ROBE E S 39 popular sentiment. The most important of the works com posed towards 1670, and thus kept back, is the extremely spirited dialogue to which he gave the title Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by ivhich they ivere carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1660. 1 To the same period pro bably belongs the unfinished Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (E. W., vi. pp. 1-160), a trenchant criticism of the constitutional theory of English government as upheld by Coke. Aubrey takes credit for having tried to induce Hobbes to write upon the subject in 1664 by presenting him with a copy of Bacon s Elements of the Laws of Enyland, and though the attempt was then unsuccessful, Hobbes later on took to studying the statute-book, with Coke upon Littleton. One other posthumous production (besides the tract on Heresy before mentioned) may also be referred to this, if not, as Aubrey suggests, an earlier time the two thousand and odd elegiac verses into which he amused himself by throwing his view of ecclesiastical encroachment on the civil power ; the quaint verses, disposed in his now favourite dialogue-form, were first published, nine years after his death, under the title Historia Ecclcsiastica (L. W., v. pp. 311-408), with a preface by Thomas Rymer. For some time Hobbes was not even allowed to utter a word of protest, whatever might be the occasion that his enemies took to triumph over him. In 1669 he had silently to bear the spectacle of an unworthy follower- Daniel Scargil by name, a fellow of Corpus Christi at Cambridge made to act an edifying part in a public recantation of his principles, after having brought them into discredit by offensively supporting them in the public schools. A few years later, in 1674, he had another ex perience of academic disfavour when Dr John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, who bore the charges of the Latin trans lation of Anthony Wood s History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1670), struck out all the complimen tary epithets in the account of his life, and substituted very different ones ; but this time the king did suffer him to defend himself by publishing a dignified letter (Vit. And., pp. xlviii. -1.), to which Fell replied by adding to the translation when it appeared a note full of the grossest in sults. And, amid all his troubles, Hobbes was not without hi.s consolations. No Englishman of that day stood in the same repute abroad, and foreigners, noble or learned, who came to England, never forgot to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect no pro gress of the years seemed able to quench. His pastimes in the latest years were as singular as his labours. The autobiography in Latin verse, with its playful humour, occasional pathos, and sublime self-complacency, was thrown off at the age of eighty-four. At eighty-five, in the year 1 673, he sent forth a translation of four books of the Odyssey (ix.-xii.) in rugged but not seldom happily turned English rhymes ; and, when he found this Voyage of Ulysses eagerly received, he had ready by 1675 a complete transla tion of both Iliad and Odyssey (E. W., x.), prefaced by a lively dissertation " Concerning the virtues of an heroic poem," showing his unabated interest in questions of literary style. In that year (1675) he ceased coming to London, and thenceforth passed his time at his patron s s^ats in Derbyshire, always occupied to the last with some intellectual work in the early morning and in the afternoon hours, which it had long been his habit to devote to thinking and to writing. With such tenacity did he cling to his pursuits (always systematically keeping up exercise for the sake of health) that even as late as August 1 E. W., vi. pp. 161-418. Though Behemoth was kept back at the king s express desire it saw the light, without Hobbes s leave, in 1679, before his death. 1679 he w,is promising his publisher somewhat to print in English." The end came very soon afterwards. A suppression of urine in October, in spite of which he in sisted upon being conveyed with the family from Chats- worth to Hardwick Hall towards the end of November, was followed by a paralytic stroke, under which he sank on the 4th of December, in his ninety-second year. He lies buried in the neighbouring parish church of Hault Hucknall. In the foregoing sketch the aim has been to give a defi nite idea of the circumstances in which Hobbes, after slowly developing in the first forty years of his life, displayed a mental activity of such extraordinary variety in his last fifty years. The task of expounding and criticizing either his better-known or his less-known doctrines will not be attempted in this place ; but a few remarks may be added as to his position in the general movement of English philo sophy. As already suggested, it cannot be allowed that he falls into any regular succession from Bacon ; neither can it be said that he handed on the torch to Locke. He was the one English thinker of the first rank in the long period of two generations separating Locke from Eacon, but, save in the chronological sense, there is no true relation of succes sion among the three. It would be difficult even to prove any ground of affinity among them beyond a disposition to take sense as a prime factor in the account of subjective experi ence : their common interest in physical science was shared equally by rationalist thinkers of the Cartesian school, and was indeed begotten of the time. Backwards, Hobbes s relations are rather with Galileo and the other inquirers who, from the beginning of the 17th century, occupied them selves with the physical world in the manner that has come later to be distinguished by the name of science in opposi tion to philosophy. But it happened that, even more than in external nature, Hobbes was interested in the phenomena of social life, presenting themselves so impressively in an age of political revolution. So it came to pass that, while he was unable, by reason of imperfect training and too tardy development, with all his pains, to make any contri bution to physical science or to mathematics as instrumental in physical research, he attempted a task which no other adli3rent of the new " mechanical philosophy " conceived nothing less than such a universal construction of human knowledge as would bring Society and Man (at once the matter and maker of Society) within the same principles of scientific explanation as were found applicable to the world of Nature. The construction was, of course, utterly prema ture, even supposing it were inherently possible ; but it is Hobbes s distinction, in his century, to have conceived it, and he is thereby lifted from among the scientific workers with whom he associated to the .rank of those philosophical thinkers who have sought to order the whole domain of human knowledge. Such as it was, the effects of his philo sophical endeavour may be traced on a variety of lines. Upon every subject that came within the sweep of his system, except mathematics and physics, his thoughts have been productive of thought. When the first storm of opposition from smaller men, roused as much by his para doxical expressions as by his doctrines, had begun to die down, thinkers of real weight, beginning with Cumberland and Cudworth, were moved by his analysis of the moral nature of man to probe anew the question of the natural springs and the rational grounds of human action ; and thus it may be said that Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole of that movement of ethical speculation that, in modern times, has been carried on with such remarkable continuity in England. In politics, the revulsion from his particular conclusions did not prevent the more clear sighted of his opponents from recognizing the force_ of his
supreme demonstration of the practical irresponsibility of
