CHAPTER XII

SOME QUASI-THEISMS

§ 1

HOBBES: especially Leviathan, 1651

To find Hobbes placed under Quasi-Theism may surprise the general reader who has been accustomed to hear of Hobbes as a leader of Atheism. The difficulty is easily settled. Hobbism was at once taken as leading to Atheism, and as such it was the grindstone on which the wits of Apologists were sharpened. But Hobbes himself did not take that path, nor is it reasonable to accuse him of mental reservation or dishonesty in avoiding it. In Natural Theology his procedure was strictly on a par with his procedure in Political Philosophy. In Politics he vindicated Tyranny as a reasonable form of Government, odious as it might seem to most minds: in Theology he vindicated a Deity, although of a character which to others seemed worse than worthless, and impossible as an object of worship. In both cases what Hobbes wanted was an Object entitled to Obedience : the recommendation to acceptance rested upon the misery or pain which disobedience entailed, not upon any joy which issued either from king or from Deity.

The fact is, Hobbes was not a true Inductive Empiricist of the school of Bacon. His philosophy is synthetic, governed by a procedure of a mathematical kind, more akin to that of Descartes than to that of Bacon. He appealed to experience for his elementary data, and found them in sensations and feeling, taking as his whole stock the most meagre selection of experiences with which any modern philosopher ever started; and his constructive principles were equally scanty. The value of his work is that it shows what could be accomplished from those data, as worked up by those principles. They led him to uphold

what we should call a Tyrant Monarch in the State, and to recommend obedience to what we should equally call a Tyrant Deity in religious life.

Hobbes, in spite of his opposition to Scholasticism, did not himself depart from the Traditional Method in Theism. His opposition amounted to abhorrence, and perhaps there is no case of a thinker, usually reckoned as in the first rank, so grossly vituperating another as Hobbes vituperated Aristotle.1 The clearing of Aristotle's philosophy out of Religion he considered one of the most salutary points of the Reformation. But Aristotle was not cleared out qua Theism: and Hobbes himself does not abandon the argument to a First Mover, a First and Eternal Cause, or such non-empirical conceptions as Unity, Eternity, Infinity, and Omnipresence as attributes of the Deity. The first basis he lays down is Feeling; and in Feeling taken very simply, merely the desire of pleasure or aversion from pain. There is the plain and obvious feeling, Fear; men find themselves in presence of an irresistible Power, the fear of which is worship.' The Moral basis is there, but by the Hobbist analysis it is reduced to Feeling, desire for pleasure. He sometimes speaks of goodness as if it were something with a character of its own, but in his definite statements the Good is what we like: God is Good to us if He gives us what we like, not otherwise. Fear of the Power which can give or withhold what we like is his basis in Feeling.

In

But Hobbes has also an Intellectual construction on the basis of things in general. He has not abandoned the distinction between First cause and secondary cause, and holds that reflection upon the latter leads up to the former. He does not indeed consider that we attain to knowledge of an Infinite: the simple I AM is all we can speak of; then by Negatives (Infinite) or Superlatives (Most High) or indefinites (Holy) we can do something towards setting Him before our minds. history we find recourse to the First Cause constantly brought into natural explanations to fill up ignorance of second causes, and to explain things causal,' and against this Hobbes protests. But he does not desire to regard the world as now out of relation with the First Cause; the term 'God' includes Father, King, Lord; and Providence is one of the necessary attributes. Hobbes is no Deist, according to his own claims: indeed his 1 Leviathan, c. 46.

Fear of an irresistible Power seems a ground for Immanence as definite as could be imagined, for if there were only an original Creator, not a Power now governing, Fear would be at an end.

In apportioning weight of influence as between his basis in Feeling and his Intellectual Theism, Hobbes ranks the latter as the higher; in early stages of culture Fear operates most, and we have Polytheism, with a minimum of assistance from Intellect; but later, 'curiosity about Causes operates,' and does so quite intellectually, 'without thought of their fortune': and then Monotheism comes.

In passing any judgment on Hobbes' idea of the Deity we must remember what he needed and was in search of: an All-powerful First Cause would be to him a perfect ruler, and entitled to man's absolute obedience: an Atheist would be an idiot or a madman in that presence; or, what was worse in Hobbes' eyes, a rebel, an enemy of God, of man, and of himself. As to goodness, Hobbes' Deity was just as much and just as little good as was his monarch. Hobbes, as we know, keenly and seriously desired to see a peaceful civil Commonwealth; for this, power in the Ruler and submission in the subject were the indispensable requisites: and it was similar for affairs ecclesiastical. For the Universe at large, therefore, we may, I think, take him to have been in calm, sober earnest in setting forth belief in an irresistible Powerful Being ruling over absolutely obedient men as the perfection of order and government. For such a Being, Fear, and search for First Cause, were adequate grounds of proof.

