History of European Ideas. Vol. IO. No. 5. pp. 519-545. 1989 0191-6599/89 $3.00 + 0.

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HOBBESS PSYCHOLOGY OF THOUGHT:

ENDEAVOURS, PURPOSE AND CURIOSITY

JEFFREYBARNOVW*

Hobbes has been thought of as having mechanised the mind in such a way that
purpose and spontaneity were excluded from his conception of human thinking.
On the contrary, his adaptation of a model for the motions of the mind from
Galilean mechanics, precisely because it places some emphasis on the role of
drives in all mental processes, makes possible a new and clearer understanding of
how goals-final causes intended by the agents-actually function (as real
efficient causes) in the determination of human action. It turns out that Hobbes,
in fact going back to and taking off from Aristotle, goes as far as any thinker since
in making orientation to an end central to ordered thought processes.
At the same time, since Hobbes does not distinguish between end and means as
things different in kind and since he rejects the idea that there could be an end in
itself or something intrinsically good apart from some correspondingly
determined human desire for it, his appropriation of the Aristotelian theme of
mans intrinsic desire to know (and specifically to know causes or by way of
causes) opens up the prospect of a quite different if not opposite orientation
giving thought coherence and direction: curiosity, understood as the desire to
know not only causes but also the undiscovered effects of causes within our
power, effects which might in turn become new ends.
Before we try to understand how purpose and curiosity may be related as
principles governing thought, we must examine the basis of Hobbess conception
of the mind in the crucial concept CO~C~ZUS, endeavor or-in its closest equivalent
in modern psychology-drive. Hobbess use of this term was influenced by its
recent involvement in the conceptualisation of physical motion in mechanics, but
there is nothing crassly reductive about his metaphorical mechanisation of
mind. He works out the parallel in a way that sheds light on the subtlety and
complexity of mental motions, using the concept conatus in a sense related only
analogically to its meaning in mechanics. The incipient intinitessimal
incremeptal strivings which he intends by his use of the term endeavour are
irreducibly psychological, and his conceptualisation of these basic elements of
mental process is but one of his major contributions to the development of
psychology.

ENDEAVOURS: CONSTITUENTS OF MOTIVE FORCE

It is not actually the case that Hobbes took over the concept of conarus or
endeavor from mechanics; the term is originally found in references to human

*University of Texas at Austin, English Department, Austin, TX 78712-1164. U.S.A.

519
520 Jeffrey Barnouw

motivation, and its use in mechanics suggests a metaphorical projection that

likens physical motion to voluntary. Already in 1615 the adversary of Francis
Bacon and later target of Hobbes, Edward Coke, wrote in a legal brief, the
matter which shall be a cause of his disfranchisement, ought to be an act or deed,
and not a conation, or an endeavour, which he may repent of before the
execution of it, Conation and endeavour are used here as rough equivalents,
like act and deed, and they are distinguished from act as motions toward
action which yet can still be stopped before overt action begins. Hobbes evidently
was not doing anything new in translating conatus as endeavour, or in applying
it to motions within the mind, but he did give the term a new technica east in a
psychological application that drew on its use in mechanics.
The significant metaphorical link between the physical and the psychological
applications is brought out in Leyiathan, chapter 6, Of the Interiour Beginnings
of Voluntary Motions. He characterises voluntary motion: as to go, to speak, to
move any of our Iimbes, in such manner as is first fancied in our minds, and after
concluding that the Imagination is the first internal1 beginning of all Voluntary
Motion, he adds,

although unstudied men, doe not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the
thing moved is invisible; or the space it is moved in, is (for the shortnesse of it)
insensible; yet that doth not hinder, but that such Motions are. For let a space be
never so little, that which is moved over a greater space, whereof that little one is
part, must first be moved over that. These small beginnings of Motion, within the
body of Man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible
actions, are commonly [!] called ENDEAVOUR

