logical traditions of the older world than the pitiless logic with
which Hobbes assailed the very theory of revelation. "To say God hath
spoken to man in a dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that God
hath spoken to him." "To say one hath seen a vision, or heard a voice,
is to say he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking." Religion, in
fact, was nothing more than "the fear of invisible powers"; and here, as
in all other branches of human science, knowledge dealt with words and
not with things.

It was man himself who for his own profit created society, by laying
down certain of his natural rights and retaining only those of
self-preservation. A covenant between man and man originally created
"that great Leviathan called the Commonwealth or State, which is but an
artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural,
for whose protection and defence it was intended." The fiction of such
an "original contract" has long been dismissed from political
speculation, but its effect at the time of its first appearance was
immense. Its almost universal acceptance put an end to the religious and
patriarchal theories of society, on which kingship had till now founded
its claim of a Divine right to authority which no subject might
question. But if Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal despotism, he
laid a new and a firmer one. To create a society at all, he held that
the whole body of the governed must have resigned all rights save that
of self-preservation into the hands of a single ruler, who was the
representative of all. Such a ruler was absolute, for to make terms with
him implied a man making terms with himself. The transfer of rights was
inalienable, and after generations were as much bound by it as the
generation which made the transfer. As the head of the whole body, the
ruler judged every question, settled the laws of civil justice or
injustice, or decided between religion and superstition. His was a
Divine Right, and the only Divine Right, because in him were absorbed
all the rights of each of his subjects. It was not in any constitutional
check that Hobbes looked for the prevention of tyranny, but in the
common education and enlightenment as to their real end and the best
mode of reaching it on the part of both subjects and Prince. And the
real end of both was the weal of the Commonwealth at large. It was in
laying boldly down this end of government, as well as in the basis of
contract on wh