HOBBES

ON BODY

FOOTNOTES
  1. As De cive, Paris, 1642.

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  2. Unlike Section III.

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  3. 1473–1543.

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  4. Three Greek philosophers who believed in the rotation of the earth.

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  5. 1564–1642.

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  6. By ‘general’ (actually, ‘universal’) physics he means the science of bodies in general, rather than particular sciences dealing with specific kinds of body (e.g. the human body).

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  7. 1578–1657. The De motu cordis was published in 1628, and the De generatione animalium in 1651.

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  8. Literally, the contrast is between ‘natural history’ and ‘civil history’. cf. the first paragraph of Leviathan, chapter 9.

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  9. 1571–1630.

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  10. 1592–1655.

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  11. 1588–1648.

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  12. c.117–180. A Greek who (among other things) wrote satirical dialogues about philosophers.

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  13. Hobbes in fact contrasts two Greek words, theosebeia, and theologia, so that the worship of God has been replaced by the logos, or philosophical theorising about God.

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  14. Aristophanes, Frogs, 293.

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  15. A pre-Olympian goddess associated with the underworld, ghosts, and black magic.

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  16. It was published 3 years later, in 1658.

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  17. An allusion to Genesis 1.1–2: ‘In the beginning . . . . the earth was without form.’

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  18. The Biblical term is ‘firmament’, or ‘foundation’, meaning a support for the heavenly bodies. Hobbes interprets it as the infinite expanse of space in which the stars were located.

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  19. Hobbes’s choice of the term ‘expansion’ as contrasted with Descartes’ ‘extension’ is significant. He takes very seriously the traditional Euclidean idea that space is generated from the expansion of a point into a line, a line into a plane, and a plane into a volume. Similarly, geometrical demonstrations involve motions of points, lines, and planes.

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  20. An allusion to the Civil War.

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  21. Their wisdom in the sense of the intellectual skills required to make money.

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  22. It is worth noting that, in this sexual metaphor, the soul of the male rapist (Hobbes) is feminine in gender, and the beautiful world he rapes is masculine in gender. I say this merely to remind one of the importance of maintaining a clear distinction between the concepts of sex and of gender.

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  23. In the translation, I haven’t been able to pick up all the analogies between philosophy and wild fruit. The word translated as ‘pick up’ could be used for picking fruit, and the word translated as ‘insane’ also means ‘unhealthy’ or ‘ill’.

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  24. Or he might mean ‘philosophy in general’, i.e. ‘first philosophy’, or metaphysics. This is how the first translator took it.

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  25. Literally, ‘colour’. I am sure that what Hobbes means here is any aspect of a word’s meaning which is not captured in its precise definition.

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  26. This paragraph is an over-condensed version of Leviathan, p.28.

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  27. In the sense that it is shared by all animals, and exclusive to animals.

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  28. Other translators take praevisus as meaning ‘previously seen’ (as it can). But this would be mere ‘foresight’ rather than philosophy, which involves knowledge of the relation between cause and effect.

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  29. In Euclid’s Geometry, a theorem is a fact about the properties of a figure which requires demonstration, and a problem is to construct a particular figure, for which a technique is required — e.g. how to construct a square on a given line using a ruler and compasses. Hobbes’s point is that the only value of theorems is to help us to construct figures, since geometry is the totality of figures which can be constructed.

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  30. I have omitted the phrase ‘so to speak’, since Hobbes coins a new Latin word here, and I have not. Hobbes contrasts scientificus and verbificus. He uses scientificus in its true etymological sense of making or generating science. By analogy, verbificus means making or generating words.

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  31. Natural history is the written record of observations of nature, or what we would now call ‘empirical science’.

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  32. i.e. the three separate books, De corpore, De homine, and De cive.

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  33. Reading quibus for cui.

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  34. In fact Hobbes uses the word ‘homogeneous’, picking up homo meaning ‘man’.

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  35. This is one of a number of passages in which Hobbes gets the Bible story wrong. In Genesis 2.19, God presents the animals to Adam, and Adam himself chooses the names. This is actually closer to Hobbes’s theory of naming than to another contemporary theory, namely that there was a sort of ur-Hebrew in which the names of things were the divine names revealed to Adam by God.

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  36. A Latin pun is lost in translation. Futurum means ‘going to be’, and there is much less of a move in the Latin if we read it as: ‘nor do we know that what we call "going to be" is ever going to be.’

