Hobbes, THOMAS, was born at Malmesbury on the 5th April 1588, and was the son of the vicar of Charlton and Westport adjoining that town. About the age of fifteen he was entered at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he was put through the usual course of Aristotelian logic and physics. His intellectual interests remained entirely unawakened, and long afterwards he attacked the universities in no measured terms for their failure to keep pace with the time. At the age of twenty, having taken his degree and quitted Oxford, he was recommended to Lord Hardwick, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, as tutor to his eldest son. This was the beginning of an intimate connection with that great family, which lasted through his long life. In 1610 he went abroad with his pupil, and made the tour of France and Italy. After his return he still continued to live with the Cavendish family, and his residence in London afforded him opportunities of becoming acquainted with Bacon, Herbert of Cherbury, Ben Jonson, and other distinguished men of the time. The first ambition to awake in him was that of the scholar, and he devoted his abundant leisure to a critical reading of the classical poets and historians. The outcome of these studies was his translation of Thucydides, which appeared in 1628, when he had already reached the mature age of forty. The Civil War was already looming in the distance, and in the choice of subject we may discern Hobbes's strong interest in politics—an interest which ultimately dominated his whole philosophy. The Earl of Devonshire died in 1626, and to Hobbes's great grief the second earl, his pupil, followed his father to the grave in 1628. Next year Hobbes accepted an engagement as travelling tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, and in this capacity paid a second visit to the Continent; but in 1631 his connection with the Devonshire family was resumed. By the desire of the dowager-countess he undertook the education of the young earl, the son of his former pupil, then only thirteen. From 1634 to 1637 they travelled abroad, and on this occasion Hobbes came into contact with Galileo in Italy, while in Paris he was admitted to the scientific and philosophical circle of which Père Mersenne was the centre.
Since 1629, when chance introduced him to a copy of Euclid's Elements, he had been an ardent student of geometry, and about the same time or a little later he began to be powerfully drawn to the new 'mechanical philosophy' of Galileo. In motion and the laws of motion he seemed to see a universal principle of explanation, and when he returned to England in 1637 it was with the outline of a comprehensive philosophical system already before his mind. Descartes, whose Discourse on Method appeared in that year, was also an adherent of the new physics, but limited and supplemented its explanations by the subjective principle of self-consciousness. Hobbes did not occupy himself (except incidentally) with the philosophical question of knowledge, but contented himself with giving an objective explanation of sensation and all mental facts in terms of motion. Regarded as the object of science, the world consisted, in Hobbes's view, of natural bodies (inanimate and animate) and political bodies, or organised aggregates of living men. Natural philosophy and civil philosophy therefore cover the whole ground; but, as the explanation of civil institutions is to be found in the nature of man, man stands out from among all other natural bodies, and forms, as it were, a bridge between nature and society. Accordingly Hobbes planned three systematic treatises, De Corpore, De Homine, De Cive; but the pressure of political events prevented him from publishing his ideas in their natural sequence, and some parts of the scheme are much less fully worked out than others. On his return to England he continued to live with the young Earl of Devonshire, and was on intimate terms with Lord Falkland, Hyde, and others engaged in the political struggles of the time. The need of a political philosophy which would put an end to anarchy by a true theory of the governing power became every day clearer to him, and in 1640 he wrote 'a little treatise in English' in defence of the royal prerogative. This is preserved in MS. under the title of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politique, and is identical with the two treatises, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, published separately ten years later. Fearful lest the Parliament should take notice of his treatise, Hobbes fled in the same year to Paris, which continued to be his home till 1651.
