and Scot, were men who had received a university education. And some of the most determined republicans, such as Adrian Scroop, Henry Nevill, William Say, Miles Corbet, John Lisle, Lord Grey of Groby, and others, were men of the families of the old Plantagenet nobility, as well as men of cultivated minds, while the royalists were mostly new men, who owed their position to the caprice of the Tudors and Stuarts.

Another generalization of Mr. Buckle as to the progress in toleration made by the French nation in 1650, founded on the assumed fact that Descartes, the enemy of superstition, should have lived without serious danger, and then have died peaceably in his bed,'1 is disposed of by the fact that Descartes was compelled to accept from Queen Christina, as a protection from the hostility of his priestly persecutors, an asylum in Sweden, where the rigour of the climate, aided by the caprice or madness of his royal patroness, killed him, at the age of fifty-three, in 1650. Mr. Buckle, in a note at the end of the chapter, indeed says: Descartes died in Sweden on a visit to Christina, so that strictly speaking there is an error in the text.

But this does not affect the argument.' That depends on whether Descartes made the visit from choice or necessity. But the memorable case of Calas, a Calvinist, falsely accused at Toulouse of murdering his son, the alleged motive being to prevent him from becoming a Roman Catholic, and condemned and broken on the wheel, occurred in 1762, more than a century after the time when, according to Mr. Buckle, the reign of fanaticism and persecution was over and that of toleration established in France.

Let us now see what are the consequences of such dealing with historical facts as Mr. Buckle's dealing with the affair which James I. called the Gowrie Conspiracy. The consequences are to furnish support to Mr. Buckle's opinion that the intellectual element in mankind is the predominant circumstance in determining their progress. Undoubtedly the intellectual element is a most important circumstance, but in the seventeenth century it was not the predominant one. In the seventeenth century the moral element, in the shape of Puritanism, was the predominant element; the element which supplied force enough to raise in England an armed insurrection, not merely against tyranny, but against vice, which had assumed in the high places of Europe a form and character that renewed in the modern world the old contest between the Hebrew1 and Greek 2 religions.

1 Genesis, xviii. xix.

2 Plato, Nóμor, A. The contrast between the Greek and Hebrew religions could not be more strongly brought out than by the fact that the vice which the Hebrew religion punished with 'fire from heaven,' and which Plato denounced, the Greek religion deified.

ESSAY II.

HOBBES.

READING over again lately Hobbes's Human Nature,' and his De Corpore Politico,' has not raised Hobbes intellectually or morally in my estimation. As the attacks on Hobbes were carried far beyond the bounds of truth and justice, so the vindications of him, even the most able of them that by James Mill, in his 'Fragment on Mackintosh,' and that by John Austin in his Jurisprudence'— while they have done but justice to the power and originality of his mind, have, as it appears to me, given too favourable a view of his political philosophy. For instance, John Austin1 attempts to show that Hobbes, like the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, who were styled the Economists, could not be an apologist of tyranny, if tyranny be synonymous with misrule, inasmuch as he maintains that good and stable government is impossible unless the fundamentals of political science be known by the bulk of the people. But this is much too favourable a version of what Hobbes really says; the sum of which is that subjects are to be taught not to desire change of government. In fact, all the political instruction Hobbes desired for the people merely amounted to as much as might make them quiet slaves. And the

1 See the long note on Hobbes in Austin's' Province of Jurisprudence Determined,' p. 296, et seq.: London, John Murray, 1832.

length to which he goes may be judged from the fact of his quoting to suit his purpose a passage of Scripture to prove that 'Kings are gods.'1 How any man in the possession of his reason could come to the conclusion that the rulers of the seventeenth century, who certainly did not themselves know even the first rudiments of political science—unless the maxim 'qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare,' and other similar maxims of the school of the Borgias, though Machiavelli has, unjustly perhaps, got the credit of them, be 'political science—would put 'the bulk of the people' in the way of knowing 'the fundamentals of political science,' is a question more easily asked than answered.

Hobbes has built up his main edifice, namely a commonwealth, upon 'the consent of many men together, or on what has been called 'original contract,' on grounds altogether false and unsound, on the sandy foundation of a fiction.' Now, as for the question of the laws of human nature, of what use can they be, even if a man has got at them, if the man then goes and constructs a complete system of political philosophy-a complete philosophy of politics in direct opposition to historical facts, to historical truth? If political philosophy is to be formed by the application of the laws of human nature to the explanation of history-which means of course historical facts, not historical fictions, as most history is it is manifest that Hobbes could not, by the way he went to work with

imaginary states of society, form a political philosophy worth the paper it was written on.

Before proceeding to point out some of the fundamental errors in Hobbes's political philosophy, it may be of use

1 See Leviathan, part ii. chap. xxx. p. 177: London, 1651.

to attempt to show how it was possible for a man of so powerful an understanding as his to fall into such errors.

The case of Hobbes affords a remarkable instance in confirmation of the theory that the circumstances which have power to give permanent qualities to the mind may be traced to the very moment of birth, and some of them, on which effects of the greatest importance depend, beyond the birth of the human being. Hobbes is undoubtedly 'a great name in philosophy;' but he was not exempt from the general law of human nature, which makes the mind in a considerable degree dependent on the body. Hobbes was born on April 5, 1588; and he has told us himself that the effect of the rumours of the coming Spanish Armada, which was to make an end of the English nation, upon his mother's mind before his birth was such that she brought forth him and fear together. In endeavouring to form an estimate of Hobbes's philosophy, it is important not to lose sight of the strange contrast between his intrepid intellect, which nothing could frighten from the pursuit of truth, and his constitutional timidity, which made him shrink from the idea of resistance to the temporal power; for resistance implied war, and that 1 Fama ferebat enim diffusa per oppida nostra, Extremum genti classe venire diem.

Atque metum tantum concepit tunc mea mater,
Ut pareret geminos, meque metumque simul.

Thomæ Hobbes Malmesburiensis Vita, carmine expressa. Authore seipso, Scripta anno 1672, London, 1681. The day of his birth,' says Aubrey, 'was April the fifth, A.D. 1588, on a Friday morning, which that year was Good Friday. His mother fell in labour with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards, he told me himself, between the hours of four and six.' Aubrey then says that his nativity was as 'I have it more exact from his own mouth, 5h. 21. manè;' that his horoscope had in it a satellitium, and that it is a maxim in astrology that a native that hath a satellitium in his ascendant proves more eminent in his life than ordinary.'— Aubrey's Lives, vol. ii. pp. 598, 599.