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  37. The argument is very abbreviated here, and a fuller version can be found in the Preface to Mersenne’s Ballistic, at the bottom of p.313. Hobbes’s point is that we can imagine a future event B when we are confronted with a present event A, if we have come to associate A and B because of past experience.

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  38. The Latin doctrinae causa could also mean ‘for the sake of teaching,’ or ‘for the sake of learning.’ I think the above translation makes best sense, since Hobbes is saying that imaginary quantities are needed in mathematical calculations, even if there is nothing in the real world which they refer to.

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  39. The ‘because’ is lacking in the Latin. Either this is a typographical error, or Hobbes is treating ‘for the sake of’ as meaning ‘because’.

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  40. i.e. the scope of the word ‘thing’ is wider than the scope of things existing in the real world, and we can give names to non-existent things.

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  41. The word is spectrum, which is a Latin translation of the Stoic term eidolon, or an emanation from the object which gives rise to perception (like the Scholastic ‘species’). I am sure Hobbes is picking up ‘phantasm’ from the previous sentence, and I do not accept the other translators’ ‘spirit’, or ‘ghost’, even though the English word ‘spectre’ could carry those meanings at the time.

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  42. This is one of the places where nomen commune means ‘common noun’.

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  43. The Latin parabola means both ‘parabola’ and ‘parable’.

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  44. chapter 3, Article 4.

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  45. This is more a paraphrase than a translation of per praepositionem.

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  46. The Latin is in quasdam scalas sive gradus.

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  47. In other words, ‘non-human’ has a wider extension, since more things are non-human than non-animal (non-animals plus non-human animals).

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  48. In the Latin, there is the same word (incohaerens) for ‘not hanging together’ and ‘incoherent’. Again, there is the same word (oratio) for ‘sentence’ and ‘language’.

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  49. In Latin, the difference is between ambulat and ambulans.

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  50. This is a remarkable understatement, since elsewhere he attributes the corruption of philosophy to a misunderstanding of the verb ‘to be’. cf. pp.30–31 below, and Leviathan 497ff. and 512ff.

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  51. Cicero jokingly invents these abstract nouns from the names of Appius and Lentulus in Epistulae ad Familiares 3.7.5.

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  52. The hyphens indicate single words in Latin.

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  53. i.e. in the sentence ‘The stone is cold,’ the word ‘cold’ is concrete. The abstraction is generated by adding the verb ‘to be’ to the word ‘cold’ giving ‘to be cold’ or ‘being cold’, which is equivalent to the abstract noun ‘coldness’.

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  54. i.e. a language in which verbs take the place of all adjectives, so that one says ‘Grass greens’ rather than ‘Grass is green.’

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  55. i.e. so that ‘Grass green’ means the same as ‘Grass is green.’

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  56. I don’t think the Latin will bear either of the previous (mutually conflicting) translations, since to use nego ut for ‘deny that’ is incorrect. The 17th-century translator has ‘for it cannot be denied but that a ghost is a very ghost.’ Martinich has ‘For that a ghost might not be a true ghost cannot be denied.’ Moreover, neither translation gives grounds for the conclusion in the following sentence. Hobbes must be saying that you cannot deny a ghost, but only the proposition that there is a ghost.

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  57. Literally, ‘sempiternally’.

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  58. Hobbes explains the difference between a ‘direct’ and an ‘indirect’ syllogism in Articles 7 and 9.

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  59. Hobbes deliberately uses the word ‘proposition’ rather than the more customary ‘premise’.

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  60. Here he is contrasting his own theory of naming with scholastic accounts, according to which names have a real basis in ‘species’. It is not clear whether he is thinking of ‘species’ as essences in things themselves, or the ‘species’ which travel from the object to the eye in perception.

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  61. The Greek is immediately followed by ‘(i)’ for no obvious reason. The expression is a common one in Aristotle for ‘form’ or ‘essence’, and it literally means ‘the what it was to be.’

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  62. The Latin is spectrum, which could mean ‘image’.

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  63. Reading falsa for falsus.

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  64. The primary meaning of propositio is the act of putting one thing in front of another.

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  65. In other words, if we draw a blank, we need some more definitions.

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  66. The Greek metaphora means ‘transfer’.

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  67. The Latin is principium — the same word as for ‘principle’. Here Hobbes is playing with, as well as explaining different senses of principium: original substance, axiom, and beginning or starting-point.

