugnæ securus Wallisianus ovat. |
And,
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Pugna placet vertor— Bella mea audisti—&c. |
So that we have sufficient authority to consider this Literary Quarrel as a war, and a “Bellum Peloponnesiacum” too, for it lasted as long. Political, literary, and even personal feelings were called in to heat the temperate blood of two Mathematicians.
| What means this tumult in a Vestal’s veins? |
Hobbes was one of the many victims who lost themselves in squaring the circle, and doubling the cube. He applied, late in life, to mathematical studies, not so much, he says, to learn the subtile demonstrations of its figures, as to acquire those habits of close reasoning, so useful in the discovery of new truths, to prove or to refute. So justly he reasoned on mathematics; but so ill he practised the science, that it made him the most unreasonable being imaginable, for he resisted mathematical demonstration, itself![380]