He was tall and erect in figure, and lived on the whole a temperate life, though he used to say that he had been drunk about a hundred times. His favourite exercise was tennis, which he played regularly even after the age of Personal characteristics. seventy. Socially he was genial and courteous, though in argument he occasionally lost his temper. As a friend he was generous and loyal. Intellectually bold in the extreme, he was curiously timid in ordinary life, and is said to have had a horror of ghosts. He read little, and often boasted that he would have known as little as other men if he had read as much. He appears to have had an illegitimate daughter for whom he made generous provision. In the National Portrait Gallery there is a portrait of him by J. M. Wright, and two others are in the possession of the Royal Society.
As already suggested, it cannot be allowed that Hobbes falls into any regular succession from Bacon; neither can it be said that he handed on the torch to Locke. He was the one English thinker of the first rank in the long period Place in English thought. of two generations separating Locke from Bacon, but, save in the chronological sense, there is no true relation of succession among the three. It would be difficult even to prove any ground of affinity among them beyond a desposition to take sense as a prime factor in the account of subjective experience: their common interest in physical science was shared equally by rationalist thinkers of the Cartesian school, and was indeed begotten of the time. Backwards, Hobbes’s relations are rather with Galileo and the other inquirers who, from the beginning of the 17th century, occupied themselves with the physical world in the manner that has come later to be distinguished by the name of science in opposition to philosophy. But even more than in external nature, Hobbes was interested in the phenomena of social life, presenting themselves so impressively in an age of political revolution. So it came to pass that, while he was unable, by reason of imperfect training and too tardy development, with all his pains, to make any contribution to physical science or to mathematics as instrumental in physical research, he attempted a task which no other adherent of the new “mechanical philosophy” conceived—nothing less than such a universal construction of human knowledge as would bring Society and Man (at once the matter and maker of Society) within the same principles of scientific explanation as were found applicable to the world of Nature. The construction was, of course, utterly premature, even supposing it were inherently possible; but it is Hobbes’s distinction, in his century, to have conceived it, and he is thereby lifted from among the scientific workers with whom he associated to the rank of those philosophical thinkers who have sought to order the whole domain of human knowledge. The effects of his philosophical endeavour may be traced on a variety of lines. Upon every subject that came within the sweep of his system, except mathematics and physics, his thoughts have been productive of thought. When the first storm of opposition from smaller men had begun to die down, thinkers of real weight, beginning with Cumberland and Cudworth, were moved by their aversion to his analysis of the moral nature of man to probe anew the question of the natural springs and the rational grounds of human action; and thus it may be said that Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole of that movement of ethical speculation that, in modern times, has been carried on with such remarkable continuity in England. In politics the revulsion from his particular conclusions did not prevent the more clear-sighted of his opponents from recognizing the force of his supreme demonstration of the practical irresponsibility of the sovereign power, wherever seated, in the state; and, when in a later age the foundations of a positive theory of legislation were laid in England, the school of Bentham—James Mill, Grote, Molesworth—brought again into general notice the writings of the great publicist of the 17th century, who, however he might, by the force of temperament, himself prefer the rule of one, based his whole political system upon a rational regard to the common weal. Finally, the psychology of Hobbes, though too undeveloped to guide the thoughts or even perhaps arrest the attention of Locke, when essaying the scientific analysis of knowledge, came in course of time (chiefly through James Mill) to be connected with the theory of associationism developed from within the school of Locke, in different ways, by Hartley and Hume; nor is it surprising that the later associationists, finding their principle more distinctly formulated in the earlier thinker, should sometimes have been betrayed into affiliating themselves to Hobbes rather than to Locke. For his ethical theories see Ethics.
Sufficient information is given in the Vitae Hobbianae auctarium (L.W. i. p. lxv. ff.) concerning the frequent early editions of Hobbes’s separate works, and also concerning the works of those who wrote against him, to the end of the 17th century. In the 18th century, after Clarke’s Boyle Lectures of 1704-1705, the opposition was less express. In 1750 The Moral and Political Works were collected, with life, &c., by Dr Campbell, in a folio edition, including in order, Human Nature, De corpore politico, Leviathan, Answer to Bramhall’s Catching of the Leviathan, Narration concerning Heresy, Of Liberty and Necessity, Behemoth, Dialogue of the Common Laws, the Introduction to the Thucydides, Letter to Davenant and two others, the Preface to the Homer, De mirabilibus Pecci (with English translation), Considerations on the Reputation, &., of T. H. In 1812 the Human Nature and the Liberty and Necessity (with supplementary extracts from the Questions of 1656) were reprinted in a small edition of 250 copies, with a meritorious memoir (based on Campbell) and dedication to Horne Tooke, by Philip Mallet. Molesworth’s edition (1839-1845), dedicated to Grote, has been referred to in a former note. Of translations may be mentioned Les Élémens philosophiques du citoyen (1649) and Le Corps politique (1652), both by S. de Sorbière, conjoined with Le Traité de la nature humaine, by d’Holbach, in 1787, under the general title Les Œuvres philosophiques et politiques de Thomas Hobbes; a translation of the first section, “Computatio sive logica,” of the De corpore, included by Destutt de Tracy with his Élémens d’idéologie (1804); a translation of Leviathan into Dutch in 1678, and another (anonymous) into German—Des Engländers Thomas Hobbes Leviathan oder der kirchliche und bürgerliche Staat (Halle, 1794, 2 vols.); a translation of the De cive by J. H. v. Kirchmann—T. Hobbes: Abhandlung über den Bürger, &c. (Leipzig, 1873). Important later editions are those of Ferdinand Tönnies, Behemoth (1889), on which see Croom Robertson’s Philosophical Remains (1894), p. 451; Elements of Law (1889).
