phical style, the utmost degree of simplicity, compactness, and perspicuity, combined, the purest transcript of thought which words seem capable of being rendered.'1 The result was, that those whom he had so powerfully attacked charged him, according to their usage from the beginning of time, with atheism. 'Of positive atheism; of mere scepticism concerning the existence of the Deity; or of, what is more impious and mischievous than either, a religion imputing to the Deity human infirmities and vices, there is not, I believe, in any of his writings, the shadow of a shade.'2

There was a certain resemblance in the fate of Hobbes to that of his friend Galileo, in so far as they both fell under the hatred of the same powerful body of men. Aubrey says: When he [Hobbes] was at Florence, he contracted a friendship with the famous Galileo Galilei, whom he extremely venerated and magnified; not only as he was a prodigious wit, but from his sweetness of nature and manners. They pretty well resembled one another. They were not much unlike in the countenance, as by their pictures may appear. They were both cheer

1 James Mill's Fragment on Mackintosh, pp. 32, 33.

2 See the long note on Hobbes in Austin's Province of Jurisprudence Determined, p. 296, et seq., London, John Murray, 1832. Many examples might be given from Hobbes's works of the opinions which excited against him the odium theologicum. The following passage shows Hobbes neither in the character of an atheist' or of an 'infidel,' but only as an enemy of ecclesiastical ambition and rapacity. "Tis one article only, which to die for meriteth so honourable a name [that of "a martyr of Christ"], and that article is this: that Jesus is the Christ; that is to say, He that hath redeemed us, and shall come again to give us salvation and eternal life in his glorious kingdom. To die for every tenet that serveth the ambition, or profit of the clergy, is not required.'-Leviathan, part iii. chap. xlii. p. 272, London, 1651. And as to the charge of atheism, Aubrey says:-'For his being branded with atheism, his writings and virtuous life testify against it. And that he was a Christian is clear, for he received the sacrament; and in his confession to Dr. Cosins on his (as he thought) death-bed, declared that he liked the religion of the Church of England best of all other.'-Aubrey's Lives, vol. ii. pp. 624, 625.

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ful and melancholique-sanguine; and had both a consimilitie of fate, to be hated and persecuted by the ecclesiastiques.' Aubrey further Aubrey further says, in a note in the same page :-'I have heard Mr. Edm. Waller say that W. Lord Marquis of Newcastle was a great patron to Dr. Gassendi and M. Des Cartes, as well as to Mr. Hobbes, and that he hath dined with them all three at the marquis's table at Paris. Mr. Hobbes was wont to say, that had M. Des Cartes (for whom he had a high respect) kept himself to geometrie, he had been the best geometer in the world; but he could not pardon him for his writing in defence of transubstantiation, which he knew was absolutely against his conscience; which was done merely to put a compliment on (flatter) the Jesuits."2

1 Aubrey's Lives, vol. ii. p. 626, London, 1813.

2 Aubrey's Lives, vol. ii. p. 626, note, London, 1813. To show the title of Aubrey to be regarded as a credible witness in regard to the particulars he has recorded respecting Hobbes, I will quote the first three sentences of his introduction to his Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesburie: '—" "Tis religion to perform the will of the dead. I therefore discharge my promise, performing the last office to my honoured friend Mr. T. H. Since nobody knew so many particulars of his life as myself, he desired that if I survived him it should be handed to posterity by my hands, which I declare and avow to do ingenuously and impartially.'-Aubrey's Lives, vol. ii. p. 593. Aubrey's Life of Hobbes occupies from p. 593 to the end, i.e. to p. 637 of vol. ii. of the publication usually cited as Aubrey's Letters and Lives, though that is an incorrect description. For the letters are those of various eminent persons in the 17th and 18th centuries, and have nothing to connect them with John Aubrey, the Pepys or Boswell of his time, whom Anthony à Wood, with small gratitude for what he owed to him, describes as 'a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased.' The lives were, says the editor,' originally designed as memoranda for the use of Anthony à Wood, when composing his Athenæ Oxonienses, and are now submitted to the public as literary curiosities. That they possess a claim to this title will readily be allowed, since there is scarcely a life without some anecdote hitherto unpublished; and the author's description of the personal appearance and domestic habits of most of the individuals of whom he writes is singularly interesting. As the lives occupy a much greater space in print than the editor expected, it was found necessary to divide the second volume into two parts.' Both the letters and the lives are