The point which evidently draws Hobbes to the analogy here is that of
imperceptibIe motions which have to be supphed by thought, that is, which are
required in order to make sense of any external motion which may eventually be
experienced. One of the functions of the physical concept conarus was to make
conceivable the internal motions in bodies which constituted their state:
cohesion, hardness, resistance, and the dynamic tension of contending forces
even where the overt result was a body apparently at rest. Any evident externaf
motion was moreover similarly a result of the interaction of several component
motions which could ideally be distinguished in a vectoral analysis like that of a
parallelogram of forces. Motion was also not simply a matter of velocity and
direction, but included an intensive quantity that would later be accounted for in
terms of mass. This moment (cf. momentum) of impulse, force or active
tendency was niceiy expressed by cowards, from conari, to attempt or strive.
Each of the components theoretically separated out in analysis of a compound
motion had to be thought of as having a specific force and direction, grasped in
terms of endeavour, which Hobbes insisted was itself not simply a tendency
conceived as potential, but a real motion, even though not perceptible as such.
The task of conceptualising human action as following necessarily from the
confluence of particular motives, each with its determinate force and defining
aim, (motives themselves for the most part produced and further modifiabte in
experience), found an apt model in mechanics.3
In chapter 15 of De Corpore Hobbes defines endeavor in its physical
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 521

understanding as motion made in less space and time than can be given; that is,
less than can be determined or assigned by exposition or number; that is, motion
made through the length of a point, and in an instant or point of time.4 This
formulation shows the sort of thinking for which Hobbes has been considered the
common ancestor to Newton and Leibniz in their respective originations of
calculus. The corresponding function of con&us for mechanics was to represent
the intensive quality of motion. His idea of motion made through the length of a
point or in a point of time made possible the comparison of endeavors and thus
of motions in terms of momentum and helped prepare for the founding of
dynamics by Leibniz.s
It is the power of motion to have effect that is of fundamental interest for
Hobbes, yet the key insight is to recognise motion even where it has no
perceptible effect. This idea of the infinitessimal had as fruitful an application in
psychology, where Hobbess conatus provided the basis for Leibnizs conception
ofpetitesperceptions orpetites appetitions. The psychology of the imperceptible,
like so much else in Hobbess conception of the workings of the mind, can be
traced back to suggestions in Aristotle, as we will later see, but the new mechanics
gave it its characteristic framework, while the cultural impact of the telescope
and microscope gave it new impetus. The barely discernible in the form of aje ne
sais quoi grasped by finesse or sentiment has a key role in the genesis of
aesthetics, which was originally conceived as a logic of feeling and sensation.6
The analogy with mechanics allows Hobbes to posit psychological endeavors,
the small beginnings of motion before they appear in. . . visible actions, so that
the formation and fruition of motives can be construed in a similar way to the
composition of physical motion from a confluence of interacting impulses. The
concept endeavor* plays an even more important role, however, in concep-
tualising how impulses arise, and it is here that all real continuity with physical
con&us breaks off. In the psychological context endeavors are imperceptible
appetites or aversions, internal beginnings of motion which may grow in force to
the point of becoming conscious as motives and may also eventuate in external
voluntary motion, but only when their aggregate has reached sufficient motive
force.
Hobbes first uses the term endeavor in a technical sense in defining appetite
and aversion in Human Nature, the first part of Elements of Law. After he has
characterised delight, contentment, or pleasure and its opposite as motion
about the heart which of necessity must there either help or hinder the motion
which is called vital, he writes of appetite or aversion,

This motion, in which consisteth pleasure or pain, is also a solicitation or

provocation either to draw near to the thing that pleaseth, or to retire from the thing
that displeaseth. And this solicitation is the endeavour or internal beginning of
animal motion, which when the object delighteth, is called APPETITE.

In Leviathan he says simply, This Endeavour, when it is toward something which

causes it, is called APPETITE, or DESIRE (Lev 119).
Not only is the endeavor which constitutes appetite or aversion the same
motion that is felt (in its inward direction) as pleasure or displeasure; in Hobbess
highly original conception an endeavor outward from the heart, a vital reaction
522 Jeffrey Barnouw

