Note 12 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The next great freethinking figure in England is Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the most important thinker of his age, after Descartes, and hardly less influential. But the purpose of Hobbes being always substantially political and regulative, his unfaith in the current religion is only incidentally revealed in the writings in which he seeks to show the need for keeping it under monarchic control.12 Hobbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-Puritan philosopher; and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes of the majority he is obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet nothing is more certain than that he was no orthodox Christian; and even his professed theism resolves itself somewhat easily into virtual agnosticism on logical pressure. No thought of prudence could withhold him from showing, in a discussion on words, that he held the doctrine of the Logos to be meaningless.13 Of atheism he was repeatedly accused by both royalists and rebels; and his answer was forensic rather than fervent, alike as to his scripturalism, his Christianity, and his impersonal conception of Deity.14 Reviving as he did the ancient rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world,15 he gave a clear footing for atheism as against the Judæo-Christian view. In affirming “one God eternal” of whom men “cannot have any idea in their mind, answerable to his nature,” he was negating all creeds. He expressly contends, it is true, for the principle of a Providence; but it is hard to believe that he laid any store by prayer, public or private; and it would appear that whatever thoughtful atheism there was in England in the latter part of the century looked to him as its philosopher, insofar as it did not derive from Spinoza.16 Nor could the Naturalist school of that day desire a better, terser, or more drastic scientific definition of religion than Hobbes gave them: “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, Religion; not allowed, Superstition.”17 As the Churchmen readily saw, his insistence on identifying the religion of a country with its law plainly implied that no religion is any more “revealed” than another. With him too begins (1651) the public criticism of the Bible on literary or documentary grounds;18 though, as we have seen, this had already gone far in private;19 and he gave a new lead, partly as against Descartes, to a materialistic philosophy.20 His replies to the theistic and spiritistic reasonings of Descartes’s Méditations are, like those of Gassendi, unrefuted and irrefutable; and they are fundamentally materialistic in their drift.21 He was, in fact, in a special and peculiar degree for his age, a freethinker; and so deep was his intellectual hostility to the clergy of all species that he could not forego enraging those of his own political side by his sarcasms.22 Here he is in marked contrast with Descartes, who dissembled his opinion about Copernicus and Galileo for peace’ sake,23 and was the close friend of the apologist Mersenne down to his death.24