‘It may seem strange to some man that hath not well weighed these things, that nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another; and he may therefore, not trusting to the inference made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself—when taking a journey he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep he locks his doors; when even in his house, he locks his chests, and this when he knows there be laws and public officers, armed to revenge all injuries that shall be done him;—what opinion I say, he has of his fellow subjects when he rides armed, of his fellow citizens when he locks his doors, and of his children and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not then accuse mankind as much by his actions as I do by my words? Yet neither of us accuse man’s nature in it.’—Leviathan, p. 62.
It is true the bond of civil government according to his account, is very different from Burke’s ‘soft collar of social esteem,’ and takes away the sentimental part of politics. But I confess I see nothing liberal in this ‘order of thoughts,’ as Hobbes elsewhere expresses it, ‘the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge and the gallows,’ which is nevertheless a good description of the nature and end of political institutions.
The true reason of the fate which this author’s writings met with was that his views of things were too original and comprehensive to be immediately understood, without passing through the hands of several successive generations of commentators and interpreters. Ignorance of another’s meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear produces hatred: hence arose the rancour and suspicion of his adversaries, who, to quote some fine lines of Spenser,
——‘Stood all astonied like a sort of steers
’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race
Unwares is chanced, far straying from his peers:
So did their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.’
ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY
In this Essay I shall give the best account I can of the question concerning liberty and necessity from the writings of others, and afterwards add a few remarks of my own on the explanation of the terms employed in this controversy. Of Mr. Hobbes’s discourse on this subject, I should be nearly disposed to say with Gassendi, when another work of his, ‘De Cive,’ was presented to him, ‘This treatise, though small in bulk, is in my judgment the very marrow of philosophy.’ In order to give a clear and satisfactory view of the question, I shall be obliged to repeat some things I have before stated, for which the importance of the subject as well as other circumstances will, I hope, be a sufficient excuse.
The doctrine of necessity is stated by this author with great force and precision as a general question of cause and effect, and with scarcely any particular reference to his mechanical theory of the mind. From this naked simple view of the matter, I cannot consistently with truth withhold my full and entire assent. The ground-work, the pure basis of the doctrine is in my opinion incontestable; it cannot be denied without overturning all the rules of science, as well as the plainest dictates of the understanding: whoever attacks it there in its stronghold, will only injure the cause he espouses. It is that rock upon which whoever falls will be dashed to pieces. But though I cannot pretend to undermine the foundation, yet I may attempt to shake some parts of the superstructure, and to clear away the crust of materialism which has grown over it. In my opinion, the representations which have commonly been given of the subject by the writers on both sides of the argument are almost equally erroneous, and their opposite conclusions built on an equal misconception of the true principle of necessity. By the principle of moral or philosophical necessity is meant then that the mind is invariably governed by certain laws which determine all its operations; or in other words, that the regular succession of cause and effect is not confined to mere matter, while the impulses of the will are left quite unaccounted for, self-caused, perfectly contingent and fantastical. We in general attribute those things to chance the causes of which we do not understand, both in mind and matter. But as there is a greater latitude and inconstancy in the one than in the other, insomuch that we can hardly ever predict with certainty the effect of particular motives on the mind, the opinion of chance, arbitrary inclination, or self-determination had gained much deeper root with respect to the operations of mind than to those of matter. The fallacy of this opinion Hobbes has exposed in a masterly, and I think unanswerable manner, and without running into those paradoxical conclusions from the first position which later necessarians have deduced from it. He affirms that necessity is perfectly consistent with human liberty; that is, that the most strict and inviolable connexion of cause and effect does not prevent the full, free, and unrestrained development of certain powers in the agent, or take away the distinction between the nature of virtue and vice, praise and blame, reward and punishment, but is the foundation of all moral reasoning. Except Dr. Jonathan Edwards, he is the only professed necessarian that I know of who has not been led, by the customary use of language, to quit the original definition of the term, and to slide from a philosophical into a vulgar and practical necessity. But I will state his reasoning in his own words, which are the best. They are as follows: