scientific revival of the sixteenth century, and his mani festo is but the conclusion, or as we might say the moral, which English common-sense draws from the scientific movement. But though he cannot be said to have originated the experimental method, we must at least concede to him the honor of having raised it from the low condition to which scholastic prejudice had consigned it, and of having insured it a legal existence, so to say, by the most eloquent plea ever made in its favor. It is no small matter to speak out what many think and no one dares to confess even to himself.

Nay, more. Though experimental science and its methods originated long before the time of the great chancellor, Bacon is none the less the founder of experimental philosophy, the father of modern positivistic philosophy, in so far as he was the first to affirm, in clear and eloquent words, that true philosophy and science have common interests, and that a separate metaphysics is futile. An outspoken adversary of the metaphysical spirit, he expressly begs his readers "not to suppose that we are ambitious of founding any philosophical sect, like the ancient Greeks or some moderns; for neither is this our intention, nor do we think that peculiar abstract opinions on nature and the prin ciples of things are of much importance to men's fortunes." Hence he not only opposes Aristotle, but "every abstract opinion on nature," i. e., all metaphysics not based on science.

He distinguishes, moreover, between primary philosophy and metaphysics. Primary philosophy treats of the notions and general propositions common to the special sciences, viz. (according to Bacon's strange division, "that is derived

Baconem, Paris, 1862; of Sigwart, Ein Philosoph und ein Naturforscher Shan Ranne | Praussische Jahrbücher. vol XII., August, 1863; vol. XIII January, 1804).

1 Novum organum, I., 116.

from the three different faculties of the soul," memory, imagination, and reason)· history, which includes civil his tory and natural history; poesy; and philosophy, which he divides into natural theology, natural philosophy, and human philosophy. Metaphysics is the speculative part of natural philosophy; it deals with forms (in the scholastic sense) and final causes, whereas the practical part of natural philosophy, or physics proper, deals only with efficient causes and substances. But Bacon does not value metaphysics very highly, and it sounds like irony when, after having called final causes barren virgins, he assigns them to this science. As regards natural theology, its sole aim is "the confutation of atheism." Dogmas are objects of faith, and not of knowledge.'

This method of distinguisning between science and theology, philosophy and faith, reason and revelation, is diametrically opposed to the ways of the School. The old realistic Scholasticism identified philosophy with theology. Bacon, like the nominalists, cannot keep them far enough apart. He justifies himself for being a naturalist in science and a supernaturalist in theology on the ground of this absolute distinction, and a number of English thinkers follow his example. But the distance is not great between the exclusion of the invisible from the domain of science and its complete denial. Thomas Hobbes, a friend of Bacon, teaches a form of materialism which his political conservatism scarcely succeeds in disguising.

§ 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

1 De dignitate et augm. sc., III.

exclusively 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,

1 Elementa philosophica de cive, 1642 and 1647; Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, London, 1650; Leviathan sive de materia, forma et potestate civitatis ecclesiasticæ 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, Neuchâtel, 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. Tönnies. 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. Tönnies, London, 1889; Siebzehn Briefe des Th. Hobbes, etc., ed. and explained by F. Tönnies, A. f. G. d. Ph., III., pp. 58-78, 192-232; Hobbes's Leviathan in Morley's Universal Library, London. On Hobbes see: F. Tönnies'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), Edin burgh and London, 1886; G. Lyon, La philosophie de Hobbes, Paris, 1893.- TR.].

De corpore, p. 2.

Id, p. 6: Subjectum philosophia sive materia circa quam versatus est corpus.

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.1

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

1 De corpore.

cerebral substance. 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 be lieve 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 noth ing 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.2

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. 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

1 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.

* Id., pp. 9 f.

• Id., pp. 71 f.