History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weberยง 52. Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the son of a clergyman, born at Malmesbury, in Wiltshire, was the tutor of Lord Cavendish, and, owing to the latter's influence, a loyal friend of the Stuarts. Returning to his country after an absence of thirteen years in France, he devoted himself elusively to literary labors.(1) Hobbes's fame as a political writer and moralist has somewhat obscured his merit as an ontologist and psychologist. And unjustly so; for he is the forerunner of materialism, criticism, and modern positivism.
Philosophy is defined by Hobbes as the reasoned knowledge of effects from causes, and causes from effects.(2) To philosophize means to think correctly; now, to think is "to compound and resolve conceptions," i. e., to add or subtract, to compute, or to reckon; hence, to think correctly means to combine what ought to be combined, and to separate what ought to be separated. Hence it follows that philosophy can have no other object than composable and decomposable things, or bodies.(3)
Pure spirits, angels, ghosts, and God, cannot be thought. They are objects of faith, and belong to theology, - not objects of science falling within the scope of philosophy. Corresponding to the division of bodies into natural and artificial, moral and social bodies, we have: philosophia naturalis (logic, ontology, mathematics, physics) and philosophia civilis (morals and politics). Physics and moral philosophy are both empirical sciences, having bodies as their objects, and outer and inner sense as their respective organs. Outside of the science of observation, there is no real knowledge.(4)
From these premises follows a wholly materialistic theory of perception. Inner perception, the primary condition and basis of intellectual life, is merely our feeling of brain action. To think, therefore, is to feel. Knowledge consists in the addition of sensations. Sensation, again, is but a modification, a movement taking place in the sensible body. Memory, the indispensable auxiliary of thought, is simply the duration of sensation: to remember is to feel what one has felt. Sensations cannot be explained, in the manner suggested by some of the ancients, as effluences emanating from bodies, and similar to them. These simulacra rerum, or, in the terminology of the Schoolmen, sensible and intelligible species, are, according to Hobbes, as bad as the occult qualities and other hypotheses of the Middle Ages. Instead, we must say: The simple motion which the objects produce in surrounding matter is communicated to the brain by the mediation of the nerves.
Hobbes here states a truth already known to Democritus, Protagoras, and Aristippus: the highly important truth of the wholly subjective character of perception. What we perceive - light, for example - is never an external object, but a motion, a modification taking place in the cerebral substances.(5)
We need no further proof of this than the fact that light is perceived when the eye receives a more or less powerful blow; the sensation is merely the effect of the excitement produced in the optic nerve. And what holds for light in general may be said of each particular color, which is but a modification of light. The senses therefore deceive us in so far as they make us believe that sound, light, and colors exist outside of us. The objectivity of the phenomenon is an illusion. The qualities, of things are accidents of our own being, and there is nothing objective except the motion of bodies, which arouses these accidents in us. Hobbes reasons as Berkeley afterwards reasoned; but the latter carries out his argument to the very end; proceeding from sensualistic premises, he finally denies the existence of bodies, and culminates in subjective idealism. Hobbes only goes half way: the reality of matter is, in his opinion, an unimpeachable dogma.(6)
Soul or spirit he defines sometimes as brain action, sometimes as nervous substance. By spirit, he says, I understand a physical body refined enough to escape the observation of the senses. An incorporeal spirit does not exist.(7) The Bible itself make no mention of such a being. Animals and man differ in degree only; both being corporeal beings. We possess no real advantage over brutes except speech. We are no more endowed with free-will than the lower beings. Like them, we are governed by irresistible appetites. Reason without passion, moral principles without a material attraction, exert no influence on the human will; it is impelled by the expectations of the imagination, the passions, and the emotions: love, hatred, fear, and hope. "A voluntary action is that which proceedeth from the will;" but the volition itself is not voluntary; it is not our deed; we are not the masters of it. Every act has its sufficient reason. According to the indeterminists, a free or voluntary act is one which, though there be a sufficient reason for its performance, is not necessary. The absurdity of this definition is obvious. If an occurrence or an act does not happen, it is because there is no sufficient reason for its happening. Sufficient reason is synonymous with necessity. Man, like all creatures, is subject to the law of necessity, to fate, or, if we choose, to the will of God. Good and evil are relative ideas. The former is identical with the agreeable; the latter, with the disagreeable. Interest is the supreme judge in morals as in everything else. Absolute good, absolute evil, absolute justice, absolute morality, are so many chimeras, gratuitous inventions of the theological mind and metaphysics.(8)
Hobbes's system of politics is consistent with these ontological premises. Liberty he considers as impossible in politics as in metaphysics and ethics. In the State as well as in nature might makes right. The natural state of man consists in the bellum omnium contra omnes. The State is the indispensable means of putting an end to this conflict. It protects the life and property of individuals at the cost of a passive and absolute obedience on their part. What it commands is good; what it prohibits is bad. Its will is the supreme law.(9)
We shall not dwell on this absolutistic theory, the logical consequence of materialism. Let us note in what two important respects Thomas Hobbes differs from Bacon. First, Hobbes teaches a system of metaphysics, - the materialistic metaphysics; secondly, his definition of philosophy places a higher value on the syllogism than the author of the Novum organum sets upon it. The latter had in proclaiming induction as the universal method, overlooked (1) the part deduction plays in mathematics, and (2) the part played by the mathematical element and a priori speculation in the discoveries of the fifteenth century. Hence Hobbes occupies a position between pure empiricism and Cartesian rationalism.
1. Elementa philosophies de cive, 1642 and 1647; Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, London, 1650; Leviathan sive de materia, forma et potestate civitatis ecclesiastice et civilis 1651; 1670 (in Latin); De corpore, 1655; De homine, 1658. [First Latin edition of his collected works (published by himself), Amsterdam, 1668; first English edition of his moral and political works, London, 1750]; (Euvres philosophiques et politiques de Th. Hobbes, etc., transl. into French by one of his friends, 2 vols., 8vo, Neuchatel, 1787; His complete works (English and Latin), collected and edited by J. Molesworth, 16 vols., 8vo, London, 1839-45; [The Elements of Law, Natural and Political, ed., with preface and critical notes, by F. Tonnies. To which are subjoined selected extracts from unprinted MSS. of Th. H., London, 1888; Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, ed. for the first time from the original MSS. by F. Tonnies, London, 1889; Siebzehn Briefe des Th. Hobbes, etc., ed. and explained by F. Tonnies, A. f. G. d. Ph., III., pp. 58-78, 192-232; Hobbes's Leviathan in Morley's Universal Library, London. On Hobbes see: F. Tonnies's four articles in Vierteljahresschrift f. wiss. Ph., 1879-1881; same author, Leibniz und H., Philos. Monatshefte, 1887, pp. 557-573; and Th. H., Deutsche Rundschau, 1889, 7; G. C. Robertson, Hobbes (Philosophical Classics), Edinburgh and London, 1886; G. Lyon, La philosophie de Hobbes, Paris, 1893. - TR.].
2. De corpore, p. 2.
3. Id., p. 6: Subjectum philosophie sive materia circa quam versatur est corpus.
4. De corpore.
5. Human Nature, p. 6: The image or colour is but an apparition unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration which the object works in the brain or spirits, or some internal substance of the head.
6. Id., pp. 9 f.
7. Id., pp. 71 f.
8. Treat. of Liberty and Necessity, London, 1656.
9. De cive, 6, 19; 12, 8; Leviathan, c. 17.
