timents, they will not, however, suppress them; and hence all
their ambiguous proceedings, all that ridicule and irony, and even
recantation, with which ingenious minds, when forced to their
employ, have never failed to try the patience, or the sagacity, of
intolerance.[348]

The character of Hobbes will, however, serve a higher moral design.
The force of his intellect, the originality of his views, and the
keenest sagacity of observation, place him in the first order of
minds; but he has mortified, and then degraded man into a mere selfish
animal. From a cause we shall discover, he never looked on human
nature but in terror or in contempt. The inevitable consequence of
that mode of thinking, or that system of philosophy, is to make the
philosopher the abject creature he has himself imagined; and it is
then he libels the species from his own individual experience.[349]
More generous tempers, men endowed with warmer imaginations, awake to
sympathies of a higher nature, will indignantly reject the system,
which has reduced the unlucky system-maker himself to such a pitiable
condition.

Hobbes was one of those original thinkers who create a new era in the
philosophical history of their nation, and perpetuate their name by
leaving it to a sect.[350]

The eloquent and thinking Madame de Stael has asserted that "Hobbes
was an _Atheist_ and a _Slave_." Yet I still think that Hobbes
believed, and proved, the necessary existence of a Deity, and that he
loved freedom, as every sage desires it. It is now time to offer an
apology for one of those great men who are the contemporaries of all
ages, and, by fervent inquiry, to dissipate that traditional cloud
which hangs over one of "those monuments of the mind" which Genius has
built with imperishable materials.

The author of the far-famed "Leviathan" is considered as a vehement
advocate for absolute monarchy. This singular production may, however,
be equally adapted for a republic; and the monstrous principle may be
so innocent in its nature, as even to enter into our own constitution,
which presumes to be neither.[351]

As "The Leviathan" produced the numerous controversies of Hobbes, a
history of this great moral curiosity enters into our subject.

Hobbes, living in times of anarchy, perceived the necessity of
re-establishing authority with more than its usual force. But how were
the divided opinions of men to melt together, and where in the State
was to be placed _absolut