Thus the Will itself is not 'free' or 'voluntary', in the sense of 'self-originating'. It seems to be so because we are conscious of the act of choice, but unconscious of the vague processes which held up to it and really determined it. Nevertheless Hobbes finds a sense for ‘voluntary action’ it is action determined by this ‘last appetite ‘only , and not by external compulsion.
This result, that man is really an automaton, was of course implicit already in the account of ‘sense’ as being itself a form of motion in matter. It was that classification of ‘mind’ with ‘matter’ which rendered it, along with every other part of the universe, subject to all the rigour of strict causation
‘Body ‘
"The universe ,that is , the whole mass of all things that are , is corporeal (material) , that is to say , body , and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth , and depth, also , every part of body is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions, and consequently every part of the universe is body , and that which is not body is no part of the universe :and because the universe is all , that which is no part of it is nothing and consequently nowhere" .
And this is so not merely because in his best known book, the Leviathan, he avowedly mobilizes his ‘philosophy. It represents what to Hobbes , was Truth: nothing , probably , was felt by him to be truer than this: ’The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real’. "Fear and reverence nature no longer ; she is no mystery , for she “worketh by motion”, and Geometry , which is the mother of the sciences".
With Hobbes there is but one real world, that in which all is ‘body’: all else belongs to the ‘kingdom of darkness’ inhabited only by fairies, ghosts, and ‘surds’ ; and this is what gives his style its singleness and force
Hobbes belongs to that class of thinkers, usual in periods of rapid scientific advance to whom a ‘ naturalistic’ type of explanation seems completely satisfying .In Hobbes' age this meant the acceptance of mechanico – materialism as an exhaustive account of reality . Hobbes is a specially significant figure for the purpose of this study , for he illustrates perhaps better than any other seventeenth – century writer the immediate results of the whole – hearted adoption of the new philosophy and its application in every field of inquiry. A Consideration of some of his views, we may therefore hope, should help us to answer the questions with which we are mainly concerned, namely , what affirmations were involved in the acceptance of mechanical ‘truth’ in our period ? And what, in consequence, had to be rejected as ‘error’?
Words are names, and names may be used to signify(I)the bodies that work on the senses, (2) the sense –impressions themselves (imagination), (3) the part of speech (‘names of names’), or (4) the relations between names (e.g. the verb ‘to be’). All other names are but insignificant sounds; ‘and words whereby we conceive nothing but the sound are those we call “absurd”, “insignificant”, and “nonsense”, When we say , he writes,
That " a man is a living body, we mean not that the ‘man' is one thing, the ‘living body ‘ another, and the ‘is’ or ‘being’ a third; but that ‘man’ and the ‘living body’ is the same thing; because the consequence, ‘if he be a man, he is a living body’, is a true consequence, signified by that word ‘is’. therefore ‘to be body ‘, ‘to walk’, ‘to be speaking’, ‘to live’ , ‘to see’, ‘and the like infinitives’.
He has an inward assurance of the materiality of the universe, that is, of all ‘real things'. A 'material’ or 'real' thing , or a 'body natural', was one which occupied space, was divisible , movable, and in sum, behaved geometrically . What Hobbes seems to leave unquestioned is that he knows the meaning of ‘matter’ or ‘body’. It is as certain, for him, that ‘body’ means what is real as that 'entity' or 'being' means nothing.
Hobbes makes the usual complaint , that the scholastic explanations not only explain nothing , but discourage further research . They were the explanations of men who felt that all really important truth was already known, and were therefore not eager to fill in the picture with physical detail. It was enough, to explain a phenomenon, to say , in different words, that it happened because it was its nature so to do. Probably this is the only ultimate explanation that can be given of anything; but the new age Did not want ultimate explanations; it wanted descriptions of intermediate processes.
If you desire to know why some kind of bodies sink naturally downwards towards the earth, and others go naturally from it , the schools will tell you out of Aristotle , that the bodies that sink downwards are ‘heavy’, and that this heaviness is it that causes them to descend .But if you ask what they mean by ‘heaviness’ they will define it to be an endeavour to go to the centre of the earth. So that the cause why things sink downward, is an endeavour to be below ; which is as much as to say, that bodies descend, or ascend, because they do . Or they will tell you the centre of the earth is the place of rest , and conservation for heavy things; and therefore they endeavour to be there : as if stones and metals had a desire, or could discern the place they would be at, as man does ; or loved rest , as man does not ; or that a piece of glass were less safe in the window than falling into the street. And in many occasions they put for cause of natural events their own ignorance .
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The soul
But Hobbes rejected much more than the mere ‘Aristotelity ‘ of which he , like Milton , had had his fill at the university .He rejected also much that his contemporaries retained. We have seen that Descartes, the representative philosopher of the seventeenth- century enlightenment , had recognized two substances as real, matter and soul; and that he had taken as his starting-point the thinking ‘ego’ conceived as immaterial , that is , not extended and not subject to the Laws of motion, From this which was to him the primary certainty , Descartes had derived his certainty of God and his certainty of the world.
Hobbes chose the first alternative: ‘soul’ as an ‘immaterial substance ‘having no location or motion, was one of the ‘insignificant sounds’, and must consequently go. Thus the last stronghold of a once all-powerful system of thought falls before the attack of mechanico-materialism.
The accepted tradition of centuries past , blended out of platonic, Aristotelian , Neo-platonic, Stoic, and Christian elements, spoke with seemingly overwhelming authority for the soul as a spiritual and even divine essence, informing the body , but existing in its own right, separable, and consequently immortal. And if the authority of this teaching had needed any reinforcement , which it hardly did, the revival of Platonic studies at the Renaissance had served to give it renewed sanction for the philosophically-minded. If any doctrine has ever been felt as a fact, it was this, as held throughout the Christian centuries. No wonder Descartes, and most others, found it first among their certainties. To deny it, the seventeenth century, was no light matter of academic debate debate; it was the worst of atheisms, for it set man amongst the brutes.
Hobbes denied it; but the manner of his denial must be a little examined, for it throws light on the mentality of the age. For Hobbes ‘thought’ was no alien substance unaccountably existing in an otherwise material world and ‘perception’ no exception to the universal mechanical rule .Thought was itself a form of motion in matter: my ‘ideas’ are vibrations in the matter of my brain or nerves. There is no gulf to bridge between the world and the soul or between the soul and the body.
The cause of ‘sense’ (perception), Hobbes explains, is the motion in external bodies acting directly or indirectly upon the, ‘organ’ of perception. All external bodies are ‘really’ composed; it will be remembered, of particles of matter in a state of motion. These motions are mechanically transferred, either by contact with the object as in touch or taste , or through some medium as in sight or sound, to the organs of sense , and thence conveyed to the brain, where the corresponding motions give rise to the seemings which are our ‘ideas’.
Similarly, all that ‘really’ takes place in us when we perceive anything is ‘divers motions’, for ‘motion produceth nothing but motion’
One further consequence of Hobbes’s denial of separate immaterial soul may be noted before we pass to the next topic And that is, that Hobbes (it is one of his several points of contact with Milton) is a ‘mortalist’ .He believes, as he logically must , that the death of the body is the death of the man, since ‘soul’ for him simply means ‘life’
That the soul of man is in its own nature eternal, and a living creature independent of the body, or that any mere man is immortal otherwise than by the resurrection in the last day except Enoch and Elias , is a doctrine not apparent in scripture.
