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admits of working out in much greater detail, particularly in the way of formulating certain kinds of cases which are especially illuminating as test instances.

The results of Bacon's work were incommensurate with the promises he had held out. What he did do was to call attention in an impressive way to the necessity for induction, experiment, and the empirical study of facts. But his great work remained at his death a mere sketch of a method which he had found it impossible to exhibit in its actual working; and he had not sufficiently understood the conditions of science to lay out a path for others. In particular, he was almost wholly blind to the important part which deduction plays in scientific inquiry. As he conceived it, Bacon's method was almost mechanical in its nature, leaving little to that scientific imagination and bold fertility of hypothesis which characterizes the great scientists. "Our method of discovering the sciences," he says, "is such as to leave little to the acuteness and strength of wit, and, indeed, rather to level wit and intellect. For as in the drawing of a straight line or accurate circle by the hand, much depends upon its steadiness and practice, but if a ruler or compass be employed there is little occasion for either, so it is with our method." 1

LITERATURE

Bacon, Chief Works: Advancement of Learning (1605); Novum Organum (1620); De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623); New Atlantis.

Fowler, Bacon.

Spedding, Life and Times of Francis Bacon, 2 vols.

Fischer, Bacon and his Successors.

Nichol, Bacon, 2 vols.

Morris, British Thought and Thinkers.

§ 26. Hobbes

1. The deductive side, whose importance Bacon had overlooked, was emphasized by another Englishman, who 1 Novum Organum, § 61.

also attempted to raise science to a philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, the son of a clergyman, was born at Malmesbury in 1588. After passing through the University of Oxford, he became a tutor in the Cavendish family, with which he remained more or less closely connected throughout the course of a long life. In his earlier years he gave no special philosophical promise. He took no interest in the scholastic doctrines, which still were taught at Oxford, but neither did he actively revolt against them; his tastes lay rather in a different direction. It was not till his fortieth year that an accidental event gave a new turn to his thought. Picking up a book on geometry, of which to that time he had been ignorant, he was greatly impressed by it. "It is impossible," he is reported to have said as he read the 47th proposition; and as he went back, and traced the steps which led up to the proof of the proposition, an interest was aroused which set him at once to the study of mathematics. And the result of this new study, combined with a growing interest in the mechanical sciences which had already transformed the educated thought of the day, was the emergence of the idea which he was to make the basis of a complete philosophy.

This idea was, that the cause of all events whatsoever can be reduced to motion, and thus can be made amenable to mathematical and deductive treatment. Philosophy is the reasoned knowledge of effects from causes, and causes from effects; and since these are always motions, philosophy is the doctrine of the motion of bodies. Such an idea meant the freeing of science from esoteric natures, Aristotelian forms, final causes, and its restriction to exact quantitative investigations. It is true that Hobbes was only pointing out what was already the conscious method of his great scientific contemporaries. Nor was he able to contribute to the history of science any results to be compared in value for a moment with theirs. He came to the study of mathematics too late ever to be a master of it, and in his extended controversies with mathematicians of his day, he

committed himself to positions that were hopelessly in the wrong, as, for example, in his insistence on the possibility of squaring the circle. But with Hobbes it is not a matter simply of scientific method. He intends to assert a philosophical principle, which is absolutely universal, and which results in an entirely mechanical and materialistic world view. Not only is a mechanical explanation to be given to events in the material world, but the same method is to be followed in psychology and sociology. The life of man is to be shown to result from a higher complexity of motions; and the life of society, in turn, is a still more complex mechanism, strictly determined, and so capable of being treated deductively. Accordingly in Hobbes' original plan, a trilogy of works De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive-was to follow up these mechanical principles through all their workings, in order to cover the whole sphere of existence.

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A significant part of Hobbes' position is thus the reduction of consciousness to motion. He identifies it, that is, with those changes in the nervous system which accompany and condition it-a confusion which is the peculiar vice of materialism. Consciousness is only the feeling of these brain changes. All the conscious life thus reduces itself to sensations, which are combined in various ways. Since knowledge is due simply to the setting up of motions in the brain, the old theory that images or copies of things enter the mind must be rejected. Our sensations are not mirrors of external realities, but wholly subjective.

2. It was not, however, as a physicist or psychologist, but rather as a social philosopher, that Hobbes won his greatest influence. As it happened, he was induced by the course of events to change his original plan, and produce the last part of his work earlier than he had intended. The occasion of this was the political situation in England, which resulted in the beheading of Charles the First and the exile of the Royalists. Hobbes, by his connection with the Cavendishes, was naturally in sympathy with the

Royalist party, and thought that he had a message for the times. The fundamental importance of his theory, for subsequent thought, lies, not so much in its actual details, as in the fact that it set up the ideal of a purely naturalistic treatment of the ethical and social life of man, an attempt to understand it simply in terms of its natural environment.

Hobbes starts from the conception of man as naturally self-seeking and egoistic, and nothing more. A man loves only himself; he cares for others only as they minister to his own pleasure. "If by nature one man should love another as man, there is no reason why every man should not equally every man." This idea of human nature Hobbes corroborates by various facts drawn from a cynical observation of men's foibles. In a company, for example, is not each one anxious to tell his own story, and impatient of listening to others; and when one leaves, are not the rest always ready to talk over his faults? There is no disinterested satisfaction in social intercourse; "all the pleasure and jollity of mind consists in this, even to get some, with whom comparing, it may find somewhat wherein to triumph and vaunt itself." 1

Now in a state of nature, where selfish characteristics rule unrestrained, the result must be a condition of continual warfare, in which every man's hand is raised against his neighbor. All men will have an appetite for the same things, and each man's selfishness, accordingly, will lead him to encroach upon his fellows whenever he has the opportunity. Under such conditions there is no satisfaction possible in life, no place for industry, navigation, commodious building, knowledge of nature, arts, letters, society; "and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Does any one doubt that this is what human nature, unrestrained, would lead to? "Let him therefore consider with himself," says Hobbes, "when

1 De Cive, I, 2, 5.

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 shall be done him." 1

It is the intolerableness of this state of affairs which gives rise to society and government. Society, indeed, does not call into play any new or non-egoistic impulses. All social life springs either from poverty or vainglory, and it exists for glory or for gain. But it is found that selfishness can be gratified better by peace than by war. "The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement."2 An enlightened selfinterest will lead a man to see that it is vastly preferable for him to give up the abstract right to everything which he is strong enough to wrest from other men and keep, and to refrain from aggression upon their liberty and possessions, provided he is thus certain of securing a like immunity for himself.

But this is only possible on two conditions: First, all men alike must enter into this agreement to respect one another's rights; and, second, the carrying out of their compact must be guaranteed by the creation of a single power, sufficiently strong to enforce its demands upon individuals, since the only way to keep men to their contracts is by physical compulsion. "Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all; "3 witness the acts of nations, and the almost entire lack of good faith and honor in their dealings with one another, since here there is no such authority to compel them to live up to their promises. For the sake, then, of peace and protection, men will be willing to hand over their individual rights and powers to one man, or 1 Leviathan, Ch. 13. 8 Ibid., Ch. 17.

2 Ibid.

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