assembly of men, submit their wills to a single will, which they thus endow once for all with the supreme authority necessary to maintain order. All men will find this to their advantage, for there is no one enough superior to his fellows to be secure against aggression. "For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself." An even greater equality exists in natural gifts of the mind; "for there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of a thing than that every man is contented with his own share." When this agreement comes about, then, society and government succeed to the original state of anarchy.

"1

Now one consequence flowing from this theory is that right and morality are a creation of the state; they relate to man only in society, and not in his original solitude. Naturally, man has nothing but instincts of self-seeking and self-preservation, and there is no limit to these except the power of gratifying them. Obligation, duty, right and wrong, have as yet no meaning. Duty only arises when there comes in an outside power to impose laws; and this power is the state. Right and wrong, then, are identical with the commands and prohibitions of the state; law is the public conscience. "The desires and other passions of men are in themselves no sin; no more are the actions that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them, which, till laws be made, they cannot know; nor can any law be made till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it."2 A man can have no individual morality, therefore, which conflicts with these commands of his rulers. In making such a claim, he would be breaking the contract which gives rise to morality, and putting himself outside the pale of society, in which alone the words have meaning.

So religion, also, must necessarily be a state affair; as 1 Ibid., Ch. 13.

2 Ibid.

the commonwealth is one person, it should exhibit to God but one worship. Hobbes takes for granted that each man will, if left to himself, attempt to force his own opinions on other men; and so the central authority of the state is necessary, here as elsewhere, to keep men within bounds. Rights of conscience and of private judgment are, accordingly, mere impertinences. Religion is not something to be believed on reason, but accepted on authority. "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." We must trust in him that speaketh, though the mind be incapable of any notion at all from the words spoken. But now who shall judge the claims of the revelation to be from God? who shall guarantee the authority of the Bible itself? Evidently, unless we go back to private judgment again, not individuals, nor any arbitrary collection of them in a church, but only the commonwealth as a whole. Outward conformity to the worship of the Established Church, therefore, and a profession of belief, is a necessity of civil order. Meanwhile in your own heart you may believe what you please, if only you keep it to yourself. If this is thought disingenuous, Hobbes bids you remember that, in your profession of belief under compulsion, the king is really acting, not you, and so that you are not responsible for the contradiction.

The practical issue of all this is that the will of the state - that is, of the king, or the authorities who represent the established government-is supreme, and that disobedience or rebellion is in every case unjustified. Nothing can release the subject from the duty of obedience. The contract is not between people and ruler, but is a covenant of the people with one another, to which the ruler is not a party; and accordingly no possible act of his can be a breach of contract, and furnish an excuse for rebellion. 1 Ibid., Ch. 32.

Nothing the sovereign can do to a subject can properly be called injustice. The king is acting by the authority given him by the people, and to complain of his act is to complain of oneself; if the subject dissents, he has already voluntarily made his dissent a crime. Does the king seize a man's property? He has property rights only with reference to others, not to the sovereign. The king is the recipient of power freely handed over to him, and once given, this cannot be recalled. For what would such a recall mean? It would mean that society no longer exists, that no one remains to judge disputes, and that the original anarchy has returned; and any conceivable act of despotism on the part of the ruler is preferable to this.

3. The philosophy of Hobbes had shown a clear understanding of certain aspects of the scientific problem, but it was not altogether fitted to give the new impetus for which philosophy was waiting. In the first place, its theory of knowledge was not satisfactory. Like the whole scientific movement of the day, Hobbes accepted Nominalism, and denied the reality of universals. Concepts, accordingly, are mere counters which the mind uses to reckon with, and represent no objective realities. Now so long as we insist upon the empirical side of science, as Bacon did, there is not so obvious a difficulty in attributing reality simply to individual things. But when, with Hobbes, we lay emphasis on deduction and mathematical laws, trouble arises. For these laws are concepts, or universals, and so, instead of having the highest reality for science, they would seem to have no reality at all. By his theory of knowledge, mathematical deduction is a mere manipulation of subjective counters in the mind, which have no objective validity. To make his science of any value, however, they ought to have precisely that external truth which they do not possess.

In the second place, a universal philosophy should give its due, not simply to material facts, but also to the human, conscious side which makes up the other great division into which phenomena fall. Hobbes' materialism fails to

do this, and so it comes short of an adequate philosophy. It is true that physical laws can be appealed to more or less successfully to account for the appearance and connection of mental phenomena. Hobbes' position has thus a methodological value, and is an anticipation of modern physiological psychology. But as metaphysics it is crude and unsatisfactory. The two facts cannot be identified, and a sensation made quite the same thing as a motion of brain particles, except by a confusion of thought. It needed a clearer recognition of the distinctive character of consciousness, and an appreciation of the great problems which its relationship to the material world involves, to bring about the rise of modern philosophy in its fullest sense. This is attained in Descartes.

LITERATURE

Hobbes, Chief Works: On Human Nature (1650); De Cive (1642); Leviathan (1651); De Corpore (1655); Of Liberty and Necessity (1654); De Homine (1658).

Sneath, The Ethics of Hobbes.

Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy.

Robertson, Hobbes.

Morris, British Thought and Thinkers.

Patten, Development of English Thought.

Watson, Hedonistic Theories.

Stephen, Hobbes.

Woodbridge, The Philosophy of Hobbes in Extracts and Notes col lected from his Writings.

III. MODERN PHILOSOPHY

§ 27. Introduction

1. BEFORE proceeding with the series of great modern philosophers, it will be well to sum up briefly what the Middle Ages had accomplished, and what problems were left for later philosophy to attempt to solve. It has been said that the task of the Middle Ages was essentially a task of training. It took the unformed material which the Germanic races offered, and by a process of centuries of authority, and by ways which were often harsh, crude, and arbitrary, it succeeded in instilling into them so thoroughly certain habits of thought and action, that these remain a part of our inheritance to the present day. Now of course such an attitude of unreasoning acceptance does not represent the highest attainment. In the stress of conditions in the medieval period, the specific contribution of Christianity - the bringing back of conduct to the inner personality, and the founding of all the outer life on the individual will and conscience-had tended to be obscured. The great work of modern times was to bring this again to the front, and to replace external law by free activity, which, however, should not be lawless, but a law to itself. Without abolishing the restraints of institutions originally established on authority, it should rather regard these as themselves necessary means to the realization of inner freedom; but it should do away with their externality, rigidity, and incapacity for growth.

But now the value of the Middle Ages began to show. In order that this new spirit of freedom and individuality should get a foothold, there must first be a negative move