by Will Durant
The theory rashly assumed, among the “nasty and brutish” savages aforementioned, a degree of order, rationality and humility sufficient for an agreement to surrender their powers. Hobbes wisely allowed for alternative origins of the state:
The attaining to this Sovereign Power is by two ways. One, by natural force, as when a man . . . maketh his children to submit themselves, and their children, to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by war subdueth his enemies to his will. . . . The other is when men agree among themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others. This latter may be called a Political Commonwealth. 32
However based, the sovereign, to be really sovereign, must have absolute power, for without it he cannot ensure individual security and public peace. To resist him is to violate the social contract which every person in the community has implicitly agreed to by accepting the protection of its head. The theoretical absolutism may admit of some actual limitations: a sovereign may be resisted if he orders a man to kill or maim himself, or to confess a crime, or if the ruler is no longer able to protect his subjects. “The obligation of subjects to the Sovereign is understood to last as long and no longer than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.” Revolution is always a crime until it succeeds. It is always unlawful and unjust, for both law and justice are determined by the Sovereign; but if a revolution establishes a stable and effective government, the subject is bound to obey the new power.
The king does not rule by divine right, since his power is derived from the people; but his authority must not be limited by a popular assembly, or by law, or by the Church. It should extend also to property; the sovereign should determine property rights, and may reappropriate private property for what he deems the public good. 34 Absolutism is necessary, for when power is shared, as between king and parliament, there will soon be conflict, then civil war, then chaos, then insecurity of life and property; and since security and peace are the ultimate needs of a society, there should be no separation, but full unity and concentration, of governmental powers. Where powers are divided there is no sovereign, and where there is no sovereign there will soon be no state. 35
Consequently the only logical form of government is monarchy. It should be hereditary, for the right to choose his successor is part of the sovereign’s sovereignty; again the alternative is anarchy. 36 Government by an assembly might serve, but only on condition that its power be absolute, not subject to the shifting desires of an uninformed populace. “A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators.” 37 The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press; there should be strict censorship of the publication, importation, and reading of books. 38 There is to be no nonsense about individual liberty, private judgment, or conscience; anything that threatens the sovereign authority, and therefore the public peace, should be contracepted at the source. 39 How could a state be governed, or protected in its foreign relations, if every individual remained free to obey or not to obey the law according to his private opinion?
4. Religion and the State
The sovereign must also control the religion of his people, for this, when taken to heart, can be a disruptively explosive force. Hobbes offers a summary definition: “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed [is] Religion; not allowed, Superstition.” 40 This reduces religion to fear, imagination, and pretense; but elsewhere Hobbes ascribes it to an anxious inquiry into the causes and beginnings of things and events. 41 Ultimately this pursuit of causes leads to the belief that “there must be (as even the heathen philosophers confessed) one First Mover, i.e., a First and an eternal cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God.” 42 Men naturally supposed that this First Cause was like themselves, a person, soul, and will, only much more powerful. They attributed to this Cause all events whose natural determinants they could not yet discern, and they saw, in strange events, portents and prophecies of the divine will.
In these four things, opinion of ghosts [spirits], ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostications, consisteth the natural seed of religion, which, by reason of different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another. 43
Hobbes was a deist rather than an atheist. He acknowledged an intelligent Supreme Being, 44 but added, “Men . . . may naturally know that God is, though not what he is.” 45 We must not conceive of God as having figure, for all figure is finite; or as having parts; or as being in this or that place, “for whatsoever is in place is bounded and finite”; nor that he moves or rests, for these ascribe to him place; nor (except by metaphor) that he partakes of grief, repentance, anger, mercy, want, appetite, hope, or any desire. 46 Hobbes concluded that “the nature of God is incomprehensible.” 47 He would not describe God as incorporeal, for we cannot conceive anything to be without body; probably every “spirit” is subtly corporeal. 48
Having put religion and God in their place, Hobbes proposed to make use of them as instruments and servants of government. For this he claimed prestigious precedents.
The first founders and legislators of commonwealths amongst the Gentiles, whose ends were only to keep the people in obedience and peace, have in all places taken care: First, to imprint in their minds a belief that those precepts which they gave concerning religion might not be thought to proceed from their own device, but from the dictates of some God, or other Spirit; or else that they themselves were of a higher nature than mere mortals, that their laws might be more easily received: So Numa Pompilius pretended to receive the ceremonies he instituted among the Romans from the nymph Egeria; and the first king and founder of the Kingdom of Peru pretended himself and his wife to be the children of the sun; and Mahomet, to set up his new religion, pretended to have conferences with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove. Secondly, they have had a care to make it believed that the same things were displeasing to the gods, which were forbidden by the laws. 49
Lest anyone conclude that Moses used similar devices in ascribing his laws to God, Hobbes adds, with a certain allergy to fire, that “God himself, by supernatural revelation, planted religion” among the Jews.
But he feels himself justified, by historical examples, in recommending that religion be made an instrument of government, and that, in consequence, its doctrines and observances be dictated by the sovereign. If the Church were independent of the state there would be two sovereigns, therefore no sovereign; and subjects would be torn between two masters.