Biographical and Critical Works.—There are three accounts of Hobbes’s life, first published together in 1681, two years after his death, by R. B. (Richard Blackbourne, a friend of Hobbes’s admirer, John Aubrey), and reprinted, with complimentary verses by Cowley and others, at the beginning of Sir W. Molesworth’s collection of the Latin Works: (1) T. H. Malmesb. vita (pp. xiii.-xxi.), written by Hobbes himself, or (as also reported) by T. Rymer, at his dictation; (2) Vitae Hobbianae auctarium (pp. xxii.-lxxx.), turned into Latin from Aubrey’s English; (3) T. H. Malmesb. vita carmine expressa (pp. lxxxi.-xcix.), written by Hobbes at the age of eighty-four (first published by itself in 1680). The Life of Mr T. H. of Malmesburie, printed among the Lives of Eminent Men, in 1813, from Aubrey’s papers in the Bodleian, &c. (vol. ii. pt. ii. pp. 593-637), contains some interesting particulars not found in the Auctarium. All that is of any importance for Hobbes’s life is contained in G. Croom Robertson’s Hobbes (1886) in Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics, and Sir Leslie Stephen’s Hobbes (1904) in the “English Men of Letters” series, both of which deal fully with his philosophy also. See also F. Tönnies, Hobbes Leben und Lehre (1896), Hobbes-Analekten (1904 foll.); G. Zart, Einfluss der englischen Philosophie seit Bacon auf die deutsche Philosophie des 18ten Jahrh. (Berlin, 1881); G. Brandt, Thomas Hobbes: Grundlinien seiner Philosophie (1895); G. Lyon, La Philos. de Hobbes (1893); J. M. Robertson, Pioneer Humanists (1907); J. Rickaby, Free Will and Four English Philosophers (1906), pp. 1-72; J. Watson, Hedonistic Theories (1895); W. Graham, English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine (1899); W. J. H. Campion, Outlines of Lectures on Political Science (1895).
(G. C. R.; X.)
[1] The translation, under the title Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War, written by Thucydides the son of Olorus, interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greek by Thomas Hobbes, secretary to the late Earl of Devonshire, appeared in 1628 (or 1629), after the death of the earl, to whom touching reference is made in the dedication. It reappeared in 1634, with the date of the dedication altered, as if then newly written. Though Hobbes claims to have performed his work “with much more diligence than elegance,” his version is remarkable as a piece of English writing, but is by no means accurate. It fills vols. viii. and ix. in Molesworth’s collection (11 vols., including index vol.) of Hobbes’s English Works (London, Bohn, 1839-1845). The volumes of this collection will here be cited as E. W. Molesworth’s collection of the Latin Opera philosophica (5 vols., 1839-1845) will be cited as L.W. The five hundred and odd Latin hexameters under the title De mirabilibus Pecci (L.W. v. 323-340), giving an account of a short excursion from Chatsworth to view the seven wonders of the Derbyshire Peak, were written before 1628 (in 1626 or 1627), though not published till 1636. It was a New Year’s present to his patron, who gave him £5 in return. A later edition, in 1678, included an English version by another hand.
[2] Hobbes, in minor works dealing with physical questions (L.W. iv. 316; E.W. vii. 112), makes two incidental references to Bacon’s writings, but never mentions Bacon as he mentions Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and others (De corpore, ep. ded.), among the lights of the century. The word “Induction,” which occurs in only three or four passages throughout all his works (and these again minor ones), is never used by him with the faintest reminiscence of the import assigned to it by Bacon; and, as will be seen, he had nothing but scorn for experimental work in physics.
[3] The free English abstract of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, published in 1681, after Hobbes’s death, as The Whole Art of Rhetoric (E.W. vi. 423-510), corresponds with a Latin version dictated to his young pupil. Among Hobbes’s papers preserved at Hardwick, where he died, there remains the boy’s dictation-book, interspersed with headings, examples, &c. in Hobbes’s hand.
[4] Among the Hardwick papers there is preserved a MS. copy of the work, under the title Elementes of Law Naturall and Politique, with the dedication to the earl of Newcastle, written in Hobbes’s own hand, and dated May 9, 1640. This dedication was prefixed to the first thirteen chapters of the work when printed by themselves, under the title Human Nature in 1650.