Thomas Hobbes

At least by the beginning of his residence in Paris in 1640, Hobbes had matured the plan for his own philosophical work. It was to consist of three treatises, dealing respectively with matter or body, with human nature, and with society. It was his intention, he says, to have dealt with these subjects in this order, but his country "was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion, and the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war," and this cause, as he said, "ripened and plucked from me this third part" of the system--the book De Cive, published at Paris in 1642. When stable government seemed to have been re-established by the Commonwealth, he had it published in London, in an English version from his own hand, as Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society. The same year, 1651, saw the publication, also in London, of his greatest work, Leviathan, and his own return to England, which now promised a sager shelter to the philosopher than France, where he feared the clergy and was no longer in favor with the remnant of the exiled English court.

The last twenty-eight years of Hobbes's long life were spent in England; and there he soon returned to the house of his old pupil the Earl of Devonshire, who had preceded him in submitting to the Commonwealth and like him welcomed the king on his return. For a year or two after his home-coming, Hobbes resided in London, busied with the completion of his philosophical system, the long-delayed first part of which, De Corpore, appeared in 1655, and the second part, De Homine, in 1656. The latter work contains little or nothing of importance that Hobbes had not said already; but the former deals with the logical, mathematical, and physical principles which were to serve as foundation for the imposing structure he had built. In 1654, the tract Of Liberty and Necessity, which he had written eight years before in reply to the bishop Bramhall's arguments, was published by some person unnamed into whose hands it had fallen. Not suspecting Hobbes's innocence in the matter of the publication, Bramhall replied with some heat on the personal question and much fullness on the matter in hand in the following year; and this led to Hobbes's elaborate defense is The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, published in 1656.

A bill aimed at blasphemous literature passed the Commons in January 1667, and Leviathan was one of two books mentioned in it. The bill never passed both houses; but Hobbes was seriously frightened. He is said to have become more regular at church and communion. He also studied the law of heresy, and wrote a short treatise on the subject, proving that there was no court by which he could be judged. But he was not permitted to excite the public conscience by further publications on matters of religion. A Latin translation of Leviathan (containing a new appendix bringing its theology into line with the Nicene creed) was issued at Amsterdam in 1668. Other works, however, dating from the same year, were kept back--the tract on Heresy, the answer to Bramhall's attack on Leviathan, and Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England. About the same time was written his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. His Historia Ecclesiastica, in elegiac verse, dates from about his eightieth year. When he was eighty-four, he wrote his autobiography in Latin verse. In 1673, he published a translation in rhymed quatrains of four books of the Odyssey; and he had completed both Iliad and Odyssey when, in 1675, he left London for the last time. Thereafter he lived with the Cavendish family at one of their seats in Derbyshire. He died at Hardwick on December 4, 1679.