Such a conception of God appears the most outrageously antiChristian that a distorted imagination could conceive: hence the fierce attribution of Atheism to Hobbes, and the genuine horror inspired by his name in pious lovers of God. Yet he himself claimed that he was a Christian, and he occupies a large part of the Leviathan with an exposition of his views. It is a mistake, therefore, to class him with Bacon as holding Religion in a separate compartment from Natural Knowledge, as is commonly done. Hobbes has a Natural Theology: there is a God (of a sort); and the connection with Revelation is that God has spoken there is evidence for it: besides Creation there is His Word: when this has been established by evidence, Reason has the further task of interpreting and understanding it.

Hobbes on Religion and Hobbes on Human Nature are

identical: he is unique in our philosophical literature; we think we are reading some sardonic irony in a satire by Swift: but in Hobbes it is genuine; he meant what he wrote.

If, therefore, we find Hobbes called the first Great Christian sceptic in England,' the epithet can be allowed from the point of view of a full Theism, but not on Hobbes' own view of 'Reason' and of God': he was a rational Theist. At the same time it is not to be denied that when history judges Hobbism it finds in it the seeds of the materialism and the scepticism of the eighteenth century.

§ 2. Transcendence only: the Deists

The limitation to Transcendence has always been the danger threatening those who rely too closely on the Causation Argument, especially when it is taken in the form of First Cause; when the element of Time is taken as entering into the phenomena, and all that we are in search of is the Prius in a time-series. The tendency to regard the Divine Being as a Creator only becomes almost unavoidable. It is thought that when He created He did so in a very full sense; He endowed creatures with their full natures, and imposed on them the laws of their being. This done, nothing more remained; or at least nothing more than the bare conception of a continued support of what had been inaugurated. No fresh action was probable, as that would be a re-creation, an interference. In early stages of civilisation such interventions might be thought of as necessary to account for the appearance of everything that was new; there might be hundreds of such interventions, thousands, millions: but the growth of Science, and the consequent increasing perception of the persistence of uniformities in the operation of a few forces, effected the dismissal of these interventions and fresh creations, one after the other, until their total disappearance was conceived. Then the Divine Creator sat on His throne and His world went on without His intervention, as a spectacle before Him. If, therefore, the habit has been to regard 'occasional' events as the chief incentives to religious belief, and the successes of science or new methods of philosophy have reduced these events both in number and volume by showing uniformities unsuspected and connections previously concealed, those who appreciate the new knowledge will tend strongly to reduce the

Theistic conception to transcendence only, and to see no continued immanence of the Divine in the World.

These conditions came into effect in England in the seventeenth century. The Baconian induction and the Cartesian Mechanical philosophy co-operated to commend a view of the world as a machine working by laws-both worlds, i.e. the physical and the mental. The achievements of Galileo and Newton for the physical world ran side by side with the psychological mechanisms of Hobbes and Locke: and the metaphysical theories of Descartes and Leibnitz were easily adaptable as a support from philosophy.

In Theological speculation there arose the view that there was no need to be continually going outside the world for explanations: let its creation be ascribed to the Almighty and Infinite and Intelligent Cause which reason insisted in placing at the origin, and its support or annihilation as a whole be referred to Him, and man's theological belief was exhausted.

In support of this view there appeared in England a procession of writers known as the Deists, in the sense of (1) philosophical Deists as against Theists, and (2) others who were called Deists in the sense of rejectors of Revelation and restrictors of belief to Natural Religion. In some the position remained philosophical. Deism was their Natural Theology: the Christian Gospel they regarded as a fresh intervention rendered necessary by the ignorance and sin of mankind, or rather granted as a merciful a merciful dispensation because of this ignorance and sin. This was the position of such a Christian But others carried their principle over into their view of the Gospel: they set aside its claim for separateness from the general religion of nature, and covered the whole with the conception of a single universe governed by a single system of laws. 'Christianity as old as the Creation' is the keynote of Tindal, perhaps the ablest of this division of the Deists. As there is confusion prevalent, due to the ambiguous use of the term Deist, the classification of Samuel Clarke may be noticed :

believer as Locke.

(i.) Those who believe that there is a Supreme Being, but that "He does not at all concern Himself with the government of the world." This is the class against which Bentley directed his Sermon I., and whom Clarke characterises in strong terms in his letter to Leibnitz.