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True, that science has made some progress since Hobbes's time, and that we have safer ground to stand upon than the speculations of Hobbes or Rousseau.
Nor can those claims be said to be very securely based in respect of matter. It is impossible to believe that posterity will trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism on which he wasted so much precious time and energy; they will have been arranged by the Prince's governor on the shelves, with Hobbes's mathematics and Southey's political essays.
Here Locke deduces the power that one man may have over another; community could not exist if transgressors were not punished. Every wrongdoer places himself in "a state of war." Here is the difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which men, says Locke, have confounded alluding probably to Hobbes's notion of the lawlessness of human society in the original condition.
I speak of those who do it in all seriousness, to draw thence evil conclusions, by which their conduct is tainted; for there are some who only do it to show off their own acumen. Hobbes's book De Cive, of which only a few copies had at that time been printed for distribution among friends, but to which some notes by the author were added in the second edition which we have.
If you take Carlyle literally when he says that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person who is just having his turn in being hazed.
But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of civil society, the second was the erection of a government.
Law in general is nothing but regulated force, and even liberty is from the very nature of things dependent upon power, upon the protection, that is, of a powerful, well-organised intelligent government. Hobbes's state of war simply threw an unpopular truth 'into a shape likely to be misunderstood. There must be war, or evils worse than war.
Bounce or not bounce, however, certain it is, that Hobbes, to the end of his life, feared that somebody would murder him. In one of these excursions he visited the Peak in Derbyshire, partly in consequence of Hobbes's description of it.
Coming now to modern thinkers, we begin with The circumstances of Hobbes's life, so powerful in determining the nature of his opinions, had an equally marked effect on the order and number of expositions that he gave to the psychological and political parts of his system.
There was not a waggon that went by without a meaning to the squire. One perhaps brought a load of wool from the downs: it was old Hobbes's, whose affairs he had known these forty years. Another, with wheat, was Lambourne's team: he lost heavily in 1879, the wet year.
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