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  68. He has changed the wording slightly. Here ‘apparent’ means ‘revealed to us in sense experience,’ and has no implication of unreality.

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  69. One might expect Hobbes to have said ‘when we know what its causes are’ — and this is indeed how Martinich translates him, even though it is not what the Latin says. Hobbes’s point seems to be that we have already thought up a number of possible causes in the process of philosophising; but we don’t have scientific knowledge until we know that the possible causes were the actual ones.

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  70. Hobbes leaves the Aristotelian expressions to dioti and to hoti in Greek. Literally they mean knowledge of ‘the because’ and knowledge of ‘the that’. These expressions were widely used in scholastic philosophy.

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  71. In other words, there are three equivalent pairs of terms. When Hobbes is expounding his own (eccentric) theory of reasoning, he prefers addition/subtraction (or occasionally multiplication/division), in order to emphasise his use of the arithmetical model. These are equivalent to the Latin compositio/resolutio and the Greek synthesis/analysis, both of which literally mean ‘putting together’ and ‘taking apart’. In this translation, I use ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’ (or ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’) for both, except in passages like this where both pairs of terms are used.

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  72. He has just said that, in sensory knowledge of particulars, the whole is known better than the parts.

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  73. That is, in scientific knowledge we have knowledge of causes, which are universals, and we know the causes of the parts better than we know the cause of the whole.

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  74. Hobbes uses the word descriptio in the geometrical sense of constructing a figure — as in the expression ‘describe a circle’.

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  75. Reading investigandae for investigandi.

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  76. In physics, we can only know the internal motions of bodies by deducing them from general principles; but in civil philosophy, we have direct access to the motions (emotions) of the mind, from which we can draw conclusions, without having to derive them from the third and fourth parts of natural philosophy.

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  77. Hobbes could never make up his mind where the proper place was. He had already discussed the nature of light in On Human Nature and the Optical Treatise. As far as the three-volume Elements of Philosophy is concerned, he was probably thinking of Part II: On the Human Being (which is largely about optics); but he may be referring to chapter 27 of On Body.

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  78. The Latin is oratio syllogistica.

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  79. This is the distinction in Euclid between an axiom which is assumed to be true, and a postulate which assumes that a basic construction is performable (e.g. drawing a straight line between any two points).

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  80. In English, the words are not the same. In Rhetoric, a parabola is a parable, or analogy; and hyperbola is hyperbole, or exaggeration.

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  81. The Latin is monstrare. Hobbes’s explanation is rather compressed. The Greek deiknuein and the Latin monstrare both mean ‘to show’, and the prefixes apo- and de- are intensifiers — to show conclusively.

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  82. The Latin finitus means both ‘finite’, and ‘having an end’, or finis.

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  83. The Latin is finimus.

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  84. This is a reference to the theory that the heavenly bodies were carried round on invisible, spheres. There were originally supposed to be eight (sun, moon, the five planets then known, and the fixed stars), but two more distant ones were added later: the primum mobile and the crystalline sphere. These are Hobbes’s ninth and tenth spheres beyond the fixed stars; and the thousandth sphere is Hobbes having fun.

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  85. The Latin for ‘happen’ is accido, and ‘accident’ literally means a ‘happening’. Hobbes deliberately uses the verb instead of the noun in order to deflect the desire to think of an accident as a sort of thing. Unfortunately English has no verb corresponding to ‘accident’.

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  86. The Latin is terminus a quo and terminus ad quem.

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  87. The ecliptic line is the orbit of the sun as it appears to us. It is called ‘ecliptic’ because eclipses of the sun or moon can happen only when the moon touches this line. Hobbes’s point is that astronomers treat the sun as a point, and the line as having no width, even though the sun is massive, and the ecliptic line really has the same width as the sun. The same is true of the points and lines we draw in geometrical figures. Much smaller creatures, such as microbes, would perceive them as immense, and not as non- or one-dimensional.

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  88. In other words, the length of the body is generated by its moving in a straight line from any point. If we now consider it as a solid straight line, and move it 90 degrees from its original direction, it will form a solid surface. The area of the surface will be the sum of the lines generated by the motion of each point constituting its length

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  89. These words are in Greek: ekeino meaning ‘that’ or ‘that thing’, and ekeininon, which is an invented word consisting of ekeino with an adjectival ending. In this sentence, ‘wood’ and ‘wooden’ are also in Greek (xylon and xylinon).

