PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 597 
whether the father’s claim or the mother’s shall prevail ; ‘ but the question lyeth 
now in the state of mere nature; where there are supposed no lawes of 
matrimony ; no lawes for the education of children; but the Law of Nature, and 
the natural inclination of the Sexes one to another, and to their children.’ ‘If 
there be no contract,’ he adds, ‘ the dominion is in the mother,’ and this for the 
same obvious reason as Heylin had given already for female sovereignty in 
Borneo.' 
It may be admitted at once that Hobbes’ normal attitude of opposition to 
the Aristotelian tradition is such that the mere fact that Aristotle had laid down 
that ‘ the father is naturally in authority over the sons’ may be held sufficient 
reason why Hobbes should decide for the Matriarchate. But it is certainly an 
instructive coincidence—and for my own part I am inclined to regard it as more 
—that the first great groups of matriarchal folk to be studied in any detail were 
precisely in areas now being thrown open by the discoverers : Southern India, 
Negro Africa, and North America ; so that, at this period, matriarchal institu- 
tions, which had so long been treated as evidence of human depravity, or, at best, 
as curiosities and antiquities, were being rehabilitated for the first time in 
European thought as a practical scheme of society. Heylin had even generalised 
already that female kingships were correlated with tropical climate.” Once 
more the circumstances of the age and the general progress of knowledge were 
forcing on the notice of the philosophers fresh phenomena of a kind which pre- 
cisely fitted the demands of the philosophic situation. 
Most important of all, however, is the direct appeal of Hobbes to the evidence 
of discovery, when he is dealing with the State of Nature itself. ‘It may per- 
adventure be thought,’ he says,° ‘theare was never such a time nor condition of 
warre as this, and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world ; but 
there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many 
places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof 
dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all, and live at this day in 
that brutish manner, as I said before. However, it may be perceived what 
manner of life there would be, if there were no common Power to fear, by the 
manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government 
use to degenerate in a civill War.’ Here, clearly, we have Hobbes the psycholo- 
gist and politician supplementing his psychological and political evidence from 
a totally different quarter, and in particular quoting America as the last citadel 
of pre-social man. 
To refer all Governments, as he explicitly does refer them, to the standard of 
Peru or Monomotapa; to imagine the State as a ‘Leviathan,’ a nightmare, a 
Frankenstein’s monster, tolerable only because without it the life of man had 
been, and would be again, ‘ solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,’ was indeed 
but a partial inference from the life of ‘natural man,’ as it might have been con- 
structed from evidence which was available even then. But it accords so closely 
with the accidents of contemporary discoveries, and with an actual tone of 
pitiful contempt which had come in fashion among the voyagers themselves, as 
to force the conclusion that Hobbes was really doing his best to state what 
nowadays we should call the ‘ most recent conclusions of anthropologists >on a 
matter of practical concern, and that political science owes more than is com- 
monly supposed to this attempt to define and interpret large new facts of human 
nature as the Age of Discoveries revealed them. 
John Locke. 
In the next generation the connection between physics and politics is even 
more strongly marked. Closely as Locke was allied, in his political aspect, to 
the leaders of the English Revolution, he is still more closely associated with 
the first administrators of the Royal Society, and that in more than one depart- 
ment. His ‘Elements of Natural Philosophy’ remain to show how near he 
1 Heylin, Mierocosmus, Oxford, 1636, p. 830. 
2 Thid. 
3 Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch, XIII. 
