“A Discourse Concerning Irony,” 1729, p. 13.
Men of very opposite principles, but aiming at the same purpose, are reduced to a dilemma, by the spirit of party in controversy. Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote against “The Anarchy of a Limited Monarchy,” and “Patriarcha,” to re-establish absolute power, derived it from the scriptural accounts of the patriarchal state. But Sir Robert and Hobbes, though alike the advocates for supremacy of power, were as opposite as possible on theological points. Filmer had the same work to perform, but he did not like the instruments of his fellow-labourer. His manner of proceeding with Hobbes shows his dilemma: he refutes the doctrine of the “Leviathan,” while he confesses that Hobbes is right in the main. The philosopher’s reasonings stand on quite another foundation than the scriptural authorities deduced by Filmer. The result therefore is, that Sir Robert had the trouble to confute the very thing he afterwards had to establish!
It may be curious to some of my readers to preserve that part of Hobbes’s Letter to Anthony Wood, in the rare tract of his “Latin Life,” in which, with great calmness, the philosopher has painfully collated the odious interpolations. All that was written in favour of the morals of Hobbes—of the esteem in which foreigners held him—of the royal patronage, &c., were maliciously erased. Hobbes thus notices the amendments of Bishop Fell:—
“Nimirum ubi mihi tu ingenium attribuis Sobrium, ille, deleto Sobrio, substituit Acri.
“Ubi tu scripseras Libellum scripsit de Cive, interposuit ille inter Libellum et de Cive, rebus permiscendis natum, de Cive, quod ita manifestè falsum est, &c.
“Quod, ubi tu de libro meo Leviathan scripsisti, primò, quod esset, Vicinis gentibus notissimus interposuit ille, publico damno. Ubi tu scripseras, scripsit librum, interposuit ille monstrosissimum.”
A noble confidence in his own genius and celebrity breaks out in this Epistle to Wood. “In leaving out all that you have said of my character and reputation, the dean has injured you, but cannot injure me; for long since has my fame winged its way to a station from which it can never descend.” One is surprised to find such a Miltonic spirit in the contracted soul of Hobbes, who in his own system might have cynically ridiculed the passion for fame, which, however, no man felt more than himself. In his controversy with Bishop Bramhall (whose book he was cautious not to answer till ten years after it was published, and his adversary was no more, pretending he had never heard of it till then!) he breaks out with the same feeling:—“What my works are, he was no fit judge; but now he has provoked me, I will say thus much of them, that neither he, if he had lived, could—nor I, if I would, can—extinguish the light which is set up in the world by the greatest part of them.”
It is curious to observe that an idea occurred to Hobbes, which some authors have attempted lately to put into practice against their critics—to prosecute them in a court of law; but the knowledge of mankind was one of the liveliest faculties of Hobbes’s mind; he knew well to what account common minds place the injured feelings of authorship; yet were a jury of literary men to sit in judgment, we might have a good deal of business in the court for a long time; the critics and the authors would finally have a very useful body of reports and pleadings to appeal to; and the public would be highly entertained and greatly instructed. On this attack of Bishop Fell, Hobbes says—“I might perhaps have an action on the case against him, if it were worth my while; but juries seldom consider the Quarrels of Authors as of much moment.”