been suggested to
account for this extraordinary terror. Some declared he was afraid of
spirits; but he was too stout a materialist![364]--another, that he
dreaded assassination; an ideal poniard indeed might scare even a
materialist. But Bishop Atterbury, in a sermon on _the Terrors of
Conscience_, illustrates their nature by the character of our
philosopher. Hobbes is there accused of attempting to destroy the
principles of religion against his own inward conviction: this would
only prove the insanity of Hobbes! The Bishop shows that "the
disorders of _conscience_ are not a _continued_, but an _intermitting_
disease;" so that the patient may appear at intervals in seeming
health and real ease, till the fits return: all this he applies to the
case of our philosopher. In reasoning on human affairs, the shortest
way will be to discover human motives. The spirit, or the assassin of
Hobbes, arose from the bill brought into Parliament, when the nation
was panic-struck on the fire of London, against Atheism and
Profaneness; he had a notion that a writ _de heretico comburendo_ was
intended for him by Bishop Seth Ward, his _quondam_ admirer.[365] His
spirits would sink at those moments; for in the philosophy of Hobbes,
the whole universe was concentrated in the small space of SELF. There
was no length he refused to go for what he calls "the natural right of
preservation, which we all receive from the uncontrollable dictates of
NECESSITY." He exhausts his imagination in the forcible descriptions
of his extinction: "the terrible enemy of nature, Death," is always
before him. The "inward horror" he felt of his extinction, Lord
Clarendon thus alludes to: "If Mr. Hobbes and some other man were both
condemned to death (which is the most formidable thing Mr. Hobbes can
conceive)"--and Dr. Eachard rallies him on the infinite anxiety he
bestowed on his _body_, and thinks that "he had better compound to be
kicked and beaten twice a day, than to be so dismally tortured about
an old rotten carcase." Death was perhaps the only subject about which
Hobbes would not dispute.

Such a materialist was then liable to terrors; and though, when his
works were burnt, the author had not a hair singed, the convulsion of
the panic often produced, as Bishop Atterbury expresses it, "an
intermitting disease."

Persecution terrified Hobbes, and magnanimity and courage were no
virtues in his philosophy. He went about hinting that he was not
obstinate (t