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consideration of false courtesy from expressing his whole mind concerning the other. Hobbes entitles his sixth Lesson," "Of Manners," and prostrates his adversaries with the following parting shot (taking care to italicize the complimentary epithets employed-italics were in great requisition in those days): "So go your ways, you Uncivil Ecclesiastics, Inhuman Divines, Dedoctors of morality, Unasinous Colleagues, Egregious pair of Issachars, most wretched Vindices and Indices Academiarum [Hobbes' fire was frequently directed against the universities]; and remember Vespasian's law, that it is uncivil to give ill language first, but civil and lawful to return it." This should unquestionably have been a staggerer to poor Ward and Wallis, yet they rallied-strange to say!and replied in this tone, accompanied by a frugal, yet sufficient, expenditure of italics: "It seems, Mr. Hobbes, that you have a mind to say your lesson, and that the mathematic professors of Oxford should hear you. You are too old to learn, though you have as much need as those that be younger, and yet will think much to be whipped. . . . You tell us, though the beasts that think our railing to be roaring have for a time admired us, yet now you have showed them our ears they will be less affrighted.' Sir, those persons (the professors themselves) needed not the sight of your ears, but could tell by the voice what kind of person brayed in your books,” etc. But I need hardly continue to narrate such particulars of these bloodless encounters. It is enough to say that however fascinated Hobbes may have been with the mathematical method of demonstration, yet he was not a great mathematician.

6

Hobbes dreaded death, and a long life was measured

out to him. Dr. Wallis related of him that he once told the countess of Devonshire that were the whole world his, he would give it for one day of life. In his eighty-fourth year he wrote: "My life is not inconsistent with my writings: I teach justice, and I cultivate justice." His long life had indeed been, in his private relations, moderate and blameless. In the Cavendish family, where he was perhaps best known, he had found life-long friends. In their house he died, before completing the ninetysecond year of his life, December 1679.

Hobbes was not a great philosopher, and yet he occupies an important place in the history of modern, and especially English, thought. His reduction of all phe-) nomena, including those of mind in their physical relations, to modes of motion, was a rather remarkable declaration of a scientific view, now, at least, universally accredited. In his philosophy of man, the foundation of his political theory, he was the first one to follow the method, recommended by Bacon and since followed by Locke and his followers, of purely empirical observation, analysis, and description. If in man a distinction is to be made between man true to himself (i.e. man as he might be and ought to be, but never is, except approximately) and man as he actually appears-between man the noumenon and man the phenomenon — between man as a free, ideal, spiritual agency apprehended in philosophical self-consciousness, and man as a series of "mental states" which, however determined, follow each other in time, or a "bundle" of "mental processes" or "perceptions," it is to the latter exclusively that the attention. of Hobbes and his celebrated successors is directed. This is identifying philosophy with empirical psychology, i.e.

substantially suppressing philosophy. The analogy with Locke is strikingly illustrated in the following incident of Hobbes' argument in the De Cive, and it well illustrates the impotently negative results which must follow the attempt to solve philosophical questions by the simple application of the genetic-descriptive method. Hobbes declares that man is "not born fit for society" because he is born a helpless infant, incapable of knowing what society is. In like manner, we shall find Locke arguing that man has no innate ideas, i.e. that he has not, independently of impressions made upon him, any mind or mental nature, because children and idiots are not conscious of possessing anything of the sort! From the premises afforded by the exclusive adoption of such a method, the denial of freedom and the reduction of civil society and government to a result of the brute necessity of blind mechanism (or, as Hobbes terms it, "accident") follow as a matter of course; and perhaps mankind owes Hobbes a debt of gratitude for having so bluntly and honestly drawn this conclusion. But every man is a man, after all, and cannot wholly divest himself of everything which belongs to the, not phenomenal, but real, inward, invisible essence of humanity. And so we find Hobbes, like so many others of his stripe of thought, still occasionally acknowledging, in glaring contradiction with his principles and disharmony with his system, an inner forum of conscience, attesting freedom and accountability to a divine, spiritual power, of which the true man is the offspring.

Such philosophy as that of Hobbes results from a disposition (historically grounded in and justified by a dread

of scholastic subtleties, from which the light and power of reason had fled) to make things easy;* in other words, to treat as an affair of sensible demonstration an order of truths which lie back of, and indeed shine through, but are not absorbed in, sensible data. The knowledge of the data is to take the place of the knowledge and the power of that which they, rightly considered, do but reveal. Physical science of phenomena is to take the place of philosophical science of ideal and absolute reality.

*"At De Principiis alium tamen edo libellum,

Fecique ut posset clarius esse nihil."

1

CHAPTER VII.

JOHN LOCKE.

BACON, Hobbes, Locke-such are the names which we elect to consider among the English thinkers of the seventeenth century. Many others might be selected, which would furnish themes for interesting study. I might mention Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes' acquaintance and early contemporary-at once scholar and cavalier, diplomat and philosopher, brother of George Herbert, the favorite religious poet (who died, by the way, in the year in which John Locke was born), and author, among other things, of a work on Truth (De Veritate), defining, and defending the sufficiency of, natural religion, and proclaiming, somewhat in the way of the later common-sense philosophy of the Scotch school, the innate possession, by human reason, of certain notions or truths which antedate and govern our experimental knowledge and control our religious faith; the same who (as he himself relates in his charming autobiography, recently edited anew by W. D. Howells), having finished his book, fell on his knees. and implored God to indicate to him, by a sign, whether he should give his work to the world or suppress it; whereupon, though surrounded by the absolute calm of a bright summer afternoon, he distinctly heard a peculiar sound which could proceed, he was sure, only from heaven, and which he interpreted as an intimation that he was to proceed, in peace, with the publication of his book. Or