Note 765 — CANTO THE FIFTEENTH.
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Hobbes: who, doubting of his own soul, paid that compliment to the souls of other people as to decline their visits, of which he had some apprehension.
[Bayle (see art. "Hobbes" [Dict. Crit. and Hist., 1736, iii. 471, note N.]) quotes from Vita Hobb., p. 106: "He was as falsely accused by some of being unwilling to be alone, because he was afraid of spectres and apparitions, vain bugbears of fools, which he had chased away by the light of his Philosophy," and proceeds to argue that, perhaps, after all, Hobbes was afraid of the dark. "He was timorous to the last degree, and consequently he had reason to distrust his imagination when he was alone in a chamber in the night; for in spite of him the memory of what he had read and heard concerning apparitions would revive, though he was not persuaded of the reality of these things." See, however, for his own testimony that he was "not afrayd of sprights," Letters and Lives of Eminent Persons, by John Aubrey, 1813, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 624.]