goodness; and in the motive which is desire not for pleasure or profit, but to obey the commands of our own conscience or of God.

Thus, in relation to the actions of men, there are three distinct senses which the term law is capable of bearing: an observed sequence between certain courses of action and their natural consequences; the prudential precepts founded upon such observed sequences precepts, however, which are purely conditional upon the end which at any moment the agent may set before him; and lastly, a command of conscience binding the agent, whatever may be his personal inclination, to obey what he recognises as the law of duty.

Now, directly we examine the matter, it becomes clear that all these three senses of law are pressed into the service by Hobbes; that he rings the changes at pleasure upon them all.

In the war of all against all,' the law which regulates the acts of his imaginary beings is either a law of blind passion, by its very nature purely unreasoning and instinctive, or a law of calculated selfishness; and he does not even take the trouble to make clear which of these two very different motive powers he has in view. In point of fact, it must manifestly be the first. His miserable Ishmaelites pass their time in slaying and defrauding their neighbours not so much because they think it expedient, nor even because they are driven to it by outward circumstances, but because they are under an inward compulsion to do so, because it is their nature to, because, as we say, they know no better. On the other hand, when the stage of reflection comes, when it is borne in upon them that their life hitherto has been 'poor, nasty, brutish and short,' and when they set themselves to calculate all the advantages that may result from exchanging it for something radically different, then it is clear that they have passed under yet another law-still, however, a purely 'natural' law-the law of conscious reflection, of calculated prudence, of expediency, of self-interest.

Even this, however, is not enough for the purpose. And until their reflections have been reduced to a code of maxims or precepts, until self-interest has had time to exalt itself into a regulative principle we may almost say, an ideal of conduct, Hobbes instinctively felt that all was yet in vain, that his puppets would still inevitably remain wedded to the war of all against all to which they had been born.

It is at this point, be it observed, that the great break occurs in the history of their experience; it is at this point also that the fatal confusion begins to creep into the argument of Hobbes. For the moment that men begin to reduce their reflections to maxims, precepts, and what our author is pleased to call theorems,' the moment they begin to treat such theorems as guides for the

regulation of their future conduct, from that moment it is clear that they have entered upon yet another stage of their pilgrimage. They have now passed avowedly into the region of ideals; they have now, however fitfully, accepted definite standards of action; they have now-in a sense, no doubt, which it is necessary to define very carefully-begun to recognise the existence of what Hobbes is determined that we shall call a ' law.'

The term law, in this connection, naturally suggests a moral law: a law recognised as binding upon the conscience of man; a law which, whether he like it or not, he feels himself to be under the obligation of obeying. That, however, is evidently not the sense which the whole tenor of Hobbes' argument demands. The law in question is, by his own avowal, no more than a mere collection of theorems,' of prudential precepts which it may be wise to follow, but which have no binding force, carry with them no obligation, whatsoever. Their appeal is not to the conscience-no conscience, no sense of moral obligation, is, in fact, possible to the beings who people Hobbes' Inferno of mutual destruction-but merely to calculations of individual self-interest. Every higher consideration, any appeal to the sense of Right and duty, is inexorably barred out.

Yet without the appeal to Right and duty, how was the desired result to be obtained? The beings assumed by the whole course of the argument are utterly unmoralised. They have, it necessarily follows, no inbred craving for concord. They have not the experience which alone could enable them to estimate its blessings. They have not the material—a material to be given only by experience for framing those precepts and theorems' without which, as we shall see directly, the whole argument falls in pieces. It is therefore in the highest degree unlikely that they should ever even conceive the desire of entering into civil society. That they would withdraw from it at the first difficulty, at the first conflict between their immediate convenience and the will of an irresponsible tyrant, is absolutely certain. In one word, no society could ever be formed by such beings; and if it were, it would immediately be dissolved. If a slightly different application may be given to words originally quoted by Locke: Intrarent civitatem, tantum ut exirent.

Such were the fears which puzzled the will of Hobbes and drove him at the last moment to confound the boundaries which, in the opening stages of his argument, he had been careful to lay down. He was haunted by a dim sense that the appeal to expediency pure and simple was foredoomed to failure: a dark suspicion that, unless reinforced by the cry of duty, it must infallibly break down. And here, at any rate, who can doubt that he was in the right? How

was it to be expected that men would submit to all the known. miseries of slavery on the bare possibility-a possibility disproved for us by all the successful revolts of history-that rebellion might bring them to a yet more miserable pass? Even apart from the teachings of history-teachings repeated under his own eyes as he laboured over De Cive and Leviathan-might not the most elementary knowledge of human nature have saved him from nursing so childish a delusion? This is to think,' as Locke said in one of the few passages where we may suppose him to be writing with direct reference to Hobbes, this is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats and foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.'1 Even to those who are still meditating the change from polecats to lions, who have therefore as yet no actual experience of the latter, this criticism is formidable enough. When the change has actually been made, when it is a choice between a lion ravening on the spot and a gang of polecats and foxes faintly clamouring in the background, who can doubt on which side the scales of expediency would be weighted?