Seeing the ghostly [spiritual] power challenges [assumes] the right to declare what is sin, it challenges by consequence to declare what is law (sin being nothing but the transgression of the law). . . . When these two powers [Church and state] oppose one another, the Commonwealth cannot but be in great danger of civil war, and dissolution. 50
In such a conflict the Church will have an advantage, “for every man, if he be in his wits, will in all things yield that man an absolute obedience, by virtue of whose sentence he believes himself to be either saved or damned.” When the spiritual power moves the subjects “by the terror of punishment and hope of reward” of this supernatural sort, “and by strange and hard words suffocates their understanding, it must needs thereby distract the people, and either overwhelm the commonwealth by oppression, or cast it into the fire of civil war.” 51 The only escape from such turmoil, Hobbes thinks, is to make the Church subject to the state. As the Catholic Church had the opposite solution, Hobbes, in Part IV of The Leviathan, attacks it as the ultimate and most powerful foe of his philosophy.
He enters upon some “Higher Criticism” of the Bible—questions Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch, and dates the historical books much later than in orthodox tradition. He suggests that Ch
ristianity should require of its adherents only a faith in “Jesus the Christ,” and that for the rest it should allow public opinion to vary within the safe bounds of public order. To a creed so chastened he offers not only the support of the government, but the full force of the state to propagate it. He agrees with the pope that only one religion should be tolerated in a state. 52 He advises the citizens to accept the theology of their sovereign without critical hesitation, as a duty to morality and the state. “For it is with the mysteries of our religion as with wholesome pills for the sick, which, swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure, but, chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.” 53 The most powerful assault that any Englishman had yet made upon Christianity ended with Christianity established as the inescapable law of an absolute state.
5. Baiting the Bear
“And thus,” said the final paragraph of The Leviathan, “I have brought to an end my Discourse of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, occasioned by the disorders of the present time, without partiality . . . and without other design than to set before men’s eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience.”
The impartiality was not widely recognized. The emigrés who gathered about Charles II in France welcomed Hobbes’s defense of royalty, but condemned his materialism as indiscreet if not blasphemous, and they regretted that their unmanageable philosopher had spent reams attacking the Catholic Church just when they were soliciting the aid of a Catholic king. The Anglican divines who were among the refugees from the triumphant Puritans raised such an outcry against the book that Hobbes “was ordered to come no more to court.” 54 Finding himself now friendless and unprotected in France, Hobbes decided to make his peace with Cromwell and return to England. According to Bishop Burnet, he made some changes in the text of The Leviathan “to gratify the Republicans.” 55 This is not certain; certain it is, however, that the doctrine of revolution as unlawful in origin, but sanctified by success, fitted imperfectly, like patchwork, with the basic doctrine of absolute obedience to an absolute monarch. The final “Review and Conclusion,” which looks like an afterthought, explained the conditions under which a subject formerly loyal to a king might in time gracefully submit to the new regime that had deposed the king. The book was published in London (1651) while Hobbes was still in Paris. At the end of that year, amid a severe winter, he crossed to England, and found a familiar haven with the Earl of Devonshire, who had long since submitted to the revolutionary Parliament. Hobbes sent in his own submission; it was accepted; and the philosopher, supported by a small pension from the Earl, moved to a house in London, because in the countryside “the want of learned conversation was a very great inconvenience.” 56 He was now sixty-three years old.
Slowly, as his book found readers, a swarm of critics gathered around his head. One clergyman after another came to the defense of Christianity, and asked who was this “Malmesbury animal” who set himself up against Aristotle, Oxford, Parliament, and God? Hobbes was timid, but he was a fighter; in 1655 he restated, in The Elements of Philosophy, his materialistic and deterministic views. John Bramhall, the learned bishop of Derry, cast his hook for Hobbes in The Catching of the Leviathan (1658), and aimed so well, according to another bishop, that “the hook is still in Hobbes’s nose.” 57 The attacks continued in almost every year till Hobbes’s death. The Earl of Clarendon, after his fall from power as chancellor, amused his exile by publishing A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors, in Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book entitled Leviathan (1676); through 322 pages it followed the volumes systematically, answering argument with argument in lucid and majestic prose. Clarendon spoke as a man with long experience in political office, and smiled Hobbes’s philosophy away as that of one who had had no responsible posts to temper his theorems with practice; and he hoped that “Mr. Hobbes might have a place in Parliament, and sit in Council, and be present in Courts of Justice and other Tribunals, whereby it is probable he would find that his solitary cogitations, how deep soever, and his too peremptory adhering to some Philosophical Notions, and even Rules of Geometry, have misled him in the investigation of Policy.” 58
Not all the attacks were so even-tempered. In 1666 the House of Commons ordered one of its committees “to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness, or against the essence and attributes of God, and in particular the book published in the name of White [a former Catholic priest who questioned the immortality of the soul], and the book of Hobbes called The Leviathan.” 59 “There was a report (and surely true),” says Aubrey, “that in Parliament . . . some of the bishops made a motion to have the good old Gentleman burnt for a heretic.” 60 Hobbes destroyed such of his unpublished papers as might further embroil him, and wrote three dialogues arguing learnedly that no court in England could try him for heresy.