occasioned by an external stimulus, constitutes sensation or appearance-that is,

the fact that phenomena appear to us as external. Our perception of the things
around us, as being outside but with a possible bearing on us, is thus from the
beginning an incipient response to them. As Hobbes explains it, the cause of
Sense, is the External1 Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each
Sense, but this pressure is conveyed by the nerves to the brain and then to the
heart and causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the
heart, to deliver it self (Lev 85).
The pressure felt by the heart has more to do with import than with impact,
since sensation conveys something that bears on the organisms welfare as this is
sensed around the heart. Hobbes held that all sense is conjoined with some
appetite or aversion,g and that this conative aspect has its effect even where it is
too faint to be sensed in its own right. As all conceptions we have immediately by
the sense, are delight, or pain, or appetite, or fear; so are all the imaginations after
sense. But as they are weaker imaginations, so are they also weaker pleasures, or
weaker pain.9
I have argued elsewhere that sense and desire, apparitio and appetitio, should
be seen as twin aspects of an emergent property of some natural bodiesO which
creates an ontological threshold and gives the psychological sense of endeavor a
character which cannot be attributed to motion in matter, namely its intrinsic
orientation to an end. The object of sense is the cause of sense in the way (and
as part of the same process) that the object of desire is the cause of desire. The
phantasm thus encapsulates the vital response, as is implied when Hobbes writes,
we speak more correctly when we say a living creature seeth, than when we say
the eye seeth.
In his discussion of appetite in Leviathan Hobbes points to the etymologies, ad-
petitio and a-versio as evidence that these emotions were conceived in Latin as
motions (toward and away from), and he suggests the same for horme and its
opposite in Greek. I2 It is interesting to note that hormk, meaning impulse or
urge, but also start or first stirring, is the root not only of hormone but of
hormic, a psychological term which has fallen into disuse even more than its
cousin conative. A passage in which the modern psychologist William
McDougall reflects on his motives for adopting the term to refer to purposive or
hormic energy is illuminating for the parallel it suggests with Hobbess
pioneering efforts:

We need a name for the fundamental property expressed in the incessant

adjustments and adventures that make up the tissue of life. Wearedirectlyaware of
that property in our conscious activities as an element of drive, urge, or felt
tendency toward an end. Psychologists call it conarion,and give the name conative
process to any train of conscious activity which is dominated by such a drive.. . .
For instance, the readers endeavor to understand the present sentence is a conative
process in which a relatively complex system of mental acts moves toward a more or
less clearly envisaged end.. . While the readers mind is pursuing the printed
argument, his neuro-muscular mechanisms are keeping his head aloft upon his
shoulders, his digestive glands are dealing with his latest meal. None of these
purposive processes may be called conative, for they lie below, and even far below,
the conscious level; yet a suprahuman spectator, who could watch our mental
behavior in the same direct way as we can observe physical events, would see them
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 523

al1 as instances of the same class , . . . he would see that they all differ from purely
mechanical processes by the presence of an internal drive. . . . To this element of
drive or urge, whether it occurs in the conscious life of men and the higher animals
or in the unconscious activities of their bodies and the (presumably) unconscious
behavior of the lower animals, we propose to give a single name--honn&.3

McDougall is not consistent in reserving conative for processes accessible to

consciousness; the dividing line is evidently movable or permeable. Hobbess
psychologicai conception of endeavor was indeed the direct source for Leibnizs
petites perceptions, which were at the same time minute appditions or
sollicitations, in which he developed a dynamic conception of unconscious
factors which incrementally attain a sufficient cumulative force or mass to
become conscious. The conception of a dynamic unconscious is virtually already
contained in Hobbess psychological idea of endeavor.
What is important in the parallel between Hobbes and McDougall forpresent
purposes is the latters conviction that purposive action is the most fundamental
category of psychology and moreover that purposiveness is of the essence of
mental activity,14 a view which was not only anticipated but fully fleshed out by
Hobbes. Hobbess emphasis on the role of purpose in all ordered thought has
been overlooked or denied, however, by scholars who have focussed on the
coherence of his philosophy as founded in his genera1 conception of motion. In
order to bring out what is at stake it will be useful to focus on a commentator who
has contributed significantly to our understanding of Hobbess positive relation
to Aristotle, because neglect or suppression of the place of purpose in Hobbes is
most telling in such a context.15
In chapter 2 of The Politics ofMotion, entitled Inertia and the End of the Finite
Cosmos, Thomas Spragens shows, on the whole ably and interestingly, that
Hobbes effected a transfo~ation of Aristotles worldview by changing the
conception of motion that was fundamental to it to a conception drawn from
Galilean mechanics and insisting, as an AriStotelian would, on a consistent
following out of all the implications of this change. Spragens construes this
transformation as global, a Ruhnian paradigm shift that has the dramatic
either/or structure of a gestalt switch such that no realm of enquiry could be
exempted from the change, as it apparently was for the dualist Descartes, who
freed such spiritual concepts as mind, soul, and God from the confines of
mechanical motion by assigning them a separate realm. Hobbes was a resolute
monist who saw motion as comprising the whole of reality.
Hobbesian movement has no order, no structure, no end or limitation. It is
endless, aimless motion. It is not from.. . to. . ., as Aristotle assumed, but rather
an endless chain without a goal. Spragens sees a rejection of teleology extending
throughout Hobbess world. Just as Aristotle applied his potency/actuality
model of movement, based on the conception of inertia as rest, to all types of
natural movements, whether they be physical, biological, or human, Hobbes
applied his idea of motion, the purposeless, automatic preservation of an original
impetus, to all types of movements. Accordingly Spragens treats Hobbess
discussion of vital motion as if it were a conceptual reduction to another species
of inertial motion, making life 1iteraIly but a motion of limbs.8
Spragens does not wholly overlook the internal source of this motion but sees
524 Jeffrey Barnouw