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  90. The Latin is pati, which means to suffer, to be passive, or to be acted upon. The words ‘passive’, ‘passion’, and ‘patient’ are derived from it. Unfortunately this etymological relationship cannot be preserved in English.

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  91. Hobbes is thinking in geometrical terms here. In geometry, two figures which are equal (have the same size) and similar (have the same shape), are qualitatively identical.

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  92. In Latin, the word potentia (power) is derived from potest (can). Unfortunately, there is no verb in English corresponding to ‘power’.

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  93. In Latin, fines. A ‘final’ cause explains why something is as it is in terms of the purpose of its existence.

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  94. The single Latin word quantum means ‘how much?’, ‘how many?’, ‘how long?’ etc. So ‘quantity’ literally means ‘howmuchness’, or ‘howmanyness’, etc.

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  95. The Latin discretus literally means ‘discerned’.

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  96. In particular, lines, surfaces, and solids.

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  97. Here there are 4 additional pages in the English translation. They are mostly quite technical.

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  98. The English translation contains additional material at the end of the last paragraph.

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  99. The whole chapter is radically restructured and expanded in the English translation.

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  100. Francesco Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), whose Geometria indivisibilibus continuorum nova quadam ratione promota was first published in 1635. Kepler was in fact the first of the moderns to use what Cavalieri called his ‘method of indivisibles.’ For the next 40 years or so, various mathematicians made different attempts to generalise the method, culminating in the rival versions of the differential and integral calculus developed by Newton and Leibniz.

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  101. i.e. if you draw lines from the circumference of a circle so that they pass through a point outside the circle, as long as the ratio between the distance from the circumference to the point and from the point to the other end is the same, all the ends will be on the circumference of a second circle.

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  102. i.e. the points which are the ends of the lines. Although I normally translate locus as ‘place’, here it is used in the technical sense of the figure traced by all the possible positions of a point, given a set of conditions. Hobbes’s point is that there are different ways of generating a circle, other than the normal one of drawing it with a pair of compasses, so that it is the locus of the moving arm.

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  103. The ‘parts’ of the line are presumably the distances between the point of contact with the applied line and the point at right angles to the focus. In other words, the length of the lines increases at twice the rate of the increase in their distance from the point opposite the focus.

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  104. He mentioned weighing on the previous page, but he doesn’t want to make it a distinct method since it relies on motion (i.e. the motion of a pair of scales).

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  105. François Viète, or Franciscus Vieta (1540–1603) published his Isagoge in artem analyticam in 1591. It is probably the earliest work on symbolic algebra, and it anticipated some features of Descartes’ analytic geometry.

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  106. Pappus of Alexandria flourished around 300 AD. His Mathematical Collection survives incomplete, and it was first published (in a Latin translation) in 1588. It is in many ways a culmination of Greek mathematics, and it had considerable influence on Vieta and Descartes.

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  107. Reading moto for motu.

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  108. The wording of chapter 2, Article 2 is different.

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  109. Hobbes uses the Greek word phainomena as an adjective — literally ‘appearing’.

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  110. The Latin is prope, meaning ‘near’. Hobbes is ambiguous as to the precise location of phantasms. In the next line he locates them in bodies, whereas in other passages they are at the surface of the sense organs, or in the medium between the sense organs and the object.

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  111. Hobbes uses the Greek noun phrase to phainesthai, literally ‘the to appear’, corresponding to phainomena used as a noun. This cannot be reproduced in English, where there is no verb corresponding to ‘phenomenon’.

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  112. The Latin says chapter 8.

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  113. The Latin says chapter 8.

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  114. Unlike the original translator, I think Hobbes is contrasting our mistaken judgment that phantasms flow from objects, with the correct account that phantasms are generated by sensation.

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  115. ‘Appears’ translates the Greek phainetai. I think this is to stress that the externality of the phantasm is mere appearance, since videtur, which I have translated as ‘seems’, could equally mean ‘is seen’.

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  116. Hobbes calls it the meningx tener. It is one of the membranes covering the brain.

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  117. Terence, or Publius Terentius Afer, (c.190–159 BC) was a writer of comedies. The quotation is from lines 4–5 of the First Prologue to Hecyra (‘The Mother-in-Law’). My translation may read slightly oddly, but I want to bring out the fact that Hobbes uses exactly the same terminology. Terence’s point was that the first production of the play was spoilt since the audience paid no attention to anything except the tightrope walker.

