History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [309]
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8
HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN
Hobbes (1588–1679) is a philosopher whom it is difficult to classify. He was an empiricist, like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, but unlike them, he was an admirer of mathematical method, not only in pure mathematics, but in its applications. His general outlook was inspired by Galileo rather than Bacon. From Descartes to Kant, Continental philosophy derived much of its conception of the nature of human knowledge from mathematics, but it regarded mathematics as known independently of experience. It was thus led, like Platonism, to minimize the part played by pure thought. English empiricism, on the other hand, was little influenced by mathematics, and tended to have a wrong conception of scientific method. Hobbes had neither of these defects. It is not until our own day that we find any other philosophers who were empiricists and yet laid due stress on mathematics. In this respect, Hobbes's merit is great. He has, however, grave defects, which make it impossible to place him quite in the first rank. He is impatient of subtleties, and too much inclined to cut the Gordian knot. His solutions of problems are logical, but are attained by omitting awkward facts. He is vigorous, but crude; he wields the battle-axe better than the rapier. Nevertheless, his theory of the State deserves to be carefully considered, the more so as it is more modern than any previous theory, even that of Machiavelli.
Hobbes's father was a vicar, who was ill-tempered and uneducated; he lost his job by quarrelling with a neighbouring vicar at the church door. After this, Hobbes was brought up by an uncle. He acquired a good knowledge of the classics, and translated The Medea of Euripides into Latin iambics at the age of fourteen. (In later life, he boasted, justifiably, that though he abstained from quoting classical poets and orators, this was not from lack of familiarity with their works.) At fifteen, he went to Oxford, where they taught him scholastic logic and the philosophy of Aristotle. These were his bugbears in later life, and he maintained that he had profited little by his years at the university; indeed universities in general are constantly criticized in his writings. In the year 1610, when he was twenty-two years old, he became tutor to Lord Hardwick (afterwards second Earl of Devonshire), with whom he made the grand tour. It was at this time that he began to know the work of Galileo and Kepler, which profoundly influenced him. His pupil became his patron, and remained so until he died in 1628. Through him, Hobbes met Ben Jonson and Bacon and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and many other important men. After the death of the Earl of Devonshire, who left a young son, Hobbes lived for a time in Paris, where he began the study of Euclid; then he became tutor to his former pupil's son. With him he travelled to Italy, where he visited Galileo in 1636. In 1637 he came back to England.
The political opinions expressed in the Leviathan, which were Royalist in the extreme, had been held by Hobbes for a long time. When the Parliament of 1628 drew up the Petition of Right, he published a translation of Thucydides, with the expressed intention of showing the evils of democracy. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, and Laud and Strafford were sent to the Tower, Hobbes was terrified and fled