ON HUMAN NATURE AND ITS CAPACITIES FOR VIRTUE. 85 



states a connection which, he has expressed with that 

 unrivalled point and perspicuity which is characteristic 

 of all his writings. But Hobbes had only divined the 

 general fact of the dependence of psychical on physio- 

 logical conditions ; he did not know the subordinate laws 

 which govern the union and mutual dependence of body 

 and mind ; and he had not reached his general conviction 

 by mounting through lower laws and facts scientifically 

 established. In another direction, Hobbes had also per- 

 ceived the general truth, without knowing the details 

 which would have justified it. He had perceived the 

 truth, of great and fundamental importance in morals, 

 that most of our social and disinterested sentiments are 

 traceable in large measure (if not, as he believed, wholly) 

 to a self-regarding root ; above all, he saw that moral 

 obligation originally owed and still owes much of its bind- 

 ing force to the imperative of the sovereign authority, 

 furthering the ends of the general social weal. These 

 central facts of the sciences of ethics and of society, Hobbes 

 apprehended with the clearest mental vision, and he ex- 

 pressed them with wonderful clearness and brevity of 

 language. But here also he lacked our later knowledge. 

 He wanted the light which recent research has shed upon 

 the composition of primitive societies, and the real primi- 

 tive condition of men, so different from his hypothesis of 

 mutualrepulsion. In short, Hobbes wanted the conclusions 

 of science, of physiology, of natural history, of civil history, 

 in order to free the great and profound guesses of genius 

 from the accompanying admixture of fiction and hypothesis 

 thrown out at hazard, and to connect his truthful and 

 penetrating but partial glances with the real and scienti- 

 fically established facts and laws of human nature. But 

 still, what Hobbes, what Butler, the most original thinker 

 after Hobbes, and what the other moralists of the 