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  118. Hobbes leaves the word in Greek. Literally it means ‘not-sensing’.

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  119. Hobbes uses the Greek verb phantazesthai.

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  120. An allusion to the famous quotation from the Gesta Romanorum 103: Quidquid agas, prudenter agas, et respice finem: ‘Whatever you do, do with foresight, and consider the end.’

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  121. The Latin is aspectus — which can also mean the act of seeing, vision, visible appearance, or the object of vision.

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  122. Unfortunately, English does not have a simple opposition between single verbs meaning ‘to will’ and ‘to will not’ — even though the Latin contrast between velle and nolle is reflected in the expression ‘willy nilly’.

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  123. Originally, the first-fruits (the first pickings of crops, and the first-born of animals) were burnt as sacrificial offerings to God. Later, the priests were allowed to keep and eat them (Numbers 18.8ff.).

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  124. Hobbes uses the Greek word alloglossos.

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  125. Literally, it ‘inflates’ you. The analogy is that new wine literally fills you with air, and the initial enthusiasm for geometry (such as Hobbes himself experienced when in Paris) makes you talk a lot of hot air, or makes you puffed up with grandiose claims for the power of geometry. It has nothing to do with alcohol (it’s not that geometrical novices are drunk with enthusiasm), since new wine has a lower alcoholic content. Remember that we are talking about the middle of the 17th century, before bottles and corks had been invented. Wine was kept in barrels, and it started to go off as soon as the barrel had been broached. By late autumn each year, everybody was gasping for some decent, unvinegary wine. By custom, the new wine was opened on Martinmas (11th November), so they drank up all the old stuff the night before. This is why St. Martin is the patron saint of reformed drunkards. In many cases (especially when the harvest was late), the fermentation wouldn’t yet be complete, so the wine would be rather sweet, cloudy, and fizzy (hence the flatulence) — quite unlike the Beaujolais Nouveau produced by modern methods of vinification.

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  126. In the original, there is a drawing of the jar, and the text refers to the mouth as A, and the base as B. However, what Hobbes says is perfectly intelligible without these aids. The one oddity is his implication that the jar is filled through the perforations while being held upside down. I would expect any 17th-century gardener in their right mind to fill it by dunking it in a water butt, and putting their finger over the hole before lifting it out.

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  127. Reading singultiente for sigultiente.

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  128. Epicurus of Samos, c.341–270 BC, who derived his views largely from Democritus of Abdera (5th century BC), who in turn is supposed to have been influenced by his approximate contemporary, Leucippus of Miletus. Virtually nothing of their writings survives.

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  129. Titus Lucretius Carus, c.99–55 BC. He expounded the Epicurean philosophy in an immense poem on the Nature of Things. The work became quite well known in the 15th century, and it had a major influence on Hobbes’s friend Gassendi.

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  130. Lucretius, I.334–339.

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  131. Hobbes has ‘I.363–66.’

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  132. Lucretius, I.345ff. Hobbes’s strange inclusion of lightning is not in this passage.

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  133. Hobbes has ‘I.385–91.’

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  134. i.e. everything is at least slightly flexible, so you can get two panes of glass apart by prising them apart at each end (though not necessarily without breaking them). Hobbes doesn’t make the point that in practice they won’t be perfectly smooth, or that it might be possible to slide them apart.

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  135. There is a common tendency to think of atoms as spherical; but, historically, most atomic theorists believed that different atoms had different shapes, in order to account for the diversity of the phenomena of nature.

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  136. Not in the sense of ‘between one star and another,’ but the whole of the space between the stars, including the earth. Hobbes is primarily interested in the space between the surface of the earth and the upper atmosphere, which used to be called the ‘sublunary sphere’; but he wants to steer clear of the language of pre-Copernican cosmology.

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  137. This claim is inconsistent with the previous sentence, since such a microscope would certainly reveal the eye of a creature the whole of which could just be detected by the naked eye. It is also wholly incredible. The technology was still so primitive that complex microscopes (with more than one lens) were no better than simple ones (basically, glorified magnifying glasses); and Hobbes was writing ten years before the publication of the first book on microscopic observations (Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of 1665). Nevertheless, his comments are prophetic, and possibly the earliest example of someone seeing the philosophical significance of microscopy.

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  138. ‘Bologna stone.’

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