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labour if we succeed in persuading the people to this conduct without communicating the doctrines of the philosophy to every individual. Only for kings or their advisers, or for the heads of the aristocracy, will the philosophy be of value, since these must take care to keep the whole in its course. These stringent inferences from the doctrine of Hobbes look, in fact, as though they had been simply abstracted from the more recent intellectual history of England, so closely has the nation, on the whole, developed itself after the pattern prescribed by Hobbes. The higher aristocracy retains a personal freedom of thought, together with a sincere, or shall we say, what has become a sincere, respect for ecclesiastical institutions. Men of business regard all doubt of the verities of religion as 'unpractical;' for the arguments for or against their theological foundations they have no appreciation; and if they shudder at Germanism,' that is rather with reference to the security of the present life than with any reference to the expectation of a life beyond the grave. Women, children, and the sentimental are unreservedly devoted to religion. But in the lower classes of society, for whose maintenance in a state of subjection a life of refined sentiment does not seem requisite, there is again. scarcely any remnant of religion, except the fear of God and the clergy. Speculative philosophy is thought superfluous, if not mischievous. The notion of a philosophy of nature has passed into that of physical science; and a modified selfishness, which has secured an excellent understanding with Christianity, is fully recognised by all classes of society as the only foundation of individual or public morality.

We are far indeed from referring to the influence of a Hobbes this wholly original, and, in its way, model development of modern England; nay, it is much rather the lively characteristic of the nature of this people in their process of development; it is the sum of all the historical and material circumstances, from which both are to be explained the philosophy of Hobbes, and the subsequent

turn taken by the national character. But at all events, we must regard Hobbes in a higher light when we see, as it were, prophetically figured in his doctrines the later phenomena of the English national life.39 Reality is often much more paradoxical than any philosophical system, and the actual behaviour of mankind contains more inconsistencies than a thinker could with all his efforts heap together; and of this orthodox but Materialistic England affords us a striking example.

And again, in the sphere of natural science there arose at this time that peculiar combination, which even to this day causes so much surprise to the scholars of the Continent, of a thoroughly Materialistic philosophy with a great respect for the dogmas and customs of religious tradition.

39 Buckle, Hist. of Civil. in Engl., i. 390, says of Hobbes: "The most dangerous opponent of the clergy in the seventeenth century was certainly Hobbes, the subtlest dialectician of his time; a writer, too, of singular clearness, and, among British metaphysicians, inferior only to Berkeley (?). . . . During his life, and for several years after his death, every man who ventured to think for himself was stigmatised as a Hobbist, or, as it was sometimes called, a Hobbian." These observations are not incorrect, although, unless we take the other side of the matter into account, they present an incorrect picture of Hobbes and his influence. This other side is described by Macaulay, Hist. of Engl., i. 86, pop. ed. (c. ii.)—“Change in the Morals of the Community: "" "Thomas Hobbes had, in language more precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of the prince was the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject ought to be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism at the royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what was really valuable

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in his speculations eagerly welcomed a theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the obligations of morality, and degraded religion into a mere affair of state. Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of the character of the fine gentleman. Further on, however, it is said very truly of this same sort of frivolous gentlemen, that by their means the English High Church came again to wealth and honour. Little as these elegant voluptuaries were inclined to regulate their life according to the precepts of the Church, they were soon just as ready "to fight knee-deep in blood" for her cathedrals and palaces, for every line of her formularies, and every thread of her vestments. In Macaulay's wellknown Essay on Bacon occurs the following noteworthy passage as to Hobbes: ". . . His quick eye soon discerned the superior abilities of Thomas Hobbes. It is not probable, however, that he fully appreciated the powers of his disciple, or foresaw the vast influence, both for good or for evil, which that most vigorous and acute of human intellects was destined to exercise on the two succeeding generations."

Two men there are in particular who represent this spirit in the generation after Hobbes-the chemist Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.

The modern world sees these two men separated by a great gulf. Boyle is now named only in the history of chemistry, and is, in his significance for the general intellectual life of modern times, almost forgotten; while the name of Newton shines as a star of the first magnitude.40 Their contemporaries did not see the matter quite in this light, and still less can the more accurate investigations of history be found to affirm this judgment. Newton will have to be less exclusively valued than is usually the case, while Boyle will be found entitled to a prominent place of honour in the history of the sciences. Yet Newton remains the greater man; and even though his explanation of the movements of the heavenly bodies by means of gravitation appears to be a ripe product of time, it was, nevertheless, not a mere chance that this was gathered by a man who united, in so rare a measure, mathematical talent, physical modes of thought, and the enduring capacity for labour. In his leaning to a clear physical and mechanical conception of the course of nature, Boyle entirely agreed with Newton; and Boyle was the older of the two, and must, in regard to the introduction into natural science of Materialistic foundations, be considered as one of the greatest of the pioneers. With him chemistry enters upon a new epoch.41 The breach with alchemy

