Page:The ethics of Hobbes (IA ethicsofhobbes00hobb).pdf/23
would have been conversant about Imagination, Memory, Intellect, Ratiocination, Appetite, Will, Good and Evil, Honest and Dishonest. ... Whilst I contrive, order, pensively and slowly compose these matters (for I do only reason, I dispute not); it so happens in the interim, that my country, some few years before the Civil Wars did rage, was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion, and the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war; and was the cause which, all those other matters deferred, ripened and plucked from me this third part. Therefore it happens that what was last in order, is yet come forth first in time. And the rather because I saw that, grounded on its own principles sufficiently known by experience, it would not stand in need of the former sections.[1]
In 1646 he was appointed instructor in mathematics to the Prince of Wales, who was then in Paris. In 1650, after the Revolution, his "little treatise," previously referred to, was published in two parts. The first part was entitled Human Nature, or The Fundamental Elements of Policy. The second part, published later, was entitled De Corpore Politico, or The Elements of Law, Moral and Politic. A translation of the De Cive, under the title Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society, followed in 1651. According to Aubrey's papers, this translation was made by Hobbes himself. This same year witnessed the publication of his Leviathan, which was really projected as early as 1642 and written in the interim. The full title of the work is Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. In it Hobbes represents the commonwealth to be an artificial man "though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended." In it, he says, "the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as
- ↑ See also De Cive, Praefatio ad Lectores.