164 



first part of the " Leviathan," to which I intend to confine mj' remarks, 

 Hohbes, in a masterly and orderly manner, and in language clear as 

 ciystal, and solid as crystal too, sets himself to work to explain and 

 develope his then novel views on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. 

 Well knowing the peculiar force of au unqualified and startling assertion, 

 he commences his hook with a " petitio priucipii" of the veiy broadest 

 kind. " Concerning the thoughts of men," he says, " the original of 

 them all is what we call sense." Before this dogma of Protagoras,* 

 thus revived by Hobbes, could gain any wide-spread belief among 

 men, all imagination must be destroyed. It is, therefore, at the 

 Imagination, the source of all that is noble and beautiful, that 

 Hobbes aims his next blow. " Imagination," he jn-oceeds, " is 

 nothing but decaying sense, and is found in men as well as in 



many other livinr/ creatures, as well sleeping as waking, 



so that Imagination and Memory are but one. Much memory, or 

 memory of roany things, is called Experience." Having thus ingeniously 

 reduced Imagination to Experience, he next proceeds to deny the 

 existence of Ideas. " Whatever we imagine is finite ; therefore there 

 is no idea nor conception of any thing that we call infinite." We may 

 here again observe that Locke 'sf theory of all ideas being acquired by 



Ionian sbpliists, places Truth in observation and e.^peii«!iice, i.e. in Perception. Lcche's 

 ailmirer and disciple, Home Tooke, expresses this doctrine in the clearest and fullest 

 raanner, when he says, " Tnilh is nothing hut what every man irowelh ; there is no such 

 thing as eternal, immutahle, everlasting truth ; fur the truth of one person may be opposite 

 to the truth of another" a passage in which the philology is as faulty as the morality and 

 the metaphysics. 



* It lias already heen shown that the error of Protagoras arose from conceiving the 

 material creation to he every Ihhig. Seeing everylhing perceptible by sense to be undergoing 

 a perpetual change, he concluded that Science and Truth must be changeable and uncer- 

 tain, cnnl'using the conceptions peculiar to physical with those peculiar to moral and 

 dialectical science, and founding that system of cold and barren materialism, which, itself 

 denying Truth, has set up its claim for truth. 



+ Loclie, and the large class of moral philosophers who hare adopted his system, deny 

 the existence of innate ideas, and, consequently, all innate moral sense of right and wrong, 

 though, as I have elsewhere shown, these very words, n'p^i, wrong, duly, ought, kc, imply 

 those innate moial obligations which the writers of this school are so anxious to disprove. 

 It would be difficult to say how the geometrical idea of a point, as " that which has no parts 

 or magnitude," or of a line, as " length without breadth," could be obtained from any 

 deductions of observation or experience. The German philosopher Novalis has well 

 observed that every science has some ideal aim far above all experience, and impossible to 

 be derived from any experience, — mechanics, its perpetual motion ; chemistry, its menstrum 

 universale and philosopher's stone ; mathematics, its quadrature of the circle ; physics, its 

 vital elixir; politics, its free and perfect form of government; and philosophy, its first 

 principle, (See Novalis's "Schriften," vol. 2, p. 231 ; and "' Comp. Coleridge's Friend," vol. .3, 

 p. 173; "Church and Staie," p. ll-'^:i; and the "Dialogue between Demosius and 

 JVIystes," p. 192.) 



