SOURCE: "Hobbes," in Political Though in England: From Bacon to Halifax, Thorton Butterworth Limited, 1914, pp. 35-57.

In the following excerpt, Gooch offers an overview of Hobbes's political philosophy and suggests that he was instrumental in the "atmospheric change which substituted the secular for the theological standpoint."

While James proclaimed the divinity of lawful kings and Bacon preached the ideals of the Tudor monarchy, Hobbes, the author of the first comprehensive political system produced in England, derived his theory of the State neither from theology nor from tradition, but from the study of human nature. The most interesting as well as the most explosive English thinker in the seventeenth century stood aloof from the contending factions. No man of his time occupied such a lonely position in the world of thought, and it was only in the nineteenth century that his importance was fully grasped and the startling modernity...