HOBBES

ELEMENTS OF LAW

FOOTNOTES
  1. He writes the word in Greek characters.

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  2. It is ambiguous whether he means a genuine seeing, so that he is saying the same thing twice in different words, or whether he means a divinely inspired dream. The wording of the section heading (‘reality and vision’) suggests the former.

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  3. Hobbes makes it clear that this is his own personal distinction. The Latin discursus means ‘running around in different directions’, and this is what Hobbes means by ‘discourse’ or ‘discursion’: it is the progression from one thought to the next, in whatever direction, and whether or not it is expressed in language. It was only in early modern times that ‘discourse’ came to mean an extended and orderly speech or treatise, and specifically one which is logical (as in the adjective ‘discursive’).

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  4. Andrew and Peter were brothers, and are often mentioned together in the Bible. Cf. John 1.40.

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  5. Mark 3.16: ‘And Simon he surnamed [nicknamed] Peter,’ and Matthew 16.18: ‘And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ The Greek for Peter is Petros, and petros means a rock. If the story is true, it proves that Jesus knew Greek.

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  6. By ‘kind’ he means genus, and by ‘sort’ he means species.

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  7. Literally ‘keen-scentedness’; but the word came to be applied to the intelligence of both animals and humans — and inventiveness in particular (as contrasted with discursive reasoning).

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  8. Hobbes uses the word ‘experiment’, which means an individual experience. It had not yet acquired its modern meaning of a controlled scientific experiment.

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  9. Remember that the primary meaning of ‘consequent’ is the purely temporal one of ‘happening after’, rather than following by logical or causal necessity.

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  10. ‘Fact’. Hobbes usually uses the word in the original sense of the Latin word factum, which means that which happened, or that which was done or made.

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  11. He is thinking of God: to call him ‘infinite’ signifies not a deficiency in God (a lack of limits), but a deficiency in ourselves, since we are incapable of conceiving infinity.

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  12. Although Hobbes is thinking primarily of human habits, it is an everyday observation that machinery (especially if made of wood) needs to be run in before it operates smoothly.

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  13. Here Hobbes punningly uses the Latin words ratio (reason) and oratio (speech).

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  14. Nosce teipsum. The Greek version (gnothi seauton) was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, which was one of the holiest shrines in the Greek world.

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  15. This implies (unnecessarily for Hobbes’s case) that people have beliefs about every possible item of knowledge. It is enough that there are some items about which some people have beliefs which happen to be true, but not evidently so.

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  16. The motion of the heart is ‘vital’, because it keeps us alive.

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  17. Hobbes uses the Greek expression agathon haplos, or ‘simply good’.

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  18. Hobbes puts these in Latin: bonum and finis.

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  19. Roman Emperor, 54–68 AD.

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  20. Roman Emperor, 180–192 AD.

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  21. i.e. suffering from melancholia, or a mental illness characterised by depression and baseless fears. It is so called because it was believed to be caused by an excess of black bile (Greek: melas ‘black’ and chole ‘bile’), which was one of the four bodily ‘humours’.

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  22. The Greek for ‘in a way which attributes human feelings to something which is not human.’ Nowadays we would probably say ‘anthropomorphically’.

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  23. In pre-Christian Greek, angelos simply meant ‘messenger’.

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  24. Both are in Latin.

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  25. For example, Socrates believed he had a ‘genius’ which warned him when he was going to do something wrong. The belief re-emerges in Christianity with the doctrine of the ‘guardian angel’. A Freudian might say that it is a reification of the superego.

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  26. Hobbes’s etymology of ‘deliberation’ is probably a deliberate joke, rather than a mistake. There is a superficial plausibility to saying that it come from de- meaning ‘taking away’, and liberatio meaning ‘freedom’; but in fact it comes from de- meaning ‘downwards’, and libra meaning a ‘weighing scales’. Hobbes must have known that it was to do with working out which of two weights is heavier (like ‘pondering’, from the Latin pondus, meaning ‘weight’).

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  27. This is a rather bad pun on ‘will’ as in a decision to perform a voluntary action after a period of deliberation, and ‘will’ as in ‘last will and testament.’

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  28. If you find this obscure, try Hobbes’s original wording: ‘The infallible sign of teaching exactly, and without error, is this: that no man hath ever taught the contrary; not that few, how few soever, if any.’

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  29. Hobbes uses the Latin mathematici, perhaps to indicate its other meaning, which is people who been taught, or are learned.

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  30. Hobbes uses the Latin dogmatici.

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  31. All the material in quotation marks is in Latin.

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