The restored King came to his rescue. Shortly after reaching London, Charles II noticed Hobbes in the street, recognized him as his former tutor, and welcomed him to the court. The Restoration court, already inclined to religious skepticism, and defending royal absolutism against Parliament, found some congenial elements in Hobbes’s philosophy. But his bald head, white hair, and Puritanlike garb invited taunting. Charles himself called him “the Bear,” and, as Hobbes neared, said, “Here comes the Bear to be baited.” 61 Nonetheless the witty King relished Hobbes’s ready repartees. He had the old man’s portrait painted, placed it in his private chambers, and gave him a pension of a hundred pounds a year. Though this was irregularly paid, it sufficed, with fifty pounds a year from the Cavendish family, to meet the philosopher’s simple needs.
Aubrey describes him as sickly in youth but healthy and vigorous in old age. He played tennis till he was seventy-five; when a tennis court was not available he took a daily walk long and brisk enough to give him a “great sweat, and then he gave the servant some money to rub him.” He ate and drank moderately; after seventy no meat and no wine. He bragged that he “had been in excess in his life a hundred times,” but Aubrey calculated that as this came to little more than once a year, it was not egregious. He never married. He appears to have had an illegitimate daughter, for whom he made generous provision. 62 He read little in these later years, and “was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than” they. “At night, when he was abed, and the doors made fast, and was sure nobody heard him, he sang aloud (not that he had a very good voice, but) for his health’s sake; he did believe it did his lungs good, and conduced much to prolong his life.” 63 However, as early as 1650, “he had a shaking palsy in his hands,” which grew so bad that by 1666 his writing became almost illegible.
He continued to write nevertheless. Reverting from philosophy to mathematics, he slipped incautiously into controversy with an expert, John Wallis, who made short work of the old man’s claim to square the circle. In 1670, aged eighty-two, he published Behemoth, a history of the Civil War; he wrote several replies to his critics, and lovingly translated The Leviathan into Latin. In 1675 he composed an autobiography in verse, and rendered all the Iliad and the Odyssey into English rhymes (1675), because “there is nothing else for me to do.”
In that year, aged eighty-seven, he returned from London to the country, and he spent the remainder of his life at the Cavendish estate in Derbyshire. Meanwhile his palsy increased, and he suffered from strangury—painful difficulty in urination. When the current Earl moved from Chatsworth to Hardwick Hall, Hobbes insisted on going with him. The trip proved exhausting. A week later his paralysis spread, putting an end to his speech. On December 4, 1679, having received the Sacrament as an obedient Anglican, he died, four months short of completing his ninety-second year.
6. Results
Hobbes’s psychology was a masterpiece of deduction from inadequate premises. Logical as it seems at first view, its joints creak with loose assumptions that further inquiry might have corrected. Determinism is logical, but it may be determined by the mold of
our logic, formed by dealing with things rather than ideas. Hobbes found difficulty in conceiving anything to be incorporeal; it seems equally difficult to conceive thought or consciousness as corporeal; yet these are the only realities directly known to us—everything else is hypothesis. Hobbes passed from object to sensation to idea without shedding much light upon the mysterious process whereby the apparently corporeal object generates the apparently incorporeal thought. Mechanistic psychology falters in the face of consciousness.
Nevertheless it was in psychology that Hobbes contributed most to our legacy. He cleared the field of some metaphysical ghosts like the Scholastic “faculties”—though these could be readily interpreted not as separate mental entities but as aspects of mental activity. He established the more evident principles of association, but underestimated the role of purpose and attention in determining the selection, sequence and persistence of ideas. He gave a helpful description of deliberation and volition. His analysis and defense of the passions was a brilliant summary, and it paid to Spinoza the debt that it owed to Descartes. From these psychological pages Locke developed his more careful and detailed Essay concerning Human Understanding. It was in answering Hobbes (rather than Filmer) that Locke evolved his treatises on government.
Hobbes’s political philosophy reformulated Machiavelli in terms of Charles I. It stemmed from the successful absolutism of Henry VIII and Elizabeth in England, and of Henry IV and Richelieu in France; and doubtless it took some warmth from ducal friends and royal refugees. In immediate effect it seemed justified by the happy restoration of a Stuart King still claiming unlimited authority, and ending an erosive anarchy. But some able Englishmen felt that if the consent of “nasty and brutish” savages sufficed to create a government, the consent of men in a presumably more advanced condition might rightly check or topple it. So in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the philosophy of absolutism fell before the reassertion of Parliament, and was soon replaced by the liberalism of Locke preaching the limitation and separation of powers. After a nineteenth century of relative democracy growing in an England guarded by the Channel and in an America protected by the seas, a modified absolutism returned in totalitarian states exercising governmental control over life, property, industry, religion, education, publication, and thought. Invention transcended mountains and moats, frontiers vanished, national isolation and security disappeared. The absolutist polity is a child of war, and democracy is a luxury of peace.