thinks, can never swerve from its principles, and has in it no "principle of mortality." Yet the constitution which he proposed comes short of consistent democracy, and falls in with the spirit of the time. The function of the one great man is recognised: "a parliament of physicians would never have found out the circulation of the blood, nor would a parliament of poets have written Virgil's Aeneis." Thus the great man is right to aim at the sovereignty when the times are out of joint, so that he may set them right and establish the reign of law; and the book ends with his proclamation as Lord Archon for life. The nobility or gentry have also their place: "there is something first in the making of a commonwealth, then in the governing of it, and last of all in the leading of its armies, which...seems to be peculiar only to the genius of a gentleman." Like Milton, Harrington argues for liberty of conscience in matters of religion-though he would disallow "popish, Jewish, or idolatrous" worship. Unlike Milton, however, he does not exclude the state from the sphere of religion: "a commonwealth is nothing else but the national conscience. And if the conviction of a man's private conscience produces his private religion, the conviction of the national conscience must produce a national religion."

Sir Robert Filmer was also among the critics of Hobbes's politics, though he owes his fame to the circumstance that he was himself criticised by Locke. He maintained the doctrine of absolute power as strongly as Hobbes did, and like him thought that limited monarchy meant anarchy; and he had written on these topics in King Charles's time. But he would not admit that this power could rest on contract, and, in his Original of Government (1652), attacked Hobbes as well as Milton and Grotius. His own views are set forth in his Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, first published in 1680, twenty-seven years after his death. Filmer was by no means devoid of critical insight. He saw that the doctrine that all men are by

nature free and equal is not true historically and, therefore, is no good ground for making popular consent the origin of government. "Late writers," he says, "have taken up too much upon trust from the subtle schoolmen who, to be sure to thrust down the king below the pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the king." He thinks that "a great family, as to the rights of sovereignty, is a little monarchy," and Hobbes had said the same; but Filmer traces all kingship to the subjection of children to their parents, which is both natural and a divine ordinance. There has never been a more absolute dominion than that which Adam had over the whole world. And kings are Adam's heirs. In developing this thesis, the author diverges into a reading of history more fantastic than anything suggested by Bellarmine or Hobbes, and delivers himself up an easy prey to Locke's criticism.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, is also to be counted among the critics of Hobbes's political theory. His Brief Survey of the dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr Hobbes's book (1674) is a protest against the paradoxes of Leviathan, but is lacking in any element of

constructive criticism.

John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, and afterwards archbishop of Armagh, was one of the most vigorous and persistent of Hobbes's critics. His first work was in defence of the royal power (1643). Afterwards he engaged in a discussion of the question of freewill with Hobbes when they were both in France. When the controversy was renewed and became public, he wrote A Defence of the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent and Extrinsical Necessity (1655). Hobbes replied, and Bramhall followed in 1658 with Castigations of Mr Hobbes, to which there was an appendix called "The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale." In this appendix, more famous than the rest of the treatise, he attacked the whole religious and political theory of Hobbes,

and gave rise to the complaint of the latter that the bishop "hath put together diverse sentences picked out of my Leviathan, which stand there plainly and firmly proved, and sets them down without their proofs, and without the order of their dependance one upon another; and calls them atheism, blasphemy, impiety, subversion of religion, and by other names of that kind."

Two younger polemical writers may be mentioned along with Bramhall. Thomas Tenison, a future archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the young churchmen militant who must needs try their arms "in thundering upon Hobbes's steel-cap." In The Creed of Mr Hobbes examined (1670), he selected a number of Hobbes's confident assertions and set them together so as to show their mutual inconsistencies. In two dialogues, published in 1672 and 1673, John Eachard, afterwards master of St Catharine's Hall, Cambridge, adopted a similar method, and showed no little wit and learning in his criticism.

These writers are the most notable of a number of early critics of Hobbes who made no independent contributions of their own to philosophy. And their criticism dealt with results rather than with principles. A satisfactory criticism of Hobbes has to penetrate to the principles of the mechanical philosophy which he adopted, and to the view of human nature which he set forth in conformity with those principles. Criticism of this more fundamental kind was attempted by certain of the Cambridge Platonists, especially by Cudworth and More; and they were fitted for the task by their sympathetic study of the spiritual philosophy of Plato in the ancient world and of Descartes in their own day-two thinkers for whom Hobbes had no appreciation.

CHAPTER V

THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS

"THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS' is the name given to a group of religious thinkers who flourished at Cambridge in the middle and latter half of the seventeenth century. They are referred to by Gilbert Burnet, who had visited Cambridge in 1663, as a "set of men" who had prevented the Church of England from having "quite lost her esteem over the nation." "These," he says, were generally of Cambridge, formed under some divines, the chief of whom were Drs Whichcote, Cudworth, Wilkins, More, and Worthington." Other names are commonly included in the list-John Smith, Nathaniel Culverwel, George Rust, Edward Fowler, and Simon Patrick. But there is no good ground for counting Wilkins among them. He was an Oxford man who held the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, for a year before the Restoration; he was eminent as a man of science1 and was one of the founders of the Royal Society; but his theological leanings do not seem to have been the same as those of the Cambridge school.

The writers enumerated were not all Platonists or even all philosophers. It was their religious attitude that led, in the first instance, to their being spoken of as a school and receiving a common name. And so they were called 'latitude men.' They appeared when the High Church system of Laud was in the ascendant; they flourished under the rule of the presbyterians and of the independents; and the Restoration scarcely disturbed them. They did not take sides with any existing parties; and it is to the

1 And author of An Essay towards a real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668.

credit of all parties that they were allowed to carry on their work at the university. Whichcote alone lost his office-the provostship of King's College-at the Restoration, and retired to a parish where he was not interfered with. Their doctrine was equally removed from Calvinism and from High Churchism. They avoided the subtleties of the prevailing theologies, opposed credulity and enthusiasm (or the claim to private inspiration), held that true religion must harmonise with rational truth, and laid stress on the moral and spiritual factors in religion.

Benjamin Whichcote (1610-83) is regarded as the originator of the movement. Burnet says that he "set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, chiefly Plato, Tully, and Plotin"; and, in the university, his former tutor blamed him for setting Plato and Plotinus above the gospel and reason above the spirit. Burnet's statement was made long after the days of which he wrote and cannot be counted strong evidence; and the contemporary criticism shows a theological animus of the kind which often loses touch with accuracy. It is doubtful how far Whichcote guided the reading of his pupils into Platonic or even philosophical channels, and it is not likely that he would have described himself as a philosopher. But there can be no doubt that he encouraged a more rational and spiritual view of Christian doctrine than was prevalent at the time. The more famous Cambridge Platonists (with the notable exception of More) were students at Emmanuel College during the period (163244) of his tutorship there; and for twenty years (163656) he lectured each week in Trinity Church, where the members of the university generally flocked to hear him.

A few sermons, discourses, and aphorisms, the first publication of which was in 1698, are all that remain to us of these discourses, and form almost the only record of his thought. They contain few references to Platonic philosophers, such as filled the pages of his followers, and it would be vain to read a system of philosophy into