Towards the end of The Elements of Law, which he completed in 1640, Hobbes launched the first of many assaults on the state of moral philosophy in his time. Those who talk about ‘right and wronge, good and bad’, he complains, are largely content to adopt the opinions ‘of such as they admire, as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others of like authority’. But these writers have failed to provide us with anything approaching a genuine understanding of virtue and vice. They have merely ‘given the names of right and wronge as their passions have dictated; or have followed the autority of other men, as we doe theires’.

One of Hobbes's principal aspirations is to overcome this kind of reliance on authority and to formulate what he describes in Leviathan as ‘the science of Vertue and Vice’. In his later writings he insists with increasing confidence that he has in fact attained his goal. He declares in chapter 26 of Leviathan that his conclusions in that treatise ‘concerning the Morall Vertues’ are ‘evident Truth’. Five years later, we find him speaking with still greater assurance in De Corpore of the contrast between his own knowledge of moral theory and the mere opinions held by ancient philosophers on the same subject. There were ‘no philosophers natural or civil among the ancient Greeks’, even though ‘there were men so called’.