There used to come sometimes to these gardens of Gorhambury, in Bacon’s day, a young man--twenty years his junior--of a strangely subtle mind, who caught so readily at the great Chancellor’s meaning, and was otherwise so well instructed that he was employed by him in some clerical duties. His name was Thomas Hobbes; and it is a name that should be known and remembered, because it is identified with writings which had as much influence upon the current of thought in the middle of the next century (the seventeenth) as those of Herbert Spencer have now, and for somewhat similar reasons. He was a very free thinker, as well as a deep one; keeping, from motives of policy, nominally within Church lines, yet abhorred and disavowed by Church-teachers; believing in the absolute right of kings, and in self-interest as the nucleus of all good and successful schemes for the conduct of life; weighing relations to the future and a Supreme Good (if existing) with a trader’s prudence, and counting Friendship “a sense of social utility.” His theory of government was--a crystallization of forces, coming about regularly by the prudent self-seeking of individuals. Of divine or spiritual influences he does not take any sympathetic cognizance; hard, cold, calculating; not inspiring, not hopeful; feeding higher appetites on metaphysic husks. Of his Deism I give this exhibit:-- “Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth that we can have no conception or image of the Deity; and consequently, all his attributes signify our inability and defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, except only this--that there is a God. For the effects, we acknowledge naturally, do include a power of their producing, before they were produced; and that power presupposeth something existent that hath such power: and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat before it; and that, again, by something else before that, till we come to an eternal (that is to say, the first) Power of all Powers, and first Cause of all Causes; and this is it which all men conceive by the name GOD, implying eternity, incomprehensibility, and omnipotency. And thus all that will consider may know that God is, though not _what_ he is.” Cribbing his emotional nature (if he ever had any), he yet writes with wonderful directness, perspicacity, and _verve_--making “Hobbism” talked of, as Spencerism is talked of. Indeed, one does not see clearly how any man, flinging only his bare hook of logic and his sinker of reason into the infinite depths around us, can fish up anything of a helpfully spiritual sort much better than Hobbism now.