by Will Durant
He arrived very slowly at the definitive expression of his philosophy. “He walked much and contemplated,” says Aubrey, “and he had in the head of his staff [cane] a pen and inkhorn, carried always a notebook in his pocket, and as soon as a notion darted, he presently entered it into his book, or else he should perhaps have lost it.” 3 He issued a series of minor works,* most of which are now negligible; but in 1651 he gathered his thoughts into a reckless masterpiece of thought and style: The Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. This is one of the landmarks in the history of philosophy; we must tarry with it leisurely.
2. Logic and Psychology
The style is almost as good as Bacon’s: not as rich in illuminating images, but every bit as pithy, idiomatic, forceful, and direct, with now and then a tang of pointed irony. There is no ornament here, no show of eloquence, only the clear expression of clear thought with a stoic economy of verbal means. “Words,” said Hobbes, “are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas.” 4 With that new razor he cut down many a weed of pretentious and meaningless speech. When he came upon St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition of eternity as nunc stans, or “everlasting now,” he shrugged it off as “easy enough to say, but though I fain would, yet I never could conceive it; they that can are happier than I.” Therefore Hobbes is a blunt nominalist: class or abstract nouns like man or virtue are merely names for generalizing ideas; they do not represent objects; all objects are individual entities—individual virtuous actions, individual men . . .
He defines his terms carefully, and on the first page of his book he defines “Leviathan” as “a commonwealth or state.” He found the word in Job (xli), where God used it for an unspecified sea monster as an image of the divine power. Hobbes proposed to make the state a great organism that should absorb and direct all human activity. But before coming to his main thesis he swept through logic and psychology with a merciless hand.
He understood by philosophy what we should now call science: “the knowledge of effects, or of appearances, acquired from the knowledge . . . of their causes, and, conversely, of possible causes from their known effects.” 5 He followed Bacon in expecting from such a study great practical benefits to human life. But he ignored Bacon’s call to inductive reasoning; he was all for “true ratiocination,” i.e., deduction from experience; and in his admiration for mathematics he added that “ratiocination is the same with addition and subtraction”—i.e., the combination or separation of images or ideas. He thought that what we lack is not experience, but proper reasoning about experience. If we could clear away the miasma of meaningless words from metaphysics, and the prejudices transmitted by custom, education, and partisan spirit, what a load of error would fall away! Reason, however, is fallible, and, except in mathematics, can never give us certainty. “The knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called science, is not absolute, but conditional. No man can know by discourse [reasoning] that this or that is, has been, or will be, which is to know absolutely; but only that if this be, that is; if this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be; which is to know conditionally.” 6
As that passage foresaw Hume’s argument that we know only sequences, not causes, so Hobbes anticipated Locke’s sensationist psychology. All knowledge begins with sensation. “There is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense.” 7 It is a frankly materialistic psychology: nothing exists, outside us or within us, except matter and motion. “All qualities called sensible,” or sensory (light, color, form, hardness, softness, sound, odor, taste, heat, cold), “are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversely. Neither, in us that are pressed, are they anything else but divers motions, for motion produceth nothing but motion.” 8 Motion in the form of change is necessary to sensation; “semper idem sentire idem est ac nihil sentire” (Hobbes could be epigrammatic in Latin too)—always to feel the same thing is the same as to feel nothing. 9 (So neither the white man nor the colored man is conscious of his own odor, since it is always under his nose.)
From sensation Hobbes proceeds to derive imagination and memory through a peculiar application of what came to be Newton’s first law of motion:
That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still forever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion it will eternally be in motion unless somewhat else stay it, though the reason be the same (namely, that nothing can change itself), is not so easily assented to. . . .
When a body is once in motion it moveth (unless something else hinder it) eternally; and whatsoever hindreth it cannot in an instant, but [only] in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it. And as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after; so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then when he sees, dreams, etc. For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the things seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call Imagination. . . . Imagination, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense . . . . When we would express the decay, and signifying that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. . . . Much Memory, or memory of many things, is called Experience. 10
Ideas are imaginations produced by sensation or memory. Thought is a sequence of such imaginations. That sequence is determined not by a free will but by mechanical laws governing the association of ideas.
Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently. But as we have no imagination whereof we have not formerly had sense in whole or in parts, so we have no transition from one imagination to another whereof we never had the like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this: All fancies [imaginations, ideas] are motions within us, relics of those made in the sense; and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after sense. . . . But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, succeeds, it comes to pass in time that, in the imaging of anything, there is no certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another. 11
Such a train of thoughts may be unguided, as in dreams, or “regulated by some desire and design.” In dreams the images lying dormant in the brain are aroused by some “agitation of the inward parts of man’s body.” For all parts of the body are connected in some way with certain parts of the brain. “I believe there is a reciprocation of motion from the brain to the vital parts, and back from the vital parts to the brain, whereby not only imagination [or idea] begetteth motion in those parts, but also motion in those parts begetteth imagination like to that by which it was begotten.” 12 “Our dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations: the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and, when we dream, at another.” 13 The illogical sequence of images in dreams is due to the absence of any external sensation to check them, or of any purpose to guide them.
There is no place in Hobbes’s psychology for free will. The will itself is no separate faculty or entity, but merely the last desire or aversion in the process of deliberation; and deliberation is an alternation of desires or aversions, which ends when one impulse lasts long enough to flow into action. “In deliberation the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action or the omission thereof is that we call the will.” 14 “Appetite, fear, hope, or the rest of the passions are not called voluntary, for they proceed not from, but are, the will, and the will is not voluntary.” 15 “Because every act of man’s will, and every desire and inclination, proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continual chain (whose first link is in the hand of God the first of all causes), they proceed from necessity.
So that to him that could see the connection of those causes, the necessity of all men’s voluntary actions would appear manifest.” 16 Throughout the universe there is an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Nothing is contingent or miraculous or due to chance.
The world is a machine of matter in motion according to law, and man himself is a similar machine. Sensations enter him as motions, and beget images or ideas; each idea is the beginning of a motion, and becomes an action if not impeded by another idea. 17 Every idea, however abstract, moves the body in some degree, however unseen. The nervous system is a mechanism for transforming sensory motion into muscular motion. Spirits exist, but they are merely subtle forms of matter. 18 The soul and the mind are not immaterial; they are names for the vital processes of the body and operations of the brain. Hobbes makes no attempt to explain why consciousness should have developed in such a mechanical process of sensation-to-idea-to-response. And by reducing all perceived qualities of objects to images in the “mind,” he comes close to the position that Berkeley would later take in refuting materialism—that all reality known to us is perception, mind.
3. Ethics and Politics
Like Descartes before him and Spinoza after him, Hobbes undertakes an analysis of the passions, for he finds in them the sources of all human actions. All three philosophers use the word passion broadly to mean any basic instinct, feeling, or emotion—chiefly appetite (or desire) and aversion, love and hate, delight and fear. Behind all these are pleasure and pain—physiological processes raising or lowering the vitality of the organism. Appetite is the beginning of a motion toward something that promises pleasure; love is such an appetite directed to one person. All impulses (as La Rochefoucauld would argue fourteen years later) are forms of self-love, and derive from the instinct of self-preservation. Pity is the imagination of future calamity to ourselves, aroused by perceiving another’s calamity; charity is the satisfied feeling of power in helping others. Gratitude sometimes includes a certain hostility. “To have received from one, to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than there is hope to requite, disposeth to counterfeit love but really secret hatred, and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor, that, in declining the sight of his creditor, tacitly wishes him there where he might never see him more. For benefits oblige, and obligation is thralldom.” 19 The basic aversion is fear, the basic appetite is for power. “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” 20 We desire riches and knowledge as means to power, and honors as evidence of power; and we desire power because we fear insecurity. Laughter is an expression of superiority and power.
The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory [self-satisfaction] arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly; for men laugh at the follies of themselves past, when these come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any present dishonor. . . . Laughter is incident most to them that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves, who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds one of the proper works is to help and free others from scorn, and compare themselves only with the most able. 21
Good and bad are subjective terms, varying in content not only from place to place and from time to time, but from person to person. “The object of any appetite or desire . . . a man calleth the good; the object of his hate or aversion, evil; for these words . . . are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.” 22 Strength of passions may be good, and lead to greatness. “He who has no great passion for . . . power, riches, knowledge, or honor . . . cannot possibly have a great fancy or much judgment.” To have weak passions is dullness; to have passions abnormally strong is madness; “to have no desires is to be dead.” 23
The felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the obtaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. 24
The government of men so constituted, so acquisitive and competitive, so hot with passions and prone to strife, is the most complex and arduous of all human tasks, and to those who undertake it we must allow every weapon of psychology and power. Though the human will is not free, society is justified in encouraging certain actions by calling them virtuous and rewarding them, and in discouraging some actions by calling them wicked and punishing them. There is no contradiction here with determinism: these social approvals and condemnations are added, for the good of the group, to the motives influencing conduct. “The world is governed by opinion”; 25 government, religion, and the moral code are in large part the manipulation of opinion to reduce the necessity and area of force.
Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad—for “the desires and other passions . . . are in themselves no sin” 26—but because man is by nature more individualistic than social. Hobbes did not agree with Aristotle that man is “a political animal”—i.e., a being equipped by nature for society. On the contrary, he conceived an original “state of nature” (and therefore the original nature of man) as a condition of competition and mutual aggression checked only by fear, not yet by law. We can visualize that hypothetical condition (said Hobbes) by observing international relations in our own age: nations are still for the most part in “a state of nature,” not yet subject to a superimposed law or power.
In all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointed, and their eyes fixed, on one another—that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns on the frontiers of their kingdoms—and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a posture of war. . . . Where there is no common power there is no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the cardinal virtues. 27
So, Hobbes believed, individuals and families, before the coming of social organization, had lived in a condition of perpetual war, actual or potential, “every man against every man.” 28 “War consisteth not in battle only, . . . but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently shown.” 29 He rejected the theory of Roman jurists and Christian philosophers that there is, or ever was, a “law of nature” in the sense of laws of right and wrong based upon the nature of man as a “reasonable animal”; he admitted that man was occasionally rational, but saw him rather as a creature of passions—above all, the will to power—using reason as a tool of desire, and controlled only by fear of force. Primitive life—i.e., life before social organization—was lawless, violent, fearful, “nasty, brutish, and short.” 30
From this hypothetical “state of nature,” men, in Hobbes’s vision, had emerged by an implicit agreement one with another to submit to a common power. This is the “social-contract” theory made popular by Rousseau’s treatise under that title (1762), but already old and battered in Hobbes’s day. Milton, in his tract On the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), had just interpreted the contract as an agreement between a king and his subjects—that they would obey him, and that he would properly fulfill the duties of his office; if he failed in this, said Milton (like Buchanan, Mariana, and many others), the people would be justified in deposing him. Hobbes objected to this form of the theory on the ground that it established no authority empowered to enforce the contract, or to determine when it had been broken. He preferred to think of the social compact as made not between ruler and ruled, but among the ruled, who agreed
to confer all their power and strength [their right to the use of f
orce upon one another] upon one man, or upon one assembly of men. . . . This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH. This is the generation of the great LEVIATHAN, or rather . . . of that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defense. For by this authority, given him by every . . . man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is enabled to form the wills of them all . . . to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defense. And he that carryeth this Person is called Sovereign, and said to have Sovereign Power; and every one besides, his Subject. 31
