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Updated: June 21, 2025
You are on the bed of purple, senator." The senator was encouraged, and went on: "Let us be good fellows." "Good devils even," said the Bishop. "I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens, Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the philosophers in my library gilded on the edges." "Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop. The senator resumed:
But we have to look the facts in the face, and to realise that the educational system of a nation must endeavour to secure the industrial and military efficiency of its future members as a means of security and protection against other competing nations and as one of the essential conditions for the self-preservation of the particular State in that war of nation against nation which Hobbes so eloquently describes: "For the nature of war, consists not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary."
Where the human spirit had been buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins of that Empire; and the papacy called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated, throned, and crowned, upon the ashes thereof to some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.
Even the Essays and the History of Henry VII. he had put into Latin "by some good pens that do not forsake me." Among these translators are said to have been George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful authority, Ben Jonson and Selden. The Essays were also translated into Latin and Italian with Bacon's sanction.
Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sovereignty; but this was not his only lack of originality. His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Hobbes, the English materialist, is among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of this theory. He held that men lived, prior to the creation of civil society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and every one had an equal right to every thing, and to take any thing on which he could lay his hands and was strong enough to hold.
These are the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved after their death. And we have now invented the art of making their extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic characters the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever.
In his “Reflexions sur le Livre de Hobbes,” he says, that although the will is determined in all cases by the divine omnipotence, yet is it free from an absolute or mathematical necessity, “because the contrary volition might happen without implying a contradiction.” True, the contrary volition might happen without implying a contradiction; for God himself might cause it to exist.
It proves, in short, that to pass through this finite space requires a time which is infinitely divisible, but not an infinite time; the confounding of which distinction Hobbes had already seen to be the gist of the fallacy. But, in another sense, to have a right to do a thing is the opposite of having no right to do it, i.e., of being under a moral obligation to forbear doing it.
It was also the most striking and successful illustration of what may be called the new prose style, or that style which, initiated by Hobbes and developed by Sprat, Cowley, and Denham blended the ease and plasticity of colloquy with the solidity and dignity of rhetoric, of that style in which Dryden was soon to become a consummate master.
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