PASSING from Bacon to Spinoza we meet with
Thomas Hobbes, a man from whom Spinoza drew
many of his ideas, though very little of his inspi-
ration. The social incidence of the greater part
of Hobbes's thinking has long been recognized;
he is not a figure over whom the biographer of
social thought finds much cause to quarrel. He
is at once the materialist par excellence of modern
philosophy, and the most uncompromising protag-
onist of the absolutist theory of the state. The
individual, all compact of pugnacity, was to
Hobbes the bogey which the state, voracious of
all liberties, became two centuries later to Herbert
Spencer. He had in acute degree the philoso-
pher's natural appetite for order; and trembled
at the thought of initiatives not foreseen by his
political geometry. He lived in the midst of

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