Hobbes as transforming the Aristotelian concept of hormk, to render the basic

human urge not self-fulfilment (the actualisation of potentiality) but self-
preservation.

Like AristotIe, Hobbes sees organisms as characterized by naturat tendencies, by

inherent strivings; but this is the striving to persist, not the desire to reach a tefos.
The central phenomenon of endeavour is, in Hobbess view, a kind of biological
inertia, an in-finitized hormt!.

But it is basically misleading to identify endeavor with the urge to self-

preservation in this way for Hobbes. Spragens may be right to maintain that
Spinozas entire world view was influenced far more profoundly [than
Descartes] by his hypostatization of the new view of inertia in his conatus sese
cunsevandzY,9 but Hobbes, on the contrary, treats conatus as essentially plural, a
multiplicity of active tendencies, incipient and incremental,, which are caused by
and have reference to particular objects of desire and aversion.
The endeavors are of course originally embedded in the natural workings of
pleasure and pain by which they are led to function in the interests of self-
preservation, at least basically and to begin with, but this hardly means that they
are themselves directed to self-preservation, quite irrespective of whether self-
preservation is seen as a relos or a non-teios. Hobbes avoids hypostatising the
urge to self-preservation into a unitary drive which would engross all particular
aims. The endeavors that constitute appetite and aversion are directed to the
objects that cause them and as such they are the rudimentary elements of
purposive action. Endeavor in this sense is for Hobbes the entry point of
teleology into the universe, and i; emerges in a form that ensures its effectiveness.
This is what is meant when Hobbes says, Afinal cause has no place but in such
things as have sense and will; and this also I shall prove hereafter to be an efficient
cause.*O
Endeavor is the basic expression of a vital response that is, intrinsically
purposive but at the same time dependent on experience for specification of most
of the ends it pursues. In De Corpore Hobbes writes that appetite is the very first
endeavor in animal motion, found even in the embryo, which while it is in the
womb, moveth its limbs with voluntary motion, for the avoiding of whatsoever
troubleth it, or for the pursuing of what pleaseth it. This apparent germ of
nativism in fact opens up a vast field for experience, since sense is needed to
inform and specify appetite. Infants have very few things which they pursue or
avoid because they have no sense or memory. Only such knowledge as is derived
from sense can show the infants what will prove pleasant or hurtful. By
accustoming themselves little by little, they come to know really what is to be
pursued and what to be avoided.*
In chapter 6 of Leviathan he says that few appetites are born with men; as
Appetite of food, Appetite of excretion,

the rest, which are Appetites of particular things, proceed from Experience, and
triail of their effects upon themselves, or other men. For of things wee know not at
all . . . we can have no further Desire, than to tast and try (Lev 120).

Similarly in DeHomine Hobbes holds that we cannot know whether or not what
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 525

