a course of rigorous demonstration. The history of Hobbes afforded a very curious example of this. Among other studies, he turned himself to that of mathematics; and in this, as in other cases, his overweening self-opinion soon led him to believe that he was infinitely superior to the professed cultivators of the subject,—had detected their weakness and error, and might treat them with supreme disdain. He also persuaded himself that he could solve the questions which had been attempted in vain by mathematicians; and which they had now despaired of, and set down as impracticable. He published a Duplication of the cube; a problem, which, as is well known, proposed in the time of Plato, has, up to the present day, been considered (geometrically) impracticable. It may perhaps be allowable in this place, and not uninstructive, to describe the nature of Hobbes's error, which led him to imagine he had solved this problem. He gave a construction, in which two lines, drawn in a certain manner in his diagram, each intersected a third line; and his reasoning supposed that the two intersected the third in the same single point. Wallis and other mathematicians easily shewed that, although the two points of intersection were very near each other, they did not absolutely coincide; and Hobbes did not hesitate to reply, that the space occupied by one of the points was large enough to take in the other also.

This matter was the subject of long and angry controversy. Hobbes wrote Quadratura Circuli, Cubatio Sphæræ, Duplicatio Cubi: also De Principiis et Ratiocinatione Geometrarum Contra Fastuosum Professorem: also Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics at Oxford (1656): and also Στιγμαί Αγρωμετρίας, Αγροικίας, Αντιπολιτείας, ΑμαBelas; or Marks of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politics, and Barbarisms of John Wallis, Professor of Geometry and Doctor of Divinity. These writings

are full of the most extravagant arrogance, ignorance, and dogmatism which can be imagined. Wallis, on the other side, treated his adversary with a severity and contempt which, at any rate on this subject, there could be no doubt of his deserving, in his Hobbiani puncti dispunctio: Hobbesius Heauton-timorumenos: Due correction for Mr Hobbes, or School-discipline for not saying his Lessons right; and other writings.

The same utter want of comprehension of the nature of science appeared in Hobbes's judgment respecting the Royal Society of London, which he censured at its first institution for attending more to minute experiment than general principles; and said that if the name of a philosopher was to be obtained by relating a multifarious farrago of experiments, we might expect to see apothecaries, gardeners, and perfumers rank among philosophers. And yet the man who thus thought it ridiculous to seek for truth by accumulating experiments, was one who in his youth had lived in habits of intimate intercourse with Lord Chancellor Bacon, and was said to have assisted him in translating his works into Latin. Nor did this contempt of facts withhold him from himself proposing many explanations of physical phenomena; nor did his profound ignorance of the very nature of science prevent his drawing up a general scheme of the branches of science and philosophy. (See The Leviathan, chap. 1.)

The fact is, that those system-makers* who have collected schools of the most devoted disciples, have generally been persons who did not, in their systems, attend, in any connected or philosophical manner, to facts; but boldly and emphatically asserted a few assumed principles, which the general progress of men's minds had prepared them to receive; and who deduced from these principles their consequences. They have not been inductive, but deductive spirits, although it

* For example, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham.

by no means follows that, even in deduction, they were exact and safe reasoners.

Some of Hobbes's contemporaries did not overlook this unphilosophical character of his mind. Harrington in his Oceana, notices it. "Of this kind," he says, (p. 2) "is the ratiocination of Leviathan throughout his whole Politics, or worse; as when he saith of Aristotle and of Cicero, of the Greeks and Romans who lived under popular states, that they derived those rights, not from the Principles of Nature, but transcribed them into their books out of the practice of their own commonwealths, as grammarians describe the rules of language out of poets. Which is as if a man should tell the famous Harvey, that he transcribed his circulation of the blood, not out of the Principles of Nature, but out of the anatomy of this or that body."

Hobbes, in the latter part of his life, received from foreigners and others that kind of attention which is naturally bestowed upon the patriarch of a new and striking system of opinions, good or bad. He had been sent in his youth (1603) to Magdalen Hall, Oxford; and in 1608, was by the recommendation of the Principal of that house, taken into the family of William Cavendish, soon after created Earl of Devonshire, as tutor to his son. In 1631 he became tutor to an Earl of Devonshire of the next generation. the breaking out of the troubles in England, he returned to Paris, where he lived in intercourse with the most considerable men of letters; but after the publication of the Leviathan, he returned to England, and lived principally at the Earl of Devonshire's seat, Chatsworth, in Derbyshire. Here he was allowed to live as he liked, his habits being somewhat peculiar; and was treated with the tolerance and indulgence which his relation to the family rendered suitable. But the earl, we are told, "would often express an abhorrence of some of his principles in policy and religion; and

both he and his lady would frequently put off the mention of his name and say, he was a humourist, and nobody could account for him." He died in 1679 at the age of ninety

one.

Among the causes which contributed much to the currency of Hobbes's doctrines, we may, I think, reckon as one, that he was the first writer who habitually and prominently employed, in the explanation of man's mortal condition, a principle with which we are now very familiar, and which has in it something, at least for a time, very persuasive. I mean, the principle which we now call the Association of Ideas, Hobbes, undoubtedly, very clearly pointed out the process which is thus designated, before Locke, to whom its discovery is usually ascribed. "The cause," he says (p. 17) in

his Human Nature-" The cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense; as for example, from St Andrew the mind runneth to St Peter, because their names are read together; from St Peter to a stone, for the same cause; from stone to foundation, because we see them together;" and so on. And thus, he observes, the mind may run almost from anything to anything. But the material step in the introduction of this principle, was, not the stating the facts only, which others also had done, but the using it as an explanation of mental habits and operations. A large part of Hobbes's philosophy consists in such explanations. Thus he says, "Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man's calamity." The same is the case in his celebrated explanation of laughter: "The passion of laughter proceedeth from the sudden imagination of our own odds, and eminency; for what is else the recommending of ourselves to our own good opinion by comparison with another man's inferiority or absurdity?"

And this principle is indeed the main foundation of the whole treatise of Human Nature.

I do not intend now to discuss the truth of doctrines, so much as to point out their succession and revolutions. Otherwise, I might observe that the Doctrine of the Association of Ideas, applied as an explanation of the moral constitution of man, must be very imperfect, and indeed can never be more than a small fragment of explanation. For if it be asserted that any notion or conception becomes what it is by the association of ideas, if for instance, this is the way in which right comes to be right, and honesty to be honesty, we still want to know with what the outward act or occasion is associated in order to have this impress stamped upon it; and also, to discover whence this new agent derives its power of making things appear right and honest. We are referred back from moral good to something else; but it may easily happen that this object thus referred to may require analysis as much as the good which we first contemplated. In many cases the explanation of results by the association of ideas is only at best treading back a few steps on a winding path, and this can do but little towards telling us where we are. To give us such an explanation, is to show us the final links of the chain, when we want to know the strength of the hook from which its beginning hangs; it is to trace the history of a philosoplical doctrine, when we want to know about its truth.

But yet it is far easier to most minds to follow the explanations which trace such associations through a few steps, than to seize hold of the fundamental moral ideas on which moral truths depend. Hence, such a philosophy as that of Hobbes's appeals to the common intellect with great advantage; and they who reason against it, before a popular audience, have a difficult task to perform. They have to appeal to ideas which are dimly and waveringly entertained