bad; that he is
vicious because he does not know what virtue is; that he always
refuses to do any service to those of his own species, because he
believes that none is due to them; that, in virtue of that right which
he justly claims to everything he wants, he foolishly looks upon
himself as proprietor of the whole universe. Hobbes very plainly saw
the flaws in all the modern definitions of natural right: but the
consequences, which he draws from his own definition, show that it is,
in the sense he understands it, equally exceptionable. This author, to
argue from his own principles, should say that the state of nature,
being that where the care of our own preservation interferes least
with the preservation of others, was of course the most favourable to
peace, and most suitable to mankind; whereas he advances the very
reverse in consequence of his having injudiciously admitted, as
objects of that care which savage man should take of his preservation,
the satisfaction of numberless passions which are the work of society,
and have rendered laws necessary. A bad man, says he, is a robust
child. But this is not proving that savage man is a robust child; and
though we were to grant that he was, what could this philosopher infer
from such a concession? That if this man, when robust, depended on
others as much as when feeble, there is no excess that he would not be
guilty of. He would make nothing of striking his mother when she
delayed ever so little to give him the breast; he would claw, and
bite, and strangle without remorse the first of his younger brothers,
that ever so accidentally jostled or otherwise disturbed him. But
these are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature, to be
robust and dependent. Man is weak when dependent, and his own master
before he grows robust. Hobbes did not consider that the same cause,
which hinders savages from making use of their reason, as our
jurisconsults pretend, hinders them at the same time from making an
ill use of their faculties, as he himself pretends; so that we may say
that savages are not bad, precisely because they don't know what it is
to be good; for it is neither the development of the understanding,
nor the curb of the law, but the calmness of their passions and their
ignorance of vice that hinders them from doing ill: _tantus plus in
illis proficit vitiorum ignorantia, quam in his cognito virtutis_.
There is besides another principle that has escaped Hobbes, a