bjects, a man had need have the _dexterity to
split a hair_, to handle them pertinently, usefully, and
yet _safely_ and _warily_."--Such men, however, cannot
avoid their fate: they will be persecuted, however they
succeed in "splitting a hair;" and it is then they have
recourse to the most absurd _subterfuges_, to which our
Hobbes was compelled. Thus also it happened to Woolston, who
wrote in a ludicrous way "Blasphemies" against the miracles of
Christ; calling them "tales and rodomontados." He rested his
defence on this subterfuge, that "it was meant to place the
Christian religion on a better footing," &c. But the Court
answered, that "if the author of a treasonable libel should
write at the conclusion, _God save the king!_ it would not
excuse him."

[349] The moral axiom of Solon "KNOW THYSELF" (_Nosce teipsum_),
applied by the ancient sage as a corrective for our own pride
and vanity, Hobbes contracts into a narrow principle, when, in
his introduction to "The Leviathan," he would infer that, by
this self-inspection, we are enabled to determine on the
thoughts and passions of other men; and thus he would make the
taste, the feelings, the experience of the individual decide
for all mankind. This simple error has produced all the dogmas
of cynicism; for the cynic is one whose insulated feelings,
being all of the selfish kind, can imagine no other stirrer of
even our best affections, and strains even our loftiest
virtues into pitiful motives. Two noble authors, men of the
most dignified feelings, have protested against this
principle. Lord Shaftesbury keenly touches the characters of
Hobbes and Rochester:--"Sudden courage, says our modern
philosopher (Hobbes), is anger. If so, courage, considered as
constant, and belonging to a character, must, in his account,
be defined constant anger, or anger constantly recurring. All
men, says a witty poet (Rochester), would be cowards, if they
durst: that the poet and the philosopher both were cowards,
may be yielded, perhaps, without dispute! they may have spoken
the best of their knowledge."--SHAFTESBURY, vol. i. p. 119.

With an heroic spirit, that virtuous statesman, Lord
Clarendon, rejects