Hobbes's opinion of Descartes, that had he kept himself to geometry, he had been the best geometer in the world,' is in accordance with the character of Descartes' mind, quoted in the preceding essay from Mr. J. S. Mill, and shows that Hobbes had a just appreciation of Descartes. But Hobbes had not so just an appreciation of himself. As Descartes was an example of the mathematical type of mind, so Hobbes was an example of the metaphysical type. As good mathematicians are, like Descartes, apt to be bad metaphysicians, good metaphysicians are apt to be bad mathematicians. Hobbes, who dispelled hosts of phantasies, gained no honour by his controversy with Wallis, the mathematical professor at Oxford, to whose writings Newton has been considered to have been more indebted than to those of Descartes. There is evidence in their writings that neither Wallis nor Newton could have dispelled the phantasies that were dispelled by Hobbes; and there is evidence that Hobbes was far enough from discovering the law of gravitation that was discovered by Newton.1

stated on the title-page to be 'now first published from the originals in the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum.' In a letter to Aubrey, dated Qu. Coll. Oxon. May 16, 1693, the writer, Thomas Tanner, afterwards bishop of St. Asaph, thus expresses his opinion of Wood's treatment of Aubrey :-'I shall scorn to be like Ant. Wood, viz. make use of your papers and acquaintance, and at last not afford you a good word; your entire originalls shall be deposited hereafter in the Museum according to your desire, that posterity may see how just we have been to the memory of your pains.'-Vol. ii. p. 166.

1 The apology for himself and his writings in the Dedication to the King prefixed to Hobbes's Philosophical Problems, of which chapter i. is headed 'Problems of Gravity,' and chapter ii. 'Problems of Tides,' might lead to the surmise that Hobbes applied his mind to physical science rather because it was a safe pursuit as compared with mental and political science, than because he felt in himself any particular aptitude for it. Berkeley, who was more of a mathematician than any other metaphysician of equal power, has some observations in The Analyst, with reference to a distinction between computing and thinking, which seems to lie at the bottom of the question be

About half a century after the time when Hobbes and Descartes met at Paris at the table of the Marquis of Newcastle, a meeting took place at Paris between a representative of Descartes' school of metaphysics and a metaphysician who, though he would have protested most vehemently against being considered as belonging to Hobbes's school of metaphysics, differed as much from Descartes in metaphysics as Hobbes. When Berkeley was in Paris in 1715, he paid a visit to Malebranche, whom he found in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for an inflammation of the lungs from which he suffered. A disputation between the two philosophers took place, in the heat of which Malebranche raised his voice so high that he brought on a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after.1

tween metaphysics and mathematics. Berkeley calls ordinary mathematicians, as distinguished from such mathematicians as Newton, who was a philosopher as well as a mathematician, 'men accustomed rather to compute than to think.'-Berkeley's Works, vol. ii. pp. 412, 414, London, 1820. Coleridge has a remark on the same subject, which makes the distinction, not between thinking and computing, but between thought and attention. Coleridge says: This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, and why Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton.'MS. note of Coleridge, printed in Gillman's Life of Coleridge, p. 34. 1 Life of Bishop Berkeley, prefixed to his works, p. 5.

ESSAY III.

JAMES MILL.

IN the essay on Hobbes I have had occasion to mention that James Mill carried on some of the most important discoveries of Hobbes in mental philosophy. But to James Mill is due more than an incidental notice, for he as well as Hobbes is a great name in philosophy.'

It is a remarkable proof of the truth of a remark in the articleJames Mill' in the Encyclopedia Britannica respecting the general neglect of metaphysical studies in the present age, that so accomplished a man as Lord Macaulay, when intending to be complimentary to James Mill, made favourable mention of his 'History of British India,' but did not seem to be aware of the existence of his 'Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind;' though the powers of mind displayed in the latter work are of a much higher order than those displayed in the former. The remark referred to occurs in a paragraph, written not by the present writer who wrote most of the paper in which it occurs, but by Mr. John Stuart Mill,1 and is this:'From the general neglect of metaphysical studies in the present age, this work' [the Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, published in 1829], 'which at some periods of our history would have placed its author on a

1 See a note on the article James Mill, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, in the beginning of Essay I.