Note 366 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 4)

It is said that Hobbes completely recanted all his opinions; and proceeded so far as to declare that the opinions he had published in his “Leviathan,” were not his real sentiments, and that he neither maintained them in public nor in private. Wood gives this title to a work of his—“An Apology for Himself and his Writings,” but without date. Some have suspected that this Apology, if it ever existed, was not his own composition. Yet why not? Hobbes, no doubt, thought that “The Leviathan” would outlast any recantation; and, after all, that a recantation is by no means a refutation!—recantations usually prove the force of authority, rather than the force of conviction. I am much pleased with a Dr. Pocklington, who hit the etymology of the word recantation with the spirit. Accused and censured, for a penance he was to make a recantation, which he began thus:—“If canto be to sing, recanto is to sing again:” so that he re-chanted his offensive principles by his recantation!

I suspect that the apology Wood alludes to was only a republication of Hobbes’s Address to the King, prefixed to the “Seven Philosophical Problems,” 1662, where he openly disavows his opinions, and makes an apology for the “Leviathan.” It is curious enough to observe how he acts in this dilemma. It was necessary to give up his opinions to the clergy, but still to prove they were of an innocent nature. He therefore acknowledges that “his theological notions are not his opinions, but propounded with submission to the power ecclesiastical, never afterwards having maintained them in writing or discourse.” Yet, to show the king that the regal power incurred no great risk in them, he laid down one principle, which could not have been unpleasing to Charles II. He asserts, truly, that he never wrote against episcopacy; “yet he is called an Atheist, or man of no religion, because he has made the authority of the Church depend wholly upon the regal power, which, I hope, your majesty will think is neither Atheism nor Heresy.” Hobbes considered the religion of his country as a subject of law, and not philosophy. He was not for separating the Church from the State; but, on the contrary, for joining them more closely. The bishops ought not to have been his enemies; and many were not.