we see as a pleasure would have been so, except by experience, that is, by feeling
it, adding that, although it is commonly said that there is no desire for the
unknown,. . . there can be a desire to experience the unknown.22
It was a favorite theme of Hobbes that appetite is itself pleasure or delight, a
positive indispensable part of happiness and of life itself, or in its best known
expression, felicity is a continuall progress of the desire, from one object to
another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later (Lev 160).
It is this theme which Spragens fundamentally misconstrues when he claims,
Human motives are not specific finite desires which may be terminated by their
fulfillment.23 By insisting one-sidedly on the urge to self-preservation, Spragens
misses the openness that distinguishes human desire, for Hobbes, from that of
other animals, and his idea of the Hobbesian conception of human nature leaves
no room for the trait that Hobbes claimed was the basis of all that is uniquely
human: curiosity.24
If one keeps in mind the central place of human action and psychology in
Hobbess philosophy, nothing will seem less apt than Spragens global conclusion
to his second chapter: In Hobbess world the Aristotelian configuration of
purposeful, finite movements had disappeared entirely. In their stead remained a
homogenous swarm of incoherent, aimless perpetuations of momentum that had
no capacity for growth, for fulfillment or for rest.25 Hobbes did indeed strip the
natural world of Aristotelian teleology, and this had a profound effect on his
conception of the character of human goals and desire, but he resolutely affirmed
that purpose had its origin and place in human life, and that purposes should be
understood therefore not as established from the beginning in the objective
structure of nature but precisely as emerging from human experience and open to
change within experience.

THE CENTRALITY OF PURPOSE

In chapter 3 of Leviathan, Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations,

Hobbes distinguishes two sorts of train of thoughts or mental discourse. The
first is Unguided, without Design, and inconstant; Wherein there is no
Passionate Thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to it self, as the end
and scope of some desire(Lev 95). This characterisation contains his conception
of ordered thinking in a nutshell. A passionate thought organises the discursion*j
of the mind by directing other thoughts to follow it as the object of some desire
which they could lead to. The sort lacking such an orientation to an end may
seem to wander freely but, Hobbes shows, it is steered insensibly by past
associations.

The second is more constant; as being regulated by some desire, and design. For the
impression made by such things as we desire, or fear, is strong, and permanent, or (if
it cease for a time,) of quick return . . . From de-sire ariseth the thought of some
means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought
of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some
beginning within our own power (Lev 95-6).
526 Jeffrey Barnouw

Here Hobbes cites an old precept, which he says is now worn out, to reinfuse
it with new meaning by applying it to his crucial notion. Resp~ce~ne~; that is to
say, in a11your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that
directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it. Just before, Hobbes had seemed
to attribute the directedness of such thinking solely to the strength of the
impression made by the things we desire or fear, but here he clearly implies that
we can influence the character of our mental discourse and thus our action
through such mental determination. Though he generally emphasises the
external causal determination of thought and will, this modest but crucial degree
of (not originary but reinforcing) willing to will is consistent with his way of
conceiving of thought as causally determined.27
By keeping our sights set on the goai and our other thoughts aimed toward it in
the necessary order, we can fortify our desire for some long-term good. Respite
fitzem may be seen as enjoining us to improve our capacity to be determined by
(our understanding of) the external situation. Hobbes suggested something of
this sort when he denied Bramhalls charge that his conception of the
necessitation of the will made consultation or deliberation vain: it is the
consultation that causeth a man, and necessitateth him to choose to do one thing
rather than another,. . . and therefore consultation is not in vain, and indeed the
less in vain by how much the election is more necessitated [by deliberation or
consultation], if more and less had any place in necessity.28 We will return to the
question of mental determination (realty wanting something) in connection
with the concepts of consultation and deliberation.
Having interpreted respicefinem as a maxim concerning the selfdiscipline of
thinking, Hobbes distin~ishes two modes of organised thought, one which
infers from effect to possible (i.e. probable) cause, the other from a cause in our
power to possible (i.e. producible) effects.

The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds: One, when of an effect imagined, we
seek the causes, or means that produce it; and this is common to man and beast. The
other is, when imagining anything whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that
can by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we
have it. Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in man only; for this is a
curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living creature that has no other
passion but sensual, such as are hunger, thirst, lust, and anger. In sum, the
discourse of the mind, when it is governed by design, is nothing but seeking, or the
faculty of invention,. . . a hunting out of the causes, of some effect, present or past;
or of the effects, of some present or past cause (Lev 96).

Hobbes does not emphasise the differences between the coherence of thought
that proceeds from seeking the successive means to a given end and that which
marks the search for heretofore unknown results of a given cause. But the
prevailing type in his summary statements about thought is that of the search for
means to an end that orients and organises thinking, the sort of thinking which
man shares with higher animals. He describes the process in De Corpore as the
main way phantasms succeed one another or proceed from one another in
waking life:

the thought or phantasm of the desired end brings in all the phantasms, that are
Hobbefs PsychoIogy of Thoughr 527

means conducing to that end, and that in order backwards from the last to the first,
and again forwards from the beginning to the end.29

S~ilarly, in the next section, with regard to the incoherence of dreams, he writes,
seeing all order and coherence proceeds from frequent looking back to the
end,. . . it must needs be, that.. . in sleep we lose all thought of the end.~O
In the earlier presentation of these ideas in Human Nature he says conceptions
of cause and effect may succeed one another in imagination just as they have in
sensation, the cause whereof is the appetite of them, who, having a conception of
the end, have next unto it a conception of the next means to that end. Cause and
effect relations are fixed by the mind, it would seem, in view of their convertibility
into relations of means to end.
Hobbes is evidently trying to differentiate the various types of mental
coherence from mere association, by which the mind may run almost from any
thing to any thing, to ranging, in which we take a beginning arbitrarily to seek
something we have in mind, to sagacity or hunting or tracing, in which
appetite giveth a man his beginning and he runs back through the chain of
means until he comes to one immediately in his power. Hunting or tracing relies
on the reciprocity of cause-effect and means-end relations, ranging does not, but
both depend on a fixed idea of the end. The specific difference of open-ended
goal-seeking thought does not come out.
In his critique of Thomas Whites De A&do, two years later, Hobbes works
with a similar dichotomy. Orderly discourse is that governed by some purpose or
goal. Whoever wishes to reach it is drawn tither [a] from any point of departure
or [b] from a point suggested by his very mind-picture of the goal.32 The former
is ranging, scanning or searching; the latter comprises two sorts which Hobbes
identifies as synthesis and analysis. The principle of discourse is derived from the
end envisioned when the mind-picture ~ha~?a~~a) of the goal calls up one of the
path to the goal, and so on through a chain of causes and effects, and this either
from cause to effect or from effect to cause. The first is synthesis, building up
effects toward the final effect or desired end, while analysis proceeds back to
preliminaries.
Synthesis is equivalent to science, as Hobbes defines it in other contexts, but
that does not contradict what he writes here, When it reasons from cause to
effect, the imag~ation might be called an art.33 Hobbes means art in the sense
of techne and is making use of the mechanical arts as a model for science just as
Bacon and Galileo did. We can know with certainty (~c~e~f~~)only what we have
ourselves made, inferring from a cause in our power to a producible effect.34 The
analogy to techne underlies the mutual conversion of cause-and-effect and
means-end relations, but leaves the experimental search for or production of
unknown effects out of the picture. The orientation to a given end continues
dominant.
In chapter 8 of Leviathan Hobbes recommends that a man make frequent
application of his thoughts to their end; that is to say, to some use to be made of
them, and he associates quickness and steadiness of mind or natural wit not only
with a mans perceiving simiiarities and differences between things but also with
observing what they serve for, or how they serve to such a purpose (Lev 135).
But in fact these last two may be very different and even opposite mental opera-
528 Jeffrey Barnouw

tions, if what they serve for is not already established. In the latter ideas are
regulated with respect to an end kept in view, but in the former it might be that the
view would be kept open-ended in search of new effects and possible goals.
Similarly, Hobbes seems to elide an important difference where he writes ofthe
man with a design in hand who runs over a multitude of things and observes
how they conduce to that design; or what design they may conduce unto (&v
13743). The latter comes in an uninvited afterthought and opens the field for the
play of curiosity. As we have seen, in Leviathan Hobbes for the first time
identifies curiosity with the principle of the second kind of regulated thought,
that which seeks al1 possible effects that can be produced by whatever it starts
from, which he equates with imagining what we can do with it. A different sort
of what might be called techno-logical imagination announces itself here. But the
topic of curiosity continues separate from the theory of knowledge.
Where Hobbes sees steady direction to some approved end as a principal
ingredient of natural wit, he offers this explanation of why a man who has no
great passion for those things most sought after, power, riches, knowledge and
honor, is not likely to have either a great imagination or much judgment: For
the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies to range abroad and find the
way to the things desired: All steadiness of the minds motion, and all quickness
of the same, proceeding from thence (Lev 139). Here, in the psychology of the
passions, we see where the idea of orientation of thought to a pre-established or
approved end must interact with the new theme of curiosity, to which we will
return.
Like much else in Hobbes, this conception of the role of ends or purposes in the
regulation of thinking is derived-with important alterations-from Aristotle.
As deliberation is characterised in the ~ic~u~ac~e~n Ethics, it begins with some
proposed or assumed end and works its way back to the first step toward that
end.

