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the Moral Philosophy of Paley, and the Utilitariauism of Bentham — 

 which had its share in bringing about the French Pi,evolutiou of the 

 18th, as well as the Chartism and Socialism of the 19th century — owes 

 its rise, or, to speak more truly, its revival in England (for the sophists 

 of Greece had anticipated it all,) not, as its advocates pretend, to 

 Bacon,!' but to the circumstance of Hobbes having " a mind to go 

 home." 



Before entering upon an exposition of his metaphysical system, 

 Hobbes, in the introduction of his book, gives us a glimpse of the 

 length to which he was prepared to carry the materialism, and (so to 

 speak) the mechanical nature of his views. " Seeiug," he says, " that 

 life is but a motion of limbs, why may we not say that all automata 

 (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels, as doth a watch,) 

 have an artificial life ? For what is the heart but a spring, and the 

 nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving 

 motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer ?" We 

 shall have occasion hereafter to observe how Hobbes again and again 

 retui'ns to this idea, in which, ap in most things, the Greeks had been 

 before-hand with him, since this principle of aU life being motion, formed 

 the very ground- work of the system of the Ionian philosophers. f In the 



* Tenneraan, Ritler, Schlegel, and other high authorities, are all of opinion that the 

 %ulgar nolioD of Racon having been a mere experimentalist has no foundation in fact. So 

 far from favouring the sonsualistic philosophy, he asserts that " enquiry into the seiisihle 

 and mo/(?n'ai" is but a secondary liind of pliilosophy; and (" Advancement of Learning," 

 p. 44 ; Montague's edit.) he shows that real knowledge does not proceed from " observation 

 and experience," or from the variable representations of the senses, but is concerned about 

 that which is. Frederick Schlegel well says of Bacon, " The dangerous consequences 

 produced by the injudicious extension of his principles, at the time when his followers and 

 admirers in the 18th century thought they could derive more than he had ever dieamt of 

 from experience and the senses, were indeed alarming and reprehensible, but they cannot 

 with justice be ascribed to the spirit of Bacon. Not only in religion, but even in natural 

 science, this great man believed in many things which have been despised as mere super- 

 stitions by his followers and admirers in later times. How little he himself partook in the 

 rude materialism of his followers may be abundantly proved, &c." In fact the systems of 

 Hobbes bore the same relation to that of Bacon as Neo-Platonism did to the Platonic 

 philosophy. (See Coleridge's Friend, vol. 3, p.ssay ix.) 



+ The Ionian philosophers, directing iheir whole attention to external nature, and 

 observing that the whole of the pliijuicdl creation was C(mtinually undergoing a series of 

 changes, maintained that everylhing was like a river, in a perpetual flux ; and tliis 

 theory of the flux of all things, of Becoming alone remaining to the exclusion of Being, 

 quickly paved the way to the denial of any general standard of knowledge, and to that 

 assertion, first openly made by Protagoras, that there is no sncVi thing as univirsul and 

 immntuhle Truth, but that the individual man is the measure of all truth — the dogma here 

 broadly proclnimed wilh all its consequences by Hobbes, and afterwards stri]>pid of the 

 plain unadorned garb with which be hud invested it, and brought forward, veiled in 

 another and a]>parcnt1y rnorc philosophical form bjr Locko ; for be, in common with the 



