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For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State.
To this corresponds a profound difference in their systems, which is by no means adequately characterized by saying that Hobbes brings into the foreground the mathematical element neglected by his predecessor, and turns his attention chiefly to politics. The dependence of Hobbes on Bacon is, in spite of their personal acquaintance, not so great as formerly was universally assumed.
It is each Individual who for himself subscribes the Social Compact. It is some shifting sandbank in which the grains are Individual men, that according to the theory of Hobbes is hardened into the social rock by the wholesome discipline of force. It is an Individual who, in the picture drawn by Blackstone, "is in the occupation of a determined spot of ground for rest, for shade, or the like."
There is not a single principle in the Social Contract which may not be found either in Hobbes, or in Locke, or in Althusen, any more than there is a single proposition of his deism which was not in the air of Geneva when he wrote his Savoyard Vicar.
One section, trained for cities and courts, comprised men familiar with all ancient and modern learning; men able to encounter Hobbes or Bossuet at all the weapons of controversy; men who could, in their sermons, set forth the majesty and beauty of Christianity with such justness of thought, and such energy of language, that the indolent Charles roused himself to listen and the fastidious Buckingham forgot to sneer; men whose address, politeness, and knowledge of the world qualified them to manage the consciences of the wealthy and noble; men with whom Halifax loved to discuss the interests of empires, and from whom Dryden was not ashamed to own that he had learned to write.
In this period we encounter in the philosophical field two of the strongest thinkers who have appeared in modern Europe, Bacon and Hobbes. The first problem was an Analytic Classification of all departments of Human Knowledge, which occupies a portion of his treatise "On the Advancement of Learning."
I should as soon have expected to hear you praise the wicked and foolish work of Hobbes, with his mischievous thesis, "A Deo rex, a rege lex." 'It is true that I contemn and despise the use which Butler hath made of his satire, said Saxon adroitly; 'yet I may admire the satire itself, just as one may admire a damascened blade without approving of the quarrel in which it is drawn.
Hobbes made everything material and subjected it to mathematical laws alone; Spinoza also divested God of intelligence and choice, leaving him a blind power, whence all emanates of necessity. The theologians of the two Protestant parties are equally zealous in refuting an unendurable necessity.
There is a great deal of truth in the well-known assertion of Hobbes, however paradoxical it may at first appear: "If I had read as much as others, I should be as ignorant." One cannot but feel its applicability in the case of some of our acquaintance, who have been for years mere readers at the rate of five or six hours a day.
But the philosophers were during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach by no means, as they thought, impelled solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really impelled them was, in particular, the strong and ever quicker conquering step of natural science and industry.
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