---
title: "Hobbes–Wallis controversy"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbes–Wallis_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:50.179873+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Second phase: the Dialogus physicus of 1661 ==
The Dialogus physicus, sive De natura aeris attacked Robert Boyle and other friends of Wallis who were forming themselves into a society (incorporated as the Royal Society in 1662) for experimental research. The full Latin title of the book mentioned Gresham College as the experimental base of Boyle's group (see Gresham College and the formation of the Royal Society), followed immediately by a reference to the duplication of the cube, which in Hobbes's latest version was included as an appendix. Hobbes chose to take as the manifesto of the new academy Boyle's New Experiments touching the Spring of the Air (1660). Hobbes saw the whole approach as a direct contravention of the method of physical inquiry enjoined in the De Corpore. He had reasoned out his own conclusions years before from speculative principles, and he warned them that if they were not content to begin where he had left off, their work would come to naught. This attack from Hobbes was one of several at the time: other opponents of Boyle were Franciscus Linus and Henry More. The issues at stake now had broadened out, and this was a choice Hobbes made, with their implications reaching beyond those of the first phase.
To Hobbes, Boyle replied himself, in the Examen of Mr T. Hobbes, which appeared as an appendix to a second edition (1662) of the New Experiments, along with an answer to Linus. But first Wallis was drawn in again, with the satire Hobbius heauton-timorumenos (1662). It included the accusation that Hobbes used purely verbal tactics, preferring his own semantics of a term such as "air", to cast doubt on the existence of a vacuum.
Hobbes reacted to personal attack by keeping aloof from scientific controversy for some years. He did write a letter about himself in the third person, Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners and Religion of Thomas Hobbes's. In this biographical piece, he told his own and Wallis's "little stories during the time of the late rebellion". Wallis did not attempt a reply.

== Hobbes and the Royal Society ==
Hobbes never became a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was formally founded right at the time when the controversy drew in Boyle, and it has been debated why. Possible explanations are that he was difficult (cantankerous, even), and in other ways incompatible with the Society as club; or that the attacks by Wallis had successfully diminished his reputation, by showing that he was a lightweight in mathematics, part of a bigger polemic plan to show his thought generally as unoriginal, coming secondhand from others. Another simple explanation is that Hobbes was too "controversial" in the modern sense: he was excluded for reasons of image management.
It is possible that Hobbes's objections to academia extended to the Society. John Aubrey reports that Hobbes thought he had a small group of enemies there. Wallis, Ward and Wilkins were indeed key members of the early Royal Society, having been in the precursor group ("Oxford Philosophical Club") in Oxford.
Quentin Skinner therefore proposed, in a 1969 paper Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society, that small-group politics explained enough: those three kept Hobbes out of the Royal Society at the start; and that his continuing absence is sufficiently explained by Hobbes's resentment at such treatment. Certainly Hobbes took it badly that Wallis could use the Philosophical Transactions to publish his critical views, for example in a review of Hobbes's Rosetum geometricum, and complained about this in 1672 to Henry Oldenburg.
Recent scholarly explanations are more complex. It is argued by Noel Malcolm that the general position of Hobbes, in 'mechanistic philosophy', was close enough to that current in the Royal Society to be compatible (even given the debate with Boyle), but that his reputation from the political and religious side made him untouchable, and the Society kept him at arm's length for that reason.

== Later publications ==
After a time Hobbes began a further period of controversial activity, which he dragged out until his ninetieth year. The first piece, published in 1666, De principiis et ratiocinatione geometrarum, was an attack on geometry professors. Three years later he brought his three mathematical achievements together in Quadratura circuli, Cubatio sphaerae, Duplicitio cubii, and as soon as they were once more refuted by Wallis, reprinted them with an answer to the objections. Wallis, who had promised to leave him alone, refuted him again before the year was out. The exchange dragged on through numerous other papers until 1678.

== Timeline ==
1650 Hobbes, Humane Nature; or the Fundamental Elements of Policy
1651 Hobbes, Leviathan
1652 Ward, A Philosophicall Essay towards an Eviction of the Being and Attributes of God
1654 Webster, Academiarum examen
1654 Ward and Wilkins, Vindiciae academiarum
1655 Hobbes, De Corpore
1655 Wallis, Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae
1656 Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics
1656 Hobbes, De Corpore, English edition
1656 Wallis, Due correction for Mr Hobbes
1656 Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica
1657 Hobbes, Marks of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politics, and Barbarisms of John Wallis
1657 Wallis, Hobbiani puncti dispunctio
1657 Wallis, Mathesis universalis
1660 Hobbes, Examinatio et emendatio mathematicae hodiernae qualis explicatur in libris Johannis Wallisii
1660 Boyle, New Experiments touching the Spring of the Air
1661 Hobbes, Dialogus physicus, sive De natura aeris
1662 Wallis, Hobbius heauton-timorumenos
1662 Boyle, An examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris
1662 Hobbes, Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners and Religion of Thomas Hobbes's
1674 Boyle, Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbes's Problemata de Vacuo

== References and notes ==

== Further reading ==
Helena Pycior, Mathematics and Philosophy: Wallis, Hobbes, Barrow, and Berkeley. Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, No. 2, (1987) pp. 265–286
S. Probst, Infinity and creation: the origin of the controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian professors Seth Ward and John Wallis, British J. Hist. Sci. 26 (90, 3) (1993), 271-279.
Alexander Bird, Squaring the Circle: Hobbes on Philosophy and Geometry, Journal of the History of Ideas - Volume 57, Number 2, April 1996, pp. 217–231
Douglas M. Jesseph, The decline and fall of Hobbesian geometry, Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Volume 30, Issue 3, September 1999, Pages 425-453

== External links ==
John Wallis (1616-1703): Mathematician and Divine by Philip Beeley and Siegmund Probst; detailed references to many of the publications
Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hobbes, Thomas". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 545–552. (See pp. 549–550 for the Hobbes–Wallis controversy.)