40 More correct is the judgment of Buckle, Hist. Civil. in Engl., i. 367: "After the death of Bacon one of the most distinguished Englishmen was certainly Boyle, who, if compared with his contemporaries, may be said to rank immediately below Newton, though, of course, very inferior to him as an original thinker." To the latter remark we can scarcely subscribe, for Newton's greatness by no means consisted in the originality of his thinking, but in the union of rare

mathematical talent with the qualities of character described in the text.

41 Thus even Gmelin, Gesch. d. Chemie, Gött., 1798, begins the "Zweite Hauptepoche," or modern history of chemistry, with "Boyle's Zeitalter (1661-1690).” He rightly observes (ii. 35), that no man contributed so largely "to destroy the authority which alchemy had usurped over so many minds and sciences" as did Boyle. He is treated with greater fulness in Kopp, Gesch. d.

and with Aristotelian notions was completed by Boyle. While these two great students of nature thus naturalised the philosophy of a Gassendi and a Hobbes in the positive sciences, and by their discoveries secured to it a definitive victory, they both, nevertheless, remained Deists in all sincerity, and without any Hobbian reservations. As they remain occupied with the phenomenal world, this was not to be achieved without great weaknesses and inconsistencies; but if they stand lower on this account as philosophers, their influence on the unfolding of the scientific method has thereby been all the healthier. As in so many other points, so in this, Boyle and Newton may be regarded as having set the fashion-that they initiate a rigid severance between the fertile field of experimental inquiry and all those problems which are transcendental, or at least, in the present condition of the sciences, are unapproachable. And hence both exhibit the liveliest interest for questions of method, but only a very slender interest for speculative questions. They are distinctly empiricists; and this must especially be firmly maintained of Newton, if any one is inclined, because of the great generality of his principle of gravitation and his mathematical endowments, to give undue prominence to the deductive side of his intellectual activity.

Robert Boyle (born in 1626) was a son of Viscount Cork, and availed himself of his considerable property in order to live wholly for science. Naturally grave and inclined to melancholy, the doubts as to the Christian faith which were probably excited by his scientific studies were regarded by him very seriously; and as he sought to combat them in his own case by Bible-reading and reflection, he

Chemie, i. 163 ff.: "We see in Boyle the first chemist whose endeavours in chemistry were chiefly directed by the one noble impulse of the investigation of nature;" and then again frequently in the special divisions of the History-especially

in the history of the doctrine of affinity, ii. 274 ff.-where, amongst other things, it is said of Boyle, that he from the beginning conceived the problem of the elements in precisely the same sense in which it is now being handled.

felt also the necessity of making others also feel that a reconciliation was possible between faith and knowledge. With this aim he founded public lectures, to which those Essays, amongst others, owe their origin by which Clarke endeavoured to convince the world of the existence of God. Clarke, who had put together a natural religion out of Newton's cosmological notions, entered the lists against every view that would not fit this system, and wrote accordingly not only against Spinoza and Leibniz, but also against Hobbes and Locke, the fathers of English Materialism and Sensationalism. And yet the whole cosmology of the great physicists Boyle and Newton, in whose footsteps he trod, peculiarly interwoven as it was with religious elements, could not have arisen without that same Materialism from which these quite other consequences were drawn.

If we think of the religious and somewhat moody character of Boyle, we must only wonder the more at the straightforwardness of judgment with which he broke through the nets of alchemy. It cannot be denied, moreover, that his scientific theories here and there in chemistry, and especially medicine, still bear traces of the mysticism which at that time was generally dominant in the sphere of those sciences, though at the same time he became the most influential opponent of this mysticism. His 'Chemista Scepticus' (1661), whose very title contains a declaration of war with tradition, is with justice regarded as a turningpoint in the history of chemistry. In physics he made most important discoveries, some of which were later attributed to others; yet it must be admitted that his theories often lack the necessary clearness and completeness, so that he does much more in the way of disturbance and preparation than of final accomplishment. 42

42 Buckle, Hist. Civil. in Engl., i. 368, attributes specially to Boyle the first exact experiments into the relation between colour and heat, the foundation of the science of hydro

statics, and the original discovery of the law (later called after Mariotte) according to which the density of air varies as its pressure. With regard to hydrostatics, however, Buckle him.

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