HOBBES, THOMAS (b. Malmesbury, England, 5 April 1588; d. Hardwick, Derbyshire, England, 4 December 1679), political philosophy, moral philosophy, geometry, optics.

He stayed in London for a year and then retired to Chatsworth, where the Cavendish family treated him with affection and even a certain deference, as befitted a philosopher of international renown. But the shock inflicted by Leviathan on clerical and lay opinion produced a rising tide of hostile criticism, some of it intelligent and philosophical but much of it in the form of abuse.12 Hobbes was pronounced atheist, heretic, and libertine. He was the “Monster of Malmesbury,” “a pander to bestiality” whose “doctrines have had so great a share of the debauchery of his Generation, that a good Christian can hardly hear his name without saying of his prayers.”13 It is true that Hobbes had his admirers and defenders, both on the Continent and in England, including such perceptive opponents as Samuel von Pufendorf and James Harrington, who understood that De cive and Leviathan were works to be reckoned with; but the clergy of all persuasions, as well as the common lawyers and university dons, united in their opposition to Hobbes. Indeed, his doctrines were cited by the House of Commons as a probable cause of the Great Fire of 1666.

Part of Hobbes's difficulties can be traced to a controversy between himself and John Bramhall, bishop of Derry (Londonderry) and later archbishop of Armagh. The two had met in 1645 at Paris, where they debated the subject of free will. Bramhall committed his ideas to paper; Hobbes wrote a rejoinder. Both agreed not to publish what they had written, but Hobbes's side of the question was put into print without his permission in a little treatise called Of Liberty and Necessity (1654). Bramhall, outraged by what he considered to be Hobbes's discourtesy in ignoring his side, published in 1655 all that had passed between them. Thus was launched a controversy which continued until Hobbes had the last word with the posthumous publication of An Answer to a Book by Dr Bramhall Called The Catching of the Leviathan (1682). Hobbes's views were strictly determinist. A man, he said, is “free” to do anything he desires if there are no obstacles in his way; but his desire to do anything has necessary and material causes. To Bramhall this doctrine was the essence of impiety; it would deny any meaning to rewards for good actions or punishments for evil ones, thus overturning the whole apparatus of religious worship. For his part Hobbes admitted that piety might not be promoted by his doctrine, but “truth is truth” and he would not be silent.

Hobbes was not molested personally during this last period of his life because he enjoyed the protection of Charles II, although he was deeply alarmed when, sometime in the 1660's, a committee of bishops in the House of Lords moved that he be burned for heresy. He wrote, but did not publish, a short treatise in the form of a legal brief showing that the law of heresy had been repealed in the time of Elizabeth and had never been revived, so that there could be no legal grounds for executing him.14 Nothing came of the episcopal agitation; but the king refused to license a history in English by Hobbes of the Long Parliament, published posthumously as Behemoth, and the crown prohibited Hobbes from publishing any other works in English on the subject of politics or religion. Not included in this ban was the Latin translation of Leviathan, made by Henry Stubbe and first published at Amsterdam in 1668 and at London in 1678.

A second controversy, even more absorbing of Hobbes's energy than his debate with Bramhall, was his dispute with John Wallis on questions of geometry. Wallis was a vastly superior mathematician who made important contributions to the development of the calculus. But he was an acrimonious, coarse-tempered man; in a controversy that lasted almost twenty-five years, Wallis pressed his mathematical advantage with ferocious zeal, also attacking Hobbes for what he thought were errors in Greek, for having a West Country manner of speech, for being a rustic, for disloyalty to the crown, and so on. Hobbes's replies were better mannered, but he too was capable of losing his temper. The issue between the two men was whether Hobbes had succeeded, as he claimed, both in squaring the circle and in duplicating the cube. Hobbes boldly announced success in both enterprises, although he modified his claim slightly in some of the later books written against Wallis. It should be observed that neither Hobbes nor Wallis doubted the possibility of a quadrature, a proof of its impossibility not having been discovered until the nineteenth century; moreover, the problem of the quadrature was not only venerable but had a particular vitality in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Wallis was able to show that Hobbes's claim of success was unfounded. Hobbes made no original contributions to geometry but, as A. De Morgan has written, though Hobbes was “very wrong in his quadrature ... he was not the ignoramus in geometry that he is sometimes supposed. His writings, erroneous as they are in many things, contain acute remarks on points of principle.”15 Hobbes's passion for geometry derived from his analytic conception of truth. He appreciated the unity and logical structure of geometry, its freedom from verbal confusion, and its reasoning from definitions placed in their proper order.

Algebra, on the other hand, failed to attract