Under these circumstances, the only thing left to Hobbes was to buttress up the principle of expediency by some other principle less shifty and more stubborn: to smuggle in by the back door that notion of duty which, for good reasons of his own, he had in the first instance resolutely barred out from the front. If those who smarted under the war of all against all could only be persuaded that, quite apart from expediency, they were under a moral obligation to 'seek peace and ensue it'; if the subjects of the mortal God' could only be induced to believe that eternal submission was a matter not so much of self-interest as of conscience and of duty: then the breaches in the earlier part of the argument might not impossibly be made good; the theory of divine Right, adroitly stripped of its theological dressing, might be once more set upon its feet; the threatened victory of Behemoth might be staved off for generations; and all might yet be well. The attempt was at any rate worth making; and with imperturbable gravity Hobbes fights his way gallantly to the end.

It was, however, a lost cause from the very first. For the idea of duty not only had no place been left in the worshippers of force and fraud who throng the opening stages of his argument, but it had been explicitly barred out. It was therefore only by a subterfuge that it could subsequently be slipped in. It is, in fact, under cover of the double meaning attaching to the term natural lawas a code of theorems, of merely prudential maxims, on the one hand, and as a command of conscience on the other-that the new

1 Civil Government, ii. § 93.

factor was brought into the reckoning. The two conceptions are sharply opposed. The one belongs to an order of thought poles asunder from the other. Yet the whole force of the argument, alike for Hobbes and for his readers, depends upon the silent replacement of the one by the other. By a stretch of compliance we may admit that Hobbes was entitled to the one. On every possible showing, he had debarred himself from invoking the other. It would be a miracle if men wholly without experience arrived at 'dictates of reason,' at prudential precepts, which, in the world as we know it, are to be reached only through and by a long discipline of experience. But no miracle in the world could convert these theorems' of self-interest into commands binding on the conscience.

Thus the effect of the sophism was exactly the reverse of that designed by its author. To call in the principle of obligation was a tacit acknowledgement that the principle of expediency had broken down. And the weapon which he himself admits to be useless is replaced by one to which he had manifestly no right. The second weapon was intended to rivet the despotism of Leviathan. Its effect was to shatter the whole argument upon which that despotism is built up.

It would be unjust to suppose that he was deliberately seeking to delude his readers; that he was himself aware of the equivocation which, while seeming to save his argument, in reality rent it from top to bottom. The charge against him is not that. It is that, blinded by the passion of the moment, he should have allowed himself to slip unobserved from one line of argument to another not only alien, but directly contrary to it; and that, having thus shifted his ground, he should have continued to pass from the one position to the other, as it suits his purpose, to the very end: betraying his sense of the weakness of the argument from expediency by taking cover behind the idea of duty, and unable to see that beings capable of recognising the bond of duty could never have been the inhuman monsters assumed, without any attempt at proof, in the opening stage of his argument and imperatively demanded by the whole tenor of the reasoning which follows.

That is the fatal flaw which Spinoza at once detected in the whole scheme of Leviathan and which he sought to repair in a theory where he starts with the undertaking to purge the political life of man from the last dregs of the idea of Right and duty, and where, but for faint visitings of human frailty, he almost redeems his promise. But, in order to obtain even this measure of success, the whole fabric of Hobbes' argument had to be taken to pieces and rebuilt from the very ground.

So much for the more speculative objections to the argument

of Leviathan. We now turn to the broader challenge which, alike by its doctrine of origins and its doctrine of sovereignty, it has never ceased to throw out to the reason and conscience of mankind. And here we need do little more than follow the lines long ago laid down by Rousseau.

Rousseau's criticism, which is embodied in the Contrat Social, in a number of Fragments written in connection with the Contrat and, to a less degree, in the Discours sur l'inégalité, may be summarised as follows. The theory of Hobbes is both self-contradictory and revolting; and even if these objections could be got over, it does not fulfil the ends with which it professes to set out. When

all is said, it provides no basis for civil society: least of all, for a society which claims to rest upon Right. This criticism is applied in the first place to Hobbes' account of the origin of the State; and secondly to what he says of its claims upon the allegiance of its members.

'All the philosophers have attempted to reach back to the state of nature, but none of them has ever got there.'1 This is the sweeping verdict of Rousseau upon the efforts of his predecessors; and on none of them does the blow fall so heavily as on Hobbes. None had made louder professions of reducing man to what he was when he came from the hands of nature; none had, in fact, failed more completely to justify his claim. The natural instincts of man, urges the apostle of nature, are limited by his natural needs: food, sleep, the gratification of his sexual impulse and—possibly, though by no means certainly-clothing. And as he is incapable of forethought, all care for the future must be jealously excluded. The instincts of Hobbes' man, on the contrary, are possible only to a being who looks before and after'; and they are limited, if this were indeed a limit, solely by vanity and a boundless lust of selfassertion. In other words, they are the product of a state of things which is purely artificial: of conditions which it must have taken centuries of settled society to bring about.

The result is a twofold contradiction. On the one hand, the being so pieced together is an unimaginable monster: combining in himself all the violence of a state of anarchy with all the calculated cunning peculiar to a decadent society; all the brutality of the sons of Nimrod with all the refined villainy of a Borgia or a Valois. The 'force and fraud' with which he is credited, even granting that each of them could exist separately, are 'virtues' mutually exclusive; the one belongs to an order of things which is wholly destructive of the other.

On the other hand, if the very existence of such a monster is impossible, still more impossible are the ends which are thrust upon

1 Discours sur l'inégalité (Political Writings, i. p. 140).