He was tall and erect in figure, and lived on the whole a temperate life, though he used to say that he had been drunk about a hundred times. His favourite exercise was tennis, which he played regularly even after the age of seventy. Socially he was genial and courteous, though in argument he occasionally lost his temper. As a friend he was generous and loyal. Intellectually bold in the extreme, he was curiously timid in ordinary life, and is said to have had a horror of ghosts. He read little, and often boasted that he would have known as little as other men if he had read as much. He appears to have had an illegitimate daughter for whom he made generous provision. In the National Portrait Gallery there is a portrait of him by J. M. Wright, and two others are in the possession of the Royal Society. Place in English thought. As already suggested, it cannot be allowed that Hobbes falls into any regular succession from Bacon; neither can it be said that he handed on the torch to Locke. He was the one English thinker of the first rank in the long period of two generations separating Locke from Bacon, but, save in the chronological sense, there is no true relation of succession among the three. It would be difficult even to prove any ground of affinity among them beyond a desposition to take sense as a prime factor in the account of subjective experience: their common interest in physical science was shared equally by rationalist thinkers of the Cartesian school, and was indeed begotten of the time. Backwards, Hobbes's relations are rather with Galileo and the other inquirers who, from the beginning of the 17th century, occupied themselves with the physical world in the manner that has come later to be distinguished by the name of science in opposition to philosophy. But even more than in external nature, Hobbes was interested in the phenomena of social life, presenting themselves so impressively in an age of political revolution. So it came to pass that, while he was unable, by reason of imperfect training and too tardy development, with all his pains, to make any contribution to physical science or to mathematics as instrumental in physical research, he attempted a task which no other adherent of the new "mechanical philosophy" conceived--nothing less than such a universal construction of human knowledge as would bring Society and Man (at once the matter and maker of Society) within the same principles of scientific explanation as were found applicable to the world of Nature. The construction was, of course, utterly premature, even supposing it were inherently possible; but it is Hobbes's distinction, in his century, to have conceived it, and he is thereby lifted from among the scientific workers with whom he associated to the rank of those philosophical thinkers who have sought to order the whole domain of human knowledge. The effects of his philosophical endeavour may be traced on a variety of lines.