English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    78/392 (page 62)
    states of consciousness, having no existence outside the mind itself. c Light and colour, and heat and sound, and other qualities which are commonly called sensible, are not objects, but phantasms in the sentients.’1 It follows that the object of sense-perception is purely subjective, and totally unlike the real object, which is the cause of the sense-appearance. This real object, or cause of the sense-appearance, is in every case motion. All sensible qualities are, ‘in the object, that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything else but divers motions ; for motion produceth nothing but motion.’2 Hobbes’s theory of knowledge, or £ logic,’ as he calls it, thus results in the acceptance of motion, or matter in motion, as the sole reality ; and this becomes the fundamental principle of his philosophy, which, so far as it conforms to his own ideal of synthetic or strictly ratiocinative explanation, is simply the result of the application of the principles of the new science of the time, the science of Kepler and Galileo and Harvey, to the whole of reality. Philo¬ sophy or metaphysics is only physical science universalised. The only real causes are mechanical ; formal and final causes are fictions of the Scholastic imagination. We see the same influence of the current scientific concep¬ tions and methods in the great Continental philosophies of the period, those of Descartes and Spinoza. The difference in the case of Hobbes is that the mechanical and materialistic point of view excludes the opposite, that of mind or spirit; for him mind is matter, thought is motion. Any other interpretation of reality or cause is for him simply inconceivable, because it is not scientific. ‘The causes of universal things (of those, at least, that have any cause) are manifest of themselves, or (as they say commonly) known to nature ; so that they need no method at all; for they have all but one universal cause, which is motion. . . . For though many cannot under-