He was welcomed by his scientific friends, and Mersenne induced him to contribute to Descartes' Meditations a series of criticisms thereon. But the political needs of the time still lay nearest his heart, and in 1642 appeared the De Cive, a fuller statement of his theory of government. Very few copies of this edition were struck off, and the book appeared with a new title in 1647 as Elementa Philosophica de Cive. In 1650 appeared the two treatises already mentioned, and in 1651 he issued a vigorous English translation of the De Cive (Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society) by way of introduction to the comprehensive English work on which he had been engaged for several years. Leviathan was printed in England, and appeared in the summer of 1651. Its rationalistic criticism and its uncompromising reduction of religion to a department of state mortally offended the royalist clergy of the exiled court. Hobbes had been mathematical tutor to
Prince Charles in 1647, and the latter always continued to take a friendly interest in his old preceptor; but on the publication of Leviathan the author was informed that the young king refused to see him. With constitutional timidity he once more took refuge in flight. He returned to England in the end of 1651, and sent in his submission to the government of the Commonwealth, it being one of the principles with which Leviathan concludes that an ordinary citizen has a right to turn to a new power that can give protection, however little he may approve of the circumstances of its origin. Hobbes settled in London to work out the remaining parts of his scheme. The De Corpore appeared in 1655, and the De Homine, a rather perfunctory revision of the old Human Nature (with expansion on the side of optical theory), in 1658. From 1654 onwards Hobbes was engaged in almost perpetual controversy, first with Bramhall on liberty and necessity, and then with Ward, Wallis, and Boyle in defence of his own hopelessly indefensible mathematical ideas, which involved the quadrature of the circle and similar absurdities. The second controversy dragged over a quarter of a century, Hobbes's last blow being delivered after he had completed his ninetieth year. After the Restoration Charles granted him a pension of £100, and is said to have been always delighted with the old man's wit and repartees, but the bishops and the church party looked with no favour upon the author of Leviathan. A series of attacks upon the book began to appear, and it was condemned by the House of Commons in 1666. Three of his later works—Behemoth, The Common Laws, and a metrical Historia Ecclesiastica, all written about 1670—he was obliged to leave unpublished (though Behemoth issued surreptitiously from the press just before his death). A collected edition of his Latin works in 1668 had to appear at Amsterdam. At the age of eighty-four Hobbes amused himself by writing an autobiography in Latin verse, and within the next three years he completed a verse translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In 1675 he left London, and the rest of his days were spent at Hardwick and Chatsworth, the two Derbyshire seats of the Devonshire family. He died at Hardwick on the 4th December 1679, in his ninety-second year.
Hobbes stands between Bacon and Locke as the second in order of time of the great English philosophers, but he stands apart from both. It is by his contributions to scientific psychology, to ethics, and to political theory that he takes rank as an original thinker. In the present century attention has been drawn afresh to his acute psychological analyses by James Mill and the English associationists. His ethical theory, based on pure selfishness on the one hand and the arbitrary prescription of a sovereign power on the other, determined negatively the whole course of ethical speculation in England for a hundred years. Cumberland, Cudworth, and Clarke, and in a somewhat less degree Shaftesbury and Butler, are in the first instance critics and opponents of Hobbes. His political absolutism, however, is the most famous part of his speculations. The state of nature, he argues, is a state of war and insecurity (homo homini lupus). Moved by a desire to escape from the intolerable evils of such a condition, human beings enter into a species of contract by which they surrender their individual rights, and constitute a state under an absolute sovereignty. The sovereign power need not be monarchical (though Hobbes's individual preference is for that form of government), but, whatever form it assume, it is absolute and irresponsible. It was far from the intention of Hobbes to justify tyranny, but Leviathan was to him like 'a mortal god,' the only guarantee for security and settled government. The theory was substantially adopted by Spinoza; and, stripped of their accidental features, Hobbes's ethico-political ideas had great influence upon the philosophical Radicals of the 19th century. No account of Hobbes would be complete which omitted to mention his admirably clear and trenchant style. A collected edition of his works was published by Sir W. Molesworth in 16 vols. (1839-45). The best account of his life and his place in the history of thought is to be found in Professor Croom Robertson's Hobbes (Blackwood's 'Philosophical Classics,' 1886).