THIRD EPOCH. PHILOSOPHY REDUCED TO A QUESTION OF PSYCHOLOGY. CHAPTER I. HOBBES. PERHAPS no writer except Spinoza has ever been so uniformly depreciated as Hobbes. From his first appearance until the present day he has been a by-word of contempt with the majority of writers; and even by those who have been liberal enough to acknowledge merit in an adversary, he has been treated as a dangerous and shallow thinker. The first person who saw his importance as a political thinker, and had the courage to proclaim it, was, we believe, James Mill. But as long as political and social theories continue to be judged of by their supposed consequences, so long will Hobbes be denied a fair hearing. He has roused the odium theologicum. It will be long ere that will be appeased. Faults he had, unquestionably; short-comings, incomplete views; and as all error is dangerous in proportion to its plausi bility-we will say that he was guilty of dangerous errors. Let the faults be noted, but not overstrained; the short-comings and incomplete views, enlarged and corrected; the errors calmly examined and refuted. We shall be gainers by it; but by inconsiderate contempt, by vilifying, no good result can be obtained. Impartial minds will always rank Hobbes amongst the greatest writers England has produced. He is profound, and he is clear; weighty, strong, and sparkling. His style, as mere style, is in its way as fine as any thing in English: it has the clearness as well as the solidity and brilliancy of crystal. Nor is the matter unworthy of the form. It is original, in the sense of having been passed through the alembic of his own brain, even when formerly the property of others. Although little of it would now appear novel, it was novel when he produced it. Haughty, dogmatic, overbearing in manner, he loved Truth, and never hesitated to proclaim her. "Harm I can do none,” he says, in the opening of the Leviathan, "though I err no less than they (i. e. previous writers), for I shall leave men but as they are, in doubt and dispute; but intending not to take any principle upon trust, but only to put men in mind of what they know already, or may know by their experience, I hope to err less; and when I do, it must proceed from too hasty concluding, which I will endeavor as much as I can to avoid.”* "Man," he In this passage we see Locke anticipated. It proclaims that Psychology is a science of observation; that if we would understand the conditions and operations of our minds, we must patiently look inwards and see what passes there. All the reasoning and subtle disputation in the world will not advance us one step, unless we first get a firm basis on fact. says elsewhere, with his usual causticity, "has the exclusive privilege of forming general theorems. But this privilege is alloyed by another, that is, by the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject but man only. And of men those are of all most subject to it, that profess Philosophy." And the cause of this large endowment of the privilege to Philosophers we may read in another passage, where he attributes the difficulty men have in receiving Truth, to their minds being prepossessed by false opinions-they having prejudged the question. The passage is as follows:-"When men have once acquiesced in untrue opinions, and registered them as authenticated records * Works, edited by Sir W. Molesworth, iv. 1. in their minds, it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly to such men than to write legibly on a paper already scribbled over." Hobbes's position in the History of Philosophy is easily assigned. On the question of the origin of our knowledge he takes a decided stand upon Experience: he is the precursor of modern Materialism: "Concerning the thoughts of man I will consider them first singly, and afterwards in a train or dependence upon one another. Singly they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of a man's body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of appearances. "The original of them all is that which we call Sense, for 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. The rest are derived from that original."* We have here stated, in the broadest manner, the principle of Materialism. It is in direct antagonism to the doctrine of Descartes that there are innate ideas; in direct antagonism to the old doctrine of the spirituality of Mind. Theoretically this principle may be insignificant; historically it is important. Hobbes's language is plain enough, but we will still further quote from him, to obviate any doubt as to his meaning. "According to the two principal parts of man, I divide his faculties into two sorts-faculties of the body, and faculties of the mind. "Since the minute and distinct anatomy of the powers of the body is nothing necessary to the present purpose, I will only sum them up in these three heads,-power nutritive, power generative, and power motive. * Leviathan, ch. 1. In the following exposition we shall sometimes cite from the Leviathan, and sometimes from the Human Nature. This genera' reference will enable us to dispense with iterated foot-notes. "Of the powers of the mind there be two sorts-cognitive, imaginative, or conceptive and motive. "For the understanding of what I mean by the power cognitive, we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually certain images or conceptions of the things without us. This imagery and representation of the qualities of the things without, is that which we call our conception, imagination, ideas, notice, or knowledge of them; and the faculty, or power by which we are capable of such knowledge, is that I here call cognitive power, or conceptive, the power of knowing or conceiving." The mind is thus wholly constructed out of sense. Nor must we be deceived by the words faculty and power, as if they meant any activity of the mind-as if they implied that the mind cooperated with sense. The last sentence of the foregoing passage is sufficient to clear up this point. He elsewhere says:- -"All the qualities called sensible are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth on our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed are they any thing else but divers motions; for motion produceth nothing but motion." Hobbes, therefore, and not Locke, is the precursor of that school of Psychology which flourished in the eighteenth century (principally in France), and which made every operation of the mind proceed out of transformed sensations; which ended, logically enough, in saying that to think is to feel-penser c'est sentir. It is to Hobbes that the merit is due of a discovery which, though so familiar to us now as to appear self-evident, was yet in truth a most important discovery, and was adopted by Descartes in his Meditations*-it is that our sensations do not correspond with any external qualities; that what are called sen * Descartes may possibly have discovered it for himself; but the priority of publication is at any rate due to Hobbes-a fact first noticed, we believe, by Mr. Hallam: Literature of Europe, iii. 271. sible qualities are nothing but modifications of the sentient being: sense; "Because the image in vision, consisting of color and shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion that the same color and shape are the very qualities themselves; and for the same cause that sound and noise are the qualities of the bell or of the air. And this opinion hath been so long received that the contrary must needs appear a great paradox; and yet the introduction of species visible and intelligible (which is necessary for the maintenance of that opinion) passing to and fro from the object is worse than any paradox, as being a plain impossibility. I shall therefore endeavor to make plain these points: "That the subject wherein color and image are inherent, is not the object or thing seen. "That there is nothing without us (really) which we call an image or color. "That the said image or color is but an apparition unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some internal substance of the head. "That as in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their inference is not the object, but the sentient." This important principle, which Carneades among the ancients alone seems to have suspected, Hobbes has very clearly and conclusively illustrated. Sense furnishes us with conceptions; but as there are other operations of the mind besides the conceptive, it remains to be seen how sense can also be the original of them. And first, of Imagination. Mr. Hallam has noticed the acuteness and originality which often characterize Hobbes's remarks; and he instances the opening of the chapter on Imagination in the Leviathan. It is worth quoting:-"That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still forever, is a truth |