NOTES. 481 point of quite cardinal importance the fairest that could be put forward with such a master as he is of the Hardwick MSS. The point upon which any true understanding of the course of Hobbes's philosophical thought turns is the fact that the two small works published separately in 1650 as Human Nature arid De Gorpore Politico were composed not later than the spring of 1640, as parts of one single
- little treatise in English,' entitled Elements of Law, Natural and Politic
composed, that is, some time before the first-written of his systematic works, the Latin De Give. The point is cardinal, as I have more than once shown, because he is thereby proved to have elaborated his characteris- tic psychological doctrine and drawn out the main lines of his political theory before he had made any progress with his ambitious scheme of general philosophy based on mechanical principles. We see him to have been a man whose native bent was to the study, above all, of man and society. It is also, as regards the political theory, of first importance to find him committed to most of his extreme positions before the outbreak of the Civil War. Now the fact, though it might have been otherwise inferred (as I afterwards saw), was first made out by me at Hardwick Hall on examination of the MSS. there preserved MSS. which at the time (1869) showed no trace of having been before attended to by anybody, though they have since been examined over again to excellent effect by Dr. F. Tonnies. 1 See, then, the understanding and the carefulness of the Quarterly Reviewer : P. 415 : " His De Give was published in 1642. A few years later this work, cut into two halves, reappeared under the guise of Human Nature and De Gorpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politic an adaptation of the title applied to his first treatise on the same subject." The ludicrous blunder of taking the Human Nature and De Gorpore Politico to be halves of the De Give is here not unaccompanied by some sort of notion that something had been written before 1642 under a'title of Elements. Accordingly, afterwards (p. 418), he speaks of " a small tract intended for private circulation " in 1640, though he would hardly have called it " a small tract " had he either seen its size among the Harleian 1 The outcome of Dr. Tonnies's labour ought to have been better known by this time. Mr. James Thornton, of High Street, Oxford, who had issued a handsome reprint of Leviathan in 1881, agreed with Dr. Tonnies in 1884 to publish a carefully collated edition of the Elements, with some inedita appended ; also a reprint of Behemoth, with text corrected accord- ing to what appears to be the original MS. of the work in the library of St. John's College, Oxford. The two volumes were announced to appear in the winter of 1884, and were, in point of fact, almost completely printed off early in 1885. After an unexplained delay of eighteen months on the part of the publisher, the remaining few pages (of one of the volumes) were got into print last autumn, and nothing appeared to stand in the way of definitive publication in October. Since then it has been found impos- sible, by any and every means yet employed, to obtain from Mr. Thornton the least hint of his intentions regarding the volumes, or any kind of accommodation by which the results of the foreign scholar's laborious research may be allowed to see the light." [Some statement to this effect was due to the readers of MIND, because, as far back as October, 1884, the reprints which Mr. Thornton had then announced for immediate publica- tion (the first of them in November), were described at some length in these pages (ix. 618), from information supplied by Mr. Thornton himself.] 31
