He was not idle, however, either at this time or at any other during his long life. He had a
controversy with Bishop Bramhall on free will; he was himself a rigid determinist. Over-
estimating his own capacities as a geometer, he imagined that he had discovered how to square the
circle; on this subject he very foolishly embarked on a controversy with Wallis, the professor of
geometry at Oxford. Naturally the professor succeeded in making him look silly.
At the Restoration, Hobbes was taken up by the less earnest of the king's friends, and by the king
himself, who not only had Hobbes's portrait on his walls, but awarded him a pension of £100 a
year--which, however, His Majesty forgot to pay. The Lord Chancellor Clarendon was shocked by
the favour shown to a man suspected of atheism, and so was Parliament. After the Plague and the
Great Fire, when people's superstitious fears were aroused, the House of Commons appointed a
committee to inquire into atheistical writings, specially mentioning those of Hobbes. From this
time onwards, he could not obtain leave in England to print anything on controversial subjects.
Even his history of the Long Parliament, which he called Behemoth, though it set forth the most
orthodox doctrine, had to be printed abroad ( 1668). The collected edition of his works in 1688
appeared in Amsterdam. In his old age, his reputation abroad was much greater than in England.
To occupy his leisure, he wrote, at eighty-four, an autobiography in Latin verse, and published, at
eighty-seven, a translation of Homer. I cannot discover that he wrote any large books after the age
of eighty-seven.
We will now consider the doctrines of the Leviathan, upon which the fame of Hobbes mainly
rests.
He proclaims, at the very beginning of the book, his thoroughgoing materialism. Life, he says, is
nothing but a motion of the limbs, and therefore automata have an artificial life. The
commonwealth, which he calls Leviathan, is a creation of art, and is in fact an artificial man. This
is intended as more than an analogy, and is worked out in some detail. The sovereignty is an
artificial soul. The pacts and covenants by which "Leviathan" is first created take the place of
God's fiat when He said "Let Us make man."
The first part deals with man as an individual, and with such general philosophy as Hobbes deems
necessary. Sensations are caused by the pressure of objects; colours, sounds, etc. are not in the
objects. The