fifteen, he went to Oxford, where they taught him scholastic logic and the philosophy of Aristotle.
These were his bugbears in later life, and he maintained that he had profited little by his years at
the university; indeed universities in general are constantly criticized in his writings. In the year
1610, when he was twenty-two years old, he became tutor to Lord Hardwick (afterwards second
Earl of Devonshire), with whom he made the grand tour. It was at this time that he began to know
the work of Galileo and Kepler, which profoundly influenced him. His pupil became his patron,
and remained so until he died in 1628. Through him, Hobbes met Ben Jonson and Bacon and Lord
Herbert of Cherbury, and many other important men. After the death of the Earl of Devonshire,
who left a young son, Hobbes lived for a time in Paris, where he began the study of Euclid; then
he became tutor to his former pupil's son. With him he travelled to Italy, where he visited Galileo
in 1636. In 1637 he came back to England.
The political opinions expressed in the Leviathan, which were Royalist in the extreme, had been
held by Hobbes for a long time. When the Parliament of 1628 drew up the Petition of Right, he
published a translation of Thucydides, with the expressed intention of showing the evils of
democracy. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, and Laud and Strafford were sent to the
Tower, Hobbes was terrified and fled to France. His book De Cive, written in 1641, though not
published till 1647, sets forth essentially the same theory as that of the Leviathan. It was not the
actual occurrence of the Civil War that caused his opinions, but the prospect of it; naturally,
however, his convictions were strengthened when his fears were realized.
In Paris he was welcomed by many of the leading mathematicians and men of science. He was one
of those who saw Descartes' Meditations before they were published, and wrote objections to
them, which were printed by Descartes with his replies. He also soon had a large company of
English Royalist refugees with whom to associate. For a time, from 1646 to 1648, he taught
mathematics to the future Charles II. When, however, in 1651, he published the Leviathan, it
pleased no one. Its rationalism offended most of the refugees, and its bitter attacks on the Catholic
Church offended the French government. Hobbes therefore fled secretly to London, where he
made submission to Cromwell, and abstained from all political activity.