Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 8, 2025
That men should observe compacts is a great and undeniable rule, yet, in this, a Christian would give as reason the command of God; a Hobbist would say that the public requires it, and would punish for disobeying it; and an old heathen philosopher would have urged that it was opposed to human virtue and perfection.
Mag. 1783, p. 719, I find in the list of 'B-nk-ts, Josiah Twamley, the elder, of Warwick, ironmonger. 'Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance, as being a Scotchman; but not upon a principle of duty, for he has no principle. If he is anything, he is a Hobbist. Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 30. Horace Walpole's opinion was very different. 'Are not atheism and bigotry first cousins?
He was no other than the laureate and dramatist Will Davenant, known on the London boards by that name for a good many years before the war, but now Sir William Davenant, knighted by the King in Sept. 1643 for his Army-plotting and his gallant soldiering. He was over forty years of age, and had just turned, or was turning, a Roman Catholic in Paris, or perhaps rather a Roman Catholic Hobbist.
But a very good advocate might be a very bad minister; and, of all the ministers who had brought the kingdom into difficulties, this plausible, fair-spoken person was the most dangerous. Nor was the old reprobate ashamed to add that he was afraid that his Lordship was no better than a Hobbist in religion.
JOHNSON. 'Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance as being a Scotchman; but not upon a principle of duty; for he has no principle. If he is any thing, he is a Hobbist. There was something not quite serene in his humour to-night, after supper; for he spoke of hastening away to London, without stopping much at Edinburgh. I reminded him that he had General Oughton and many others to see.
The King, Clarendon is glad to tell, had defended him, and said he had perfect trust in him, and was sure he would never desert the Church. Something of the wit, or of the Roman Catholic Hobbist and freethinker, had then flashed out in the speech of the distressed envoy. He "offered some reasons of his own in which he mentioned the Church slightingly."
Prejudice of this kind sounded oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist philosophy must necessarily have whether on the current religion or on the current notions of political and social morality.
But yet, if a Christian, who has the view of happiness and misery in another life, be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason: Because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us. But if a Hobbist be asked why? he will answer: Because the public requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you if you do not.
An epicurean or a Hobbist readily allows, that there is such a thing as a friendship in the world, without hypocrisy or disguise; though he may attempt, by a philosophical chymistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another, and explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances.
JOHNSON. 'Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance, as being a Scotchman; but not upon a principle of duty; for he has no principle. If he is any thing, he is a Hobbist. There was something not quite serene in his humour to night, after supper; for he spoke of hastening away to London, without stopping much at Edinburgh. I reminded him, that he had General Oughton and many others to see.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking