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THOMAS HOBBES 
CAN give you no better introduction to the way of thought, 
I: method, and the temper of Thomas Hobbes than the 
brief life of him by his friend John Aubrey. Aubrey did 
not think of him as a man of immense learning. * He had 
very few books . . . he had read much if one considers his 
long life ’—Hobbes was born in 1588 at Malmesbury, a 
plebeius homo who talked broad Wiltshire; he died in 1679— 
““ but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He 
was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he 
would have known no more than other men.” * He thought 
much, and with excellent method and stedinesse, which made 
him seldom make a false step.” As he thought, so he lived. 
*“ He was (generally) temperate, both as to wine and women— 
et hec tamen omnia mediocriter,” says Aubrey in a whimsical 
sentence. During his long old age he kept to a careful régime 
which included singing prick-song in his bed for his lungs’ 
sake, and playing tennis three times a year. The simple 
worldliness of his ways is shown by an odd note on the fly-leaf 
of an early copy of his De Corpore Politico in All Souls Library. 
“I have heard of Mr Hobbs that when amongst those that 
weer strangers to him, he ever applyed himselfe to him that 
wore most clothes on taking him to be the wisest man.” For 
a great part of his life he chose the unheroic but comfortable 
career of companion tutor to noblemen’s sons ; but he lived in 
an age when, if ever, the English upper class had both a sense 
of noble living and a care for knowledge. It was in this great 
country-house society that in middle life he made the discovery 
of the new mathematics. Aubrey says, “ He was 40 yeares 
old before he looked on geometry; which happened acciden- 
tally. Being in a gentleman’s library . . . Euclid’s Elements 
lay open, and ’twas the 47 EL libri I. He read the pro- 
position. ‘By G—,” sayd he, ‘this is impossible.” So he 
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