We deliberate not about ends but about what contributes to ends.. . . Having set
the end they consider how and by what means it is to be attained, and if it seems to
be produced by several means they consider by which it is most easily and best
produced, while if it is achieved by one only they consider how it will be achieved by
this and by what means this will be achieved, till they come to the fust cause, which
in the order of discovery is last.5

Aristotle elaborates on the structure of deliberation by drawing a parallel to

reasoning in geometry:

For the person who deliberates seems to inquire and analyse in the way described as
though he were analysing a geometrica construction (not all inquiry appears to be
deliberation-for instance mathematical inquiries- but all deliberation is inquiry),
and what is last in the order of analysis seems to be first in the order of becoming.

Deliberation has the structure of a geometric proof in that it aims at a goal set
up at the start: quod em? de~o~zrandu~, which casts a different light on its
characteristic rigor. Where rational demonstration is often thought of as
analogous to mechanical causal necessitation: if one says a, b naturally follows
and then one must conclude c, Aristotle shows this concatenation to be
Hobbess PsychoIogy of Thought 529

subordinate to the opposite mental process here: what must I say first in order to
get to c. In view of the revolutionary effect which Hobbess late discovery of
geometrical reasoning had on his own development as a thinker, the Aristotelian
view of its orientation to an end contains some interesting possibilities.
In the Eudemian Ethics deliberation is described in the same terms, but in a way
that shows the affinity to Hobbes more fully.

No one deliberates about the end-that is there for everyone; men deliberate
about the things that lead towards it, whether this or that contributes to its
attainment, or else, when that has been decided, how it will come about. We all
continue deliberating until we carry the starting-point of the process of change
back to ourselves.36

And again: For one who deliberates, if he has carried his inquiry back from the
end, deliberates about what contributes to it, in order to bring the process back to
himself, or what he can do himself towards the end.
It becomes clearer what Aristotle means by excluding ends from the objects of
deliberation, when he explains that deliberation results in choice@rohairesis), so
that, by definition, no one makes a choice without preliminary deliberation on
whether it would be better or worse to act thus. Deliberation is thus conceived as
reasoning about whether something should be done or not. For that part of the
soul is deliberative which is capable of discerning a cause: the reason for the sake
of which-which is one of the causes- cause being something because-of-
which . . . That is why those who have no goal before them are not in a position to
deliberate. The same point is made by a variation of the analogy with reasoning
in geometry. Since one who deliberates always deliberates with something in
view, and there is always some goal with reference to which he inquires what is
useful, no one deliberates about the end, this being a starting-point and
hypothesis, like hypotheses in the theoretical sciences.38
It should be evident to students of Hobbes that choice occupies a place in
Aristotle analogous to will in Hobbes. Choice is neither simply wish nor opinion
(Aristotle holds), but opinion together with inclination, whenever as a result of
deliberation they are brought to a conclusion. Choice comes from deliberative
belief, while a deliberative* inclination is one whose starting-point and cause
is deliberation, and our inclination results from deliberation.39 The similarity to
Hobbess definition of will as the last appetite in or resulting from a process of
deliberation is apparent. Hobbes sees deliberation as an alternate arising in the
mind of appetites and aversions concerning one and the same thing,
representing good and evil1 consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing
propounded (Lev 127).O
Aristotle uses some of the same ideas in his conception of the practical
intellect. In De Anima he says that two apparent sources of movement are desire
and intellect which reasons for the sake of something and is practical. . . . Every
desire too is for the sake of something; for the object of desire is the starting-point
for the practical intellect, and the final step is the starting-point for action. In
effect, then, desire alone is what produces animal movement. For the object of
desire produces movement, and because of this, thought produces movement,
because the object of desire is its starting-point.
In De Motu Animalium Aristotle says that the movers of the animal.. . can be
530 Jeffrey Barnouw

reduced to thought and desire, because both phantasia and sense-perception

hold the same place as thought, since all are concerned with making distinctions.
Motion is seen here as analogous to a logical conclusion, that is, it is construed in
terms of a practical syllogism, where the conciusion which results from the two
premises is the action. As in the enthymeme or rhetorical syllogism, not ail the
premises need be considered distinctly and separately, and we conclude without
calculating [logisamenoij.4z
Aristotle has a physiological-psychological conception of the workings of
appetite underlying the practical syllogism that seems to have influenced
Hobbess idea of cmatus significantly. In Dednima he says that imagination is a
movement taking place as a result of actual sense-perception.. . And because
imaginations persist and are similar to perceptions, animals do many things in
accordance with them.43 This implies not only a decaying sense concept of
imagination, as is made clear in On Dreams where he speaks of it as a residuary
movement, the remnant of a sensory impression taken when sense was
actualizing itself, 44 but also that phantasiai are essentiahy linked to motives of
appetition or aversion.
Just as Hobbes later refers to the heart as the last (i.e. fundamental] organ of
sense, and the fountain of all sense,45 Aristotle says, all sanguineous animals
have the supreme organ of the sense-faculties in the heart, since the life is always
located in this part, maintained there by some connate natural heat.46 This
provides the basis for his physiology of appetition:

Now the origin of motion is, as we have said, the object ofpursuit or avoidance in
the sphere of action. Of necessity the thought and phontasia of these are
accompanied by heating and chilling. For the painful is avoided and the pleasant
pursued, and the painful and the pleasant are nearly always accompa~ed by
chilling and heating (although we do not notice this when it happens in a smaI1
part).4

Aristotle has just said that when an alteration is produced in the region of the
heart, even if it is only in an imperceptibly small part of it, it produces a
considerable difference in the body, and this presumably holds for minute
heating or chilling, which is called upon to explain why it is pretty much at the
same time that the creature thinks it should move forward and moves, unless
something impedes it. The phantasia coming from thought or sense-perception
prepares the desire, the desire prepares the affections which prepare the
organic parts involved in the action. The rapidity and simultaneity result from
the fact that the active and passive are naturally relative to each other.48
The continuous circuit which links sense and imagination to appetite and
affect and thus to appropriate action operates through visceral responses
thought of as going on at imperceptible levels. These ideas will be further
developed by the Stoics and revived by Hobbes, Leibniz and others in the
seventeenth century. Just such a conception of desire, as an inner motion caused
by the object of desire, provides the basis for Hobbess claim that a final cause,

as far as man can understand it, is exactly the same as an efficient cause: from
something pleasant arises the thought of enjoying it; from the notion of the path
arises the progression towards the object desired. In this series of effects the object,
Hobbess Psychology of Thought .53I

agent, because the act of the object that is the goal is the efficient
or the goal, is the
cause of our movement towards the goa1.49

The object is the efficient cause because it is our goal. It works on us and draws
us to it in virtue of qualities not only in itself(active power of the agent) but in us
as well (passive power, capacity to be moved by such an agent). The goal is a
good, is desired and desirable, because of the lit between active and passive
powers, and not of itself nor simply by subjective whim or will. Hobbess idea of
endeavors as imperceptible but cumulative responses to an external object,
perceived or envisioned, allows him to construe the object desired as the efficient
cause of desire by conceiving of motivation as gradually coalescing.
Psychological endeavors and the motions compounded from them are not like
physical motion, proceeding from an initial impact, but are intrinsically oriented
to an end. It is on that basis that thinking is understood as proceeding from, and
capable of being directed according to, our practical objectives.
Still, by framing this process entirely in terms of external efficient causality,
albeit in conjunction with the corresponding passive power and material
causality of the sentient, Hobbes has made it difficult to conceive of the capacity
for self-regulation in thinking and in deliberative desire. His commitment to the
principle of causal necessity (or of sufficient reason, in a limited version) leads
him to emphasise the determination of motives by experience. But this does not
mean that he must exclude the possibility of such self-regulation, which indeed
seems implicit in the pervasive moral dimension of his own work. It may well be
that a causal approach to the formation and fruition of motives is the best basis
for grasping what is involved in reflexive discipline of the human mind.50
In De Homine, after presenting sense, delight and appetite as mental
phenomena constituted by inner endeavors, Hobbes affirms that causal
determinism applies to these motions in a way that seems to deny the difference
between appetite and will, that is, to deny that deliberation makes any difference:

Therefore the causes, as of sense, so of appetite and aversion, delight and

annoyance, are these same objects ofthe senses. From this it can be understood that
neither our