Although On the Human Being (Libri de Homine) was Section 2 of the Latin trilogy Elements of Philosophy, it was the last to be completed. It was finally published in 1658, when Hobbes was 70 years old.

I have used the Molesworth edition (LW II), to which the page numbers in square brackets refer. As far as I am aware, the only previous translation into English (and then only partial) was by Charles T. Wood, T.S.K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert, in Bernard Gert (ed) Man and Citizen (Harvester, 1972). It covers the Epistle Dedicatory, and chapters 10–15. By contrast with my policy of translating Hobbes’s English into modern English of the same style as my translations from his Latin, they translated Hobbes’s Latin into a style approximating to Hobbes’s English.

On the Human Being is one of the least satisfactory of Hobbes’s philosophical works, and I think he wrote it only because he wanted to complete his promised trilogy before he died. The root of his problem was that he simply had nothing more to say on the topic. On the Human Being was supposed to be about the characteristics of the human race which distinguish it from animals (other than straight physiology, which belongs to ‘natural history’ rather than to ‘science’ in Hobbes’s sense). Hobbes believed that there were two such characteristics: the possession of language, which was necessary for reasoning, philosophy, science, and technology; and the capacity to live in a civil society. But he had already dealt with the former in Parts I and II of On Body, and with the latter in On the Citizen. Indeed, he had also covered both to varying degrees of detail in his two main unitary works: The Elements of Law, and Leviathan.

The result was a cobbling together of what he had written elsewhere, usually in summary form, but with a few new additions. The structure is as follows:

I have extracted the parts which have most philosophical interest.

Go to Index to On the Human Being