Hobbes has a metaphysic so clear, so well determined, that his political conception is bound to have that cogency which belongs exclusively to the works of men whose philosophical grounds are theoretically first rate. That Cromwell should have offered him a high office in his government is not surprising. Obviously the mind and character of Hobbes are for prompt decisions and coherency of action. Yet his political theories are not fit for actual application. It is not impossible that his ideas should have influenced the political men of his days; but his _Leviathan_ is the conception of a man to whom philosophy was _doctrina corporum_. Bodies can be natural or artificial, and the state is the most important of all the artificial bodies, man being both a natural body, the most perfect natural body, and an element of the state, the most perfect of all artificial bodies. Psychology is bound to occupy the foreground in his anthropology, and no philosopher ever laid a greater emphasis on the distinction between theory and practice. Thought is considered after the Cartesian doctrine as relatively free, and will as dependent upon thought; the superiority of the former is acknowledged indeed by all the thinkers of the time and of the following century. In psychology the consequence of this distinction is a conception of the volitive activity that foreshadows the more modern theories of determinism, against which all idealisms have fought their most strenuous battles and Fascism is actually leading a political crusade. For Hobbes asserts the necessity of surpassing the state of Nature, in which all men are free, by the sacrifice of some liberties and by the sacred preservation of the engagements of the contract. But on what ground can he require such sacrifice and faithfulness, except that of self-preservation? Thus selfishness is at the basis of the edifice and there looms already the capital sin of the more modern conception of Liberalism. The state is conceived as the algebraical sum of the citizens, the selfishness of whose life is guaranteed by the legislature.