It is not, however, in this, which is only the old Cyrenaic or Epicurean answer, that the distinctive point of Hobbism lies.
From an ethical point of view Hobbism divides itself naturally into two parts, which by Hobbes's peculiar political doctrines are combined into a coherent whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected.
These distinctions, he insists, have an objective reality, The cognizable by reason no less than the relations of Cambridge space or number; and he endeavours to refute moralists, Hobbism - which he treats as a " novantique philo- C d sophy," a mere revival of the relativism of Protagoras - chiefly by the following argumentum ad hominem.
Objections, both general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of formulating man's natural pursuit of self-interest; but the serious controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism related not to such principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a (real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows.
In short, More's Platonism appears to be really as hedonistic as Hobbism; only the feeling to which it appeals as ultimate motive is of a kind that only a mind of exceptional moral refinement can habitually feel with the decisive intensity required.