WorkThomas Hobbes

Elements of Philosophy: Concerning Body

The book describes a world made only of bodies in motion, in which to reason is to calculate; its geometry started a quarrel that lasted twenty-three years.

by Thomas Hobbes214 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: De Corpore
First published: 1655(aged 67)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Before 1655 was over, John Wallis, professor of geometry at Oxford, had printed a refutation of a book published that same year. Thomas Hobbes had included in it a method for squaring the circle — constructing a square equal in area to a given circle — and Wallis showed that the proofs failed. An English translation of the Latin followed in 1656, supervised and corrected by Hobbes, with his reply, Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics, attached to it. The two men went on attacking each other in print until 1678, when Hobbes was ninety. The quarrel has little to do with what the book was written for. The book is the first section of a system in three parts — on body, on man and on the citizen — and Hobbes had been drafting it for at least ten years. Its target is the philosophy then taught in the universities, which explained the world through essences and through substances that have no body. Hobbes allows only bodies and their motions. Philosophy, he says, is knowledge of effects reasoned from their causes, and reasoning is computation: the mind adds names together and subtracts them from one another, and an error is a miscalculation. Every change is a motion, and a body moves only because another body pushes it. To describe how a motion begins he introduces endeavour, a motion through a space and a time smaller than any that can be measured. Sense is explained the same way. An object presses on the eye or the ear, the pressure travels inward, and the body's reaction outward is what a person experiences as colour or sound. On this account a thought is a movement in a body, and a mind is not a separate kind of thing. Hobbes held that everything else in his philosophy, his science of politics included, rested on these principles.

Key concepts

What does Hobbes mean by “computation”?

Computation is his word for reasoning. To reason is to add ideas together or to subtract one from another, as an accountant does with figures, and it is not only numbers that can be added: bodies, motions, times and names can too. The Greek word for reasoning, he points out, also meant to reckon. A mistake in philosophy is therefore the same kind of thing as a mistake in a sum.

What is the difference between a mark and a sign?

A mark is something a person sets up to bring back a thought of their own, like a note to oneself. A sign is the same thing used so that others can tell what one thinks. Names do both jobs, Hobbes says, and they are marks first. Someone could reason alone with private marks, but the knowledge would die with them unless the marks also served as signs.

What is a “phantasm”?

A phantasm is an appearance in the one who perceives or imagines: the image, the colour, the sound as experienced. Hobbes insists that it is in the perceiver and not in the object, although it seems to stand outside. The term carries much of the book. Space and time are defined as phantasms, and sense itself is a phantasm produced when the organ reacts to pressure.

What does “accident” mean in De Corpore?

An accident is a way in which a body is conceived: its size, its motion or rest, its colour, its hardness. Hobbes denies that an accident is a thing in its own right or a part of the body. It is the power a body has to produce a certain conception in us. This is his reply to the philosophy of the schools, which he accuses of treating such properties as separate beings.

What is an “entire cause”?

An entire cause is everything that had to be present for an effect to happen: all the relevant properties of the thing acting and of the thing acted on, taken together. Hobbes argues that once all of them are present the effect cannot fail to follow, and that if one is missing it cannot occur. So for him every effect, without exception, has a necessary cause.

What is “endeavour” in Hobbes’s physics?

Endeavour is motion through a stretch of space and time too small to be measured, the very first beginning of a movement. Hobbes needs it because he explains everything by motion, and a motion has to start somewhere. Pressure and resistance are endeavours opposed to each other. In the chapter on sense, the organ’s outward endeavour against the object’s pressure is what produces the appearance a person sees.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Reasoning as Reckoning

Is thinking anything more than adding and subtracting names? If Hobbes is right, a false philosophy is a sum done wrong, and the remedy is to check the accounts.

Philosophy is defined at the start as knowledge of effects gained by reasoning from their causes, and its purpose is power over things. To reason is to compute: the mind adds one idea to another or takes one away, and words fix the result. Names are marks for one’s own memory and signs to others. Only names are universal, and truth belongs to sentences, never to things. Hence the first truths are definitions that the makers of language settled, and a false conclusion is a slip in the reckoning. The schools’ talk of essences is, on this view, a mistake about words.

language
logic
propositions
reasoning
definition
universals
syllogism
syllogistic logic
demonstration
method
knowledge
classification

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Nothing but Bodies in Motion

What is left of the world if only bodies and their motions are real? Space, time, cause and even seeing have to be explained again from that starting point.

Hobbes begins by imagining the world annihilated and one person left with his memories. Space is then the image of a thing simply as outside the mind, and time the image of before and after in a motion. A body is what fills space independently of our thought, and its properties are the ways it is conceived. All change is motion, passed on by contact, and a complete cause makes its effect necessary. Endeavour names motion’s smallest beginning. Sense is the organ’s reaction to pressure from an object, and what a person sees is that reaction. The mind needs no substance of its own.

motion
causation
perception
sensation
space
time
body
accidents
matter
memory
imagination
metaphysics

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Within this work

passages held: 214
distinct concepts: 236
by passages held, corpus-wide: #337

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causation” and “motion”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
causation	motion	15
language	logic	12
geometry	motion	8
motion	time	8
motion	perception	5
language	perception	4
causation	geometry	3
causation	language	3
geometry	time	3
space	time	3
causation	logic	2
causation	perception	2
logic	motion	2
logic	time	2
motion	space	2
geometry	space	1
language	motion	1
logic	space	1
perception	space	1
perception	time	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1642 Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (De Cive)
Written in Latin for readers across Europe, this is the second of Hobbes's three statements of his political theory, after The Elements of Law and before Leviathan, and the one that forms a section of his larger system.
EN
1650 The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic
De Cive and Leviathan both grow out of this treatise, the first statement of Hobbes's political theory, which he wrote in English in 1640 and did not himself send to the press.
EN
1651 Leviathan
The last of Hobbes's three statements of his political theory and the one that is still read: it repeats the argument of The Elements of Law and De Cive and says far more about religion than either.
EN
1655 Elements of Philosophy: Concerning Body (De Corpore) you are here EN
1656 The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance
This is Hobbes's fullest treatment of free will and his last word on it in his argument with John Bramhall, an argument that reached print in four instalments between 1654 and 1658.
EN
1682 An Answer to Bishop Bramhall’s The Catching of the Leviathan, with An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy
Two defensive pieces from the late 1660s, when Hobbes was barred from publishing on religion: one closes his quarrel with John Bramhall, which had begun over free will, and the other is his history of how heresy came to be punished.
EN

— or open another of their works