A Perpetual Object of Hatred to All Theologians

David Wootton

• The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Vols I-II edited by Noel Malcolm
  Oxford, 592 pp, £60.00, September 1994, ISBN 0 19 824065 1

Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them. Alas, few people wrote to him. Worse, most of his correspondents were obscure and insignificant. Between the letter from Henry Oldenburg, soon to be secretary of the Royal Society, in 1655 and Leibniz’s of 1670, the only letters between Hobbes and an intellectual of the first rank are two scathing reports transmitted through intermediaries by Christian Huygens. In them he dismisses Hobbes’s claim to have transformed geometry by a number of major discoveries, such as that the value of pi is the square root of ten, as ‘absurd childish nonsense’. Hobbes believed geometry was the queen of sciences because nobody contested the truth of geometrical proofs. It must have been deeply embarrassing for him to discover that his own efforts to square the circle convinced nobody, but provided yet further opportunities for his enemies to attack him. One of the best books on the reception of Hobbes’s philosophy is called The Hunting of Leviathan, and what we find in these two volumes is the correspondence of a philosopher who has been driven out of polite society.