secondary are not they also mere phantasms in the sentients? Apparently there is no difference between them in this respect. Hobbes answers this objection by a frank affirmative, and proceeds to make a distinction between space and geometrical extension, a distinction which, as we saw, may have been felt by some ancient scientists and which ultimately became important in modern thought but only in postNewtonian times. Space, for Hobbes, is itself a phantasm," the phantasm of a thing existing without the mind simply; that is to say, that phantasm, in which we consider no other accident, but only that it appears without us." 15 Extension, however, is an essential characteristic of body, as we learn by the geometrical study of motion. There are always such extended bodies in motion external to us, which cause by their motions the phantasms within, including that withoutness' of the phantasms, which is space. Time is likewise a phantasm, of before and after in motion.' "The present only has a being in Nature; things past have a being in the memory only; but things to come have no being at all; the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present. In nature there is motion but no time; time is a phantasm of the before-and-afterness of memory and anticipation. Thus the entire perceived image, however contrary to appearances, is within the body. Mind is organic motion, and sense is appearance of outness taking place really within the organs. The big epistemological difficulty in such a position Hobbes apparently does not notice. He assumes without critical examination the essentials of Galileo's mechanical cosmology.

"16

Now Hobbes' combination of materialism and nominalism as thus developed has prepared him to proclaim quite frankly and without the qualifications

15 Elements of Philosophy, Bk. II, Ch. 7, Par. 2, ff. Cf. also quotation II, p. 122, ff. above. 16 Leviathan, Bk. I, Ch. 3.

and exceptions in Galileo and Descartes the doctrine of causality which has become accepted more and more fully and clearly in modern times, deserving for that reason to be set over against the medieval principle of final causality by the Supreme Good as its contrasting modern conception. Hobbes insists very strongly on interpreting causality always in terms of particular motions of particular bodies. The vast, hidden forces, which were for Galileo the primary or ultimate causes of effects, disappear in Hobbes, who has followed Descartes in denying the existence of a vacuum in nature. "There can be no cause of motion, except in a body contiguous and moved.” 17 "For if those bodies be not moved which are contiguous to a body unmoved, how this body should begin to be moved is not imaginable; as has been demonstrated . . . to the end that philosophers might at last abstain from the use of such unconceivable connections of words." 18 The latter passage occurs in the midst of a criticism of Kepler for calling in such occult powers as magnetic attraction as causes for motion. Hobbes held, of course, that magnetic virtue itself can be nothing but a motion of body. Everything that exists is a particular body; everything that happens a particular

motion.

Finally, Hobbes' nominalism together with his mechanical account of the genesis of the deceitful phantasms, expressed itself in a feature of his philosophy that has been subsequently most influential. We should note that in a certain respect Hobbes represented a counter-tendency to the work of Galileo and Descartes; he is trying to reunite the sundered halves of the Cartesian dualism and bring man back into the world of nature as a part of her domain. the contrary logic of the movement was too much for him. He was unable to introduce the exact-mathe

17 Elements of Philosophy, Bk. II, Ch. 9, Par. 7.

1a Elements, Book IV, Ch. 26, Par. 8, 7.

But

matical method into his biology or psychology, with the result that the allied astronomy and physics became inexact and uncertain, and were for that reason of no use whatever to later scientists. Couple this fact with the extreme radicalism of his endeavour to reduce mind to bodily motion, and his failure to convert science to complete materialism is quite understandable. A remnant of the res cogitans still remained ; even Hobbes' phantasms had to be explained rather than denied. But someone might have carried over the teleological method of explanation, discredited now in physics, to the modern analysis of the human mind; nature might have been abandoned to mathematical atomism while the other side of the dualism might have been accounted for mainly in terms of purpose or use. That this did not happen in the dominant current of modern thought we likewise owe largely to Hobbes. Having carried through the new conception of causality to a decisive statement, having also, in his doctrine of the relation of the human mind to nature, made such a strong bid for a consistent materialism, there was no temptation for him to return to teleology in his psychological analysis. He was not able to develop a psychology in terms of mathematical atoms, but he strayed no farther from this method than was necessary; he described the mind as a compound of the elementary parts or phantasms above referred to, produced in the vital organs by the clash of inrushing and outpushing motions, and combined according to simple laws of association. Purpose and reasoning are admitted, but they appear not as ultimate principles of explanation, which had been their significance for the scholastic psychologist; they represent merely a certain type of phantasm or group of phantasms within the total compound. This treatment, aided by the decline of the notion of God as Supreme Good, set the fashion for almost the whole modern development of psychology. Locke, the next great psychologist,

followed Hobbes' method still more explicitly and in greater detail, with the result that after him only an occasional idealist ventured to write a psychology in terms of different main assumptions. Spinoza, though without influence till much later, is interesting to mention in contrast with Hobbes. His main interests would have been favourable to an ultimate teleology in explaining the attribute of thought; only being able, as he thought, to apply the mathematical method here also, he conceived it, like the realm of extension, in terms of mathematical implication rather than in terms of ends and means. From now on it is a settled assumption for modern thought in practically every field, that to explain anything is to reduce it to its elementary parts, whose relations, where temporal in character, are conceived in terms of efficient causality solely.

(C) More's Notion of Extension as a Category of Spirit

Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, was also powerfully stimulated by the philosophy of Descartes and was eager to get beyond the dualism of the French thinker, but being a deeply religious spirit, he sensed serious difficulties in Hobbes' smashing way of disposing of the problem. The general account of man's cognitive relation to nature which had developed by this time he took over (very significantly) without noticing any serious difficulty with "I I say in general, that sensation is made by the arrival of motion from the object to the organ, where it is received in all the circumstances we perceive it in, and conveyed by virtue of the soul's presence there, assisted by her immediate instrument the spirits, by virtue of whose continuity to those of the common sensorium, the image or impress of every object is faithfully transmitted thither." 19 These phrases' the

it.

1 More, Immortality of the Soul (A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, 4th ed., London 1712). Bk. II, Ch. 11, Par. 2.

soul's presence there,'' her immediate instrument the spirits, the common sensorium,' will need elucidation later; let us proceed to note here that More accepts the general structure of the primary-secondary doctrine, though on Galileo-Cartesian rather than Hobbesian lines; the latter's dismissal of the 'soul' as merely a name for the unconceivable cause of vital motions More would not at all admit. For him it was as real a substance as corporeal matter. But for the rest he is quite orthodox. "The diversity there is of sense or perception does necessarily arise from the diversity of the magnitude, position, figure, vigour, and direction of motion in parts of the matter. . . there being a diversity of perception, it must imply also a diversity of modification of reaction; and reaction being nothing but motion in matter, it cannot be varied but by such variations as are compatible to matter, namely such as are magnitude, figure, posture, local motion, . . . direction . . . and a vigour thereof. These are the first conceivables in matter, and therefore diversity of perception must of necessity arise from these." 20 As regards the ultimate structure of matter, too, the common notions of the day were accepted uncritically, with the exception that there appear certain added idiosyncracies, such as the contention that the atoms, though extended, have no figure. Matter is composed of homogeneous atoms, impenetrable as regards each other, without figure, though extended, filling all space, and by their own nature inert, though movable by spirit.” 21 The reason, such

as it is, for this curious notion, is given in the preface to the Immortality of the Soul: "those indiscerptible particles of matter have no figure at all; as infinite greatness has no figure, so infinite littleness has none also." The Cartesian doctrine of the conservation of the quantity of motion was likewise accepted. God

10 Immortality of the Soul, Bk. II, Ch. 1, Axiom 22.

21 Enchiridion Metaphysicum, London, 1671, Ch. 9, Par. 21.