Note 352 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 4)

Hobbes explains the image in his Introduction. He does not disguise his opinion that Men may be converted into Automatons; and if he were not very ingenious we might lose our patience. He was so delighted with this whimsical fancy of his “artificial man,” that he carried it on to government itself, and employed the engraver to impress the monstrous personification on our minds, even clearer than by his reasonings. The curious design forms the frontispiece of “The Leviathan.” He borrowed the name from that sea-monster, that mightiest of powers, which Job has told is not to be compared with any on earth. The sea-monster is here, however, changed into a colossal man, entirely made up of little men from all the classes of society, bearing in the right hand the sword, and in the left the crosier. The compartments are full of political allegories. An expression of Lord Clarendon’s in the preface to his “Survey of the Leviathan,” shows our philosopher’s infatuation to this “idol of the Den,” as Lord Bacon might have called the intellectual illusion of the philosopher. Hobbes, when at Paris, showed a proof-sheet or two of his work to Clarendon, who, he soon discovered, could not approve of the hardy tenets. “He frequently came to me,” says his lordship, “and told me his book (which he would call Leviathan) was then printing in England. He said, that he knew when I read his book I would not like it, and mentioned some of his conclusions: upon which I asked him, why he would publish such doctrine: to which, after a discourse, between jest and earnest, he said, The truth is, I have a mind to go home!” Some philosophical systems have, probably, been raised “between jest and earnest;” yet here was a text-book for the despot, as it is usually accepted, deliberately given to the world, for no other purpose than that the philosopher was desirous of changing his lodgings at Paris for his old apartments in London!