Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

222 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
early 1630s to find a copy of a book of Galileo’s. The Earl’s younger brother,
Charles, had an even greater interest in science, and acted as a kind of patron and
distributor of scientific writing, notably the writings of a scientist called Walter
Warner. Hobbes was one of those who gave his opinion of the writings that
Charles Cavendish circulated. Cavendish also had contacts with many
Continental scientists, including Mersenne and Descartes.
Hobbes accompanied the third Earl of Devonshire on another Grand Tour from
1634 to 1636. He probably met Galileo in Italy and once again saw Mersenne
when he passed through Paris. His activities in the 1630s, however, did not
provide him with a real scientific education, and it may seem surprising that
when he renewed his contact with Mersenne in the 1640s he should have been
treated as the equal of people whose knowledge of natural philosophy and
mathematics was far greater than his own. Perhaps his knowledge mattered less
than his enthusiasm. Hobbes shared with the intellectuals that he met in Paris a
profound admiration for Galileo, and a belief that deductive methods could be
applied to fields outside natural science. He was applying them himself in
psychology, ethics and politics, subjects that Mersenne especially was keen to
see placed on a scientific footing. Then, apart from what he had in common
intellectually with members of Mersenne’s circle, many of them found him an
agreeable personality.
It was one thing for Hobbes to be accepted as a full member of Mersenne’s
circle, however, and another for his views to be endorsed. His extreme
materialism could not be reconciled with orthodox theology; his views about the
necessity of subordinating the ecclesiastical to the secular power could not have
been accepted by members of the circle who were subject to the Catholic
authorities. Mersenne and Gassendi, who were both Catholic churchmen, needed
to keep their distance in matters of doctrine. Mersenne managed to do this while
at the same time acting as a publicist for Hobbes’s hypotheses in natural
philosophy and a promoter of his political treatise, De Cive. His method was to
be vague in identifying the author of the hypotheses, and discreet in his praise
for Hobbes’s civil philosophy. When Mersenne published any of Hobbes’s work
or reported it to correspondents, Hobbes was usually referred to merely as
‘l’Anglais’. At other times Mersenne exercised an influence from behind the
scenes. He encouraged the publication in 1647 of a second edition of Hobbes’s
political treatise, De Cive: the first, limited and anonymous printing had been a
success in Paris five years earlier. However, Sorbière, who saw the work through
the press, was instructed by Mersenne not to publish his own or Gassendi’s
letters praising the book. In Gassendi’s case, the need to keep Hobbes at arm’s
length was made urgent by the parallels between his and Hobbes’s responses to
the Meditations. It is also possible that during the 1640s Gassendi saw in
Hobbes’s writing precisely the combination of atheistic materialism and
determinism that a too sympathetic treatment of Epicurus might have committed
Gassendi himself to, and that, in order to avoid this, he strengthened the
theological ‘corrections’ to the doctrine. 2