In the same year, shortly after leaving the university, Hobbes was recommended by Wilkinson as tutor to the son of William Cavendish, baron of Hardwick, and thus began a connexion with a great and powerful family that ended only with his life. Twice it was loosened— once, for a short time, after twenty years, and again, for a longer period, during the Civil War—but it never was broken, and during more than fifty years, to the credit alike of him and his patrons, it was of the closest character. William Cavendish, second son of the famous “Bess of Hardwick” by the second of her four marriages, had just by the favour of King James obtained his barony, before being advanced, a few years later, to the earldom of Devonshire. His son, the heir to a name thus rising as well as to a great fortune, was hardly younger than Hobbes, and was indeed already married, a f e w m onths before, at the instance of the king, who made up the match, to the only daughter of the Scottish Lord Bruce of Kinloss, though by reason of the bride’s age, which was only twelve years, the pair had no establishment for some time to come. In the circumstances Hobbes was companion rather than tutor (before becoming secretary) to young Cavendish; and, growing soon greatly attached to each other, they were sent abroad together on the grand tour in 1610. How long they were gone upon this journey, which lay through France, Germany, and Italy, is not known: but it was long enough to give Hobbes the opportunity of acquiring a moderate knowledge of French and Italian; and he did not return without having received a distinct mental impulse that had a lasting effect on his life. The real intellectual activity of that time (still more than five and twenty years before the definite inauguration of modern philosophy by Descartes’s Discourse on Method in 1637) was in the newly enlarged if not newly opened domain of physical science; and Hobbes was little prepared by his juvenile training to understand the achievements of Galileo and Kepler, if he heard anything of them. But he had had a little modicum of scholastic philosophy retailed to him at Oxford; and now, wherever he went, he could hear nothing but words of scorn poured upon all such learning. How it had come to pass that the scholastic way of thinking, once so dominant, was thus discredited at the hands alike of revolutionary thinkers such as Bruno, of scientific workers like Galileo, and of men of the world like Montaigne, he could not know. Accordingly, it seems that at first he was more dismayed to find that the only knowledge to which he could pretend was laughed at by people whom he did not understand, than pleased to be furnished with such an excuse for his own youthful indifference to its value. It was not long, however, before he yielded to the stream. He was not yet able to strike out a new line of thought, and so (like Descartes) rise above the misconceptions mingled with the general aversion from scholasticism, amounting to a neglect of all philosophy. He had but sufficient force of mind to wish to· be seen, like others, at work upon something else. The line he should take could hardly be doubtful; he had nothing to fall back upon except his Latin and Greek. He was no longer so familiar with them, but it was still open to him to become a scholar; nor in the age of Scaliger and Casaubon was there any lack of ambition in making classical study the occupation of a life. The resolution was made when he returned home, if not earlier, and made in a determined spirit; but when after many years’ labour he had made himself a scholar, his true work was still to lie all before him.

Hobbes’s period of scholarly acquirement lasted till 1628, and had as its immediate outcome a translation of Thucydides. In Derbyshire or in London, with his young master, he had abundant leisure and easy access to books, and he went carefully through the classical poets and historians, reading critically with the help of commentators, and at the same time bent on acquiring (as if for future use) a good Latin style, clear and easy to read, because fitting words to thoughts. Among all the ancient writers Thucydides attracted him most, and he seems to have set himself early to the work of translation, wishing others to share in the pleasure and instruction he derived from his favourite’s pages. But when he had finished his work he kept it lying by him for years, being no longer so sure of finding appreciative readers; and when he did send it forth at last, in 1628, he was fain to be content with “the few and better sort.” That he was finally determined to pub lication by the political troubles of the year 1628 may be regarded as certain, not only from his own express declaration at a later time (F⅛. carm. exp.}, but also from unmistakable hints in the account of the life and work of his author prefixed to the translation on its appearance. 1628 was the year of the Petition of Right, extorted by the popular leaders from a reluctant king in the third parliament he had tried within three years of his accession; and, in view of Hobbes’s later activity, it is very significant that just then he should come forward, at the mature age of forty, with his version of the impressive story of the Athenian democracy as the first production of his pen. Nothing else is known of his doings before 1628, except that through his connexion with young Cavendish, who from about the year 1619 became an important social and political figure, he had relations with literary men of note like Ben Jonson, and also with the two philosophical thinkers who before himself rendered the English name illustrious in the 17th century—Bacon and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. If he never had any sympathy with Herbert’s intuitionalist principles in philosophy, he was no less eager, as he afterwards showed, than Herbert to rationalize in matters of religious doctrine, so that he may with the same reason be called the second of the English deists as Herbert has been called the first. With Bacon there is evidence of his having been so intimate (Aubrey’s Lives, pp. 222, 602) that it is not surprising that some writers have been betrayed into describing him as the disciple and follower of the great Instaurator. The facts as recorded, however,—that he used sometimes to walk with Bacon at Gorhambury, and would jot down with exceptional intelligence the eager thinker’s sudden “notions,” also that he was employed to make the Latin version of some of the Essays,— prove nothing of the sort, when weighed against his own disregard of all Bacon’s most characteristic principles, and the other evidence that the impulse to independent philosophical thinking came to him not from Bacon, and not till some time after Bacon’s death in 1626..

So far as we have any positive evidence, it was not before the year 1629 that Hobbes first entered on the path of philosophical inquiry; and meanwhile a great change had been wrought in his outer life. His friend and master, after only about two years’ tenure of the earldom, fell a sudden victim to the plague in June 1628; and the affairs of the Devonshire family having become greatly disordered by lavish expenditure, the widowed countess was left with the task of righting them in the boyhood of the third earl. Hobbes went on for a time living in the household; but his services were no longer in demand as before, and, remaining inconsolable under his personal bereavement, he sought distraction, in 1629, in another engagement which took him abroad as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, of an old Notts family. This, his second, sojourn abroad appears to have been spent chiefly in Paris, and the one important fact recorded of it is that he then first began to look into Euclid. Sojourn and engagement came to an end together in 1631, when he was recalled to train the young earl of Devonshire, now thirteen years old, as he never had had an opportunity of training the boy’s father. In the course of the next seven years Hobbes took his young pupil over rhetoric, logic, astronomy, and the principles of law, with other subjects. Most probably their life for the first three years was in Derbyshire, till they went abroad in the middle of 1634. They remained away till the spring of 1637, and Hobbes went over much the same ground as in his first journey, but now in a very different frame of mind. His head was now full of the thought of motion in nature, and whenever he could meet with the philosophical speculators or scientific workers who were then with a new-born ardour seeking for a clue to the secret of the physical world, none so forward to consort with them as he. He was still in time to pay his respects to the aged Galileo, for whom he conceived and ever retained the warmest admiration; and on the way homewards he spent no less than eight months in daily converse with the members of a busy scientific circle in Paris, held together by the genial influence of the Père Mersenne. From that time (the winter of 1636-7) he too, as he tells us, was numbered among philosophers.

It is not impossible to trace a little more exactly the steps by which Hobbes reached this consummation when he was just touching his fiftieth year. There can be no doubt, it seems, that his introduction to Euclid took place in 1629, and according to Aubrey, who tells the story with a quaint dramatic vigour {Lives, p. 604), the introduction was quite accidental. Euclid’s manner of proof was as a revelation to him, and it became the model for his own way of thinking upon all subjects ever after; nor was he content till he too could be seen at work solving questions of geometry with as much confidence as if he had been, like Descartes, an accomplished mathematician from his boyhood. It is less easy to determine when he awoke to an interest in the physical doctrine of motion. The story told by himself {Vit., p. xx.) is that, being struck one day in a company of learned men by the question, What is sense? which some one asked and nobody could answer, he fell to thinking often on the subject, till it suddenly occurred to him that if bodies and their internal parts were at rest, or were always in the same state of motion, there could be no distinction of anything, and consequently no sense; the cause of all things must, therefore, he presumed, be sought in diversity of movements, and starting from this principle he was driven to geometry for insight into the ground and modes of motion. Unfortunately no date or place is given; but if it may be supposed that he must already have known something of geometry to understand its bearing on the study of motion, the scene or at least the conclusion to which it led should be referred to some time after his casual introduction to Euclid. It is even suggested in one or two of the biographical narratives that the new mental advance was not made till the time of the third journey. Nothing is said, however, which should exclude another account, that on the third journey he began to study the doctrine of motion more seriously, being interested in it before; and as he claims more than once {L. W., v. p. 303; E. W., vii. p. 468) to have explained light and sound by a mechanical hypothesis as far back as 1630, the company-scene (which is more likely to have occurred abroad than in England) and the sudden inspiration may perhaps more safely be assigned to the time of the second journey. But it was not till the third journey that the new interest became an overpowering passion, and the “philosopher” was on his way home before he had advanced so far as to conceive the scheme of a system of thought to the elaboration of which his life should henceforth be devoted.

Hobbes was able to carry out his plan in some twenty years or more from the time of its conception, but the execution was so broken in upon by the dire political events that happened from the year 1637, and became so complicated with other labours, that its stages can hardly be followed without some previous understanding of the relations of the parts of the scheme, as there is reason to believe they were sketched out from the beginning. And there is the more need for some preliminary statement because at least one of the parts—the doctrine of Sian—is far more effectively wrought out in other works than in the treatise De Homine, which professes to contain the formal exposition of it. Hobbes’s notion was that the whole body of philosophical truth should be disposed in three sections, dealing progressively with Body, Man, and State or Society. An anxious political observer before he became a philosopher, he was supremely interested in the problem of con duct; but the philosopher could not be satisfied till the foundations of settled social life were based deep in the constitution of human nature; and his new philosophical insight revealed to him the need and the possibility of interpreting the facts of human nature by what had begun to be known of physical nature generally. He would therefore first work out, in a separate treatise De Corporc, a systematic doctrine of Body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, as motion or mechanical action was now (through Galileo and others) understood, —the theory of motion being applied in the light of mathematical science, after quantity, the subject-matter of mathematics, had been duly considered in its place among the fundamental conceptions of philosophy, and a clear indication had been given, at first starting, of the logical ground and method of all philosophical inquiry. He would then single out Man from the realm ol nature, and, in a treatise De Hornine, show what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation and knowledge, as also of the affections and passions thence resulting, whereby man came into relation with man. Finally he would consider, in a crowning treatise De Civc, how men, being naturally rivals or foes, were moved to enter into the better relation of Society, and demonstrate how this grand and beneficent product of human wit must be regulated if men were not to fall back into brutishness and misery. Such, in briefest summary, was the scheme conceived, at a time of new intellectual expansion, with reference to a threatening movement of social upheaval. We are now to see how it fared in the execution.

Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country seething with discontent. The reign of “Thorough” was collapsing, and the forces pent up since 1629 were soon to rend the fabric of the English state to pieces. In February Hampden’s case began to be tried; in July broke out the Edinburgh riot over Laud’s prayer-book; next year was formed the Solemn League and Covenant; the year after the rebel Scots had the king at their mercy in the open field; and finally, in the spring of 1640, with a new prospect of war, Charles had no resource left but once more, after eleven years of personal rule, to call a parliament. Such a rush of events was but too likely to overpower Hobbes’s resolution to work up to social problems from abstract questions of body and space and motion, and there is clear evidence that he was soon distracted from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. The Short Parliament, as he tells us himself at a later time {E. IK., iv. p. 414), was not dissolved, in three weeks from the time of its meeting, before he had ready “a little treatise in English,” in which he sought to prove that the points of the royal prerogative which the members were determined to dispute before granting supplies, “were inseparably annexed to the sovereignty which they did not then deny to be in the king.” Now it can be proved that at this time he had written not only his Human Nature but also his De Corpore Politico, the two treatises, though published separately ten years later, having been composed as parts of one work; and there cannot be the least question that together they make “the little treatise” just mentioned. We are therefore to understand, first, that he wrote the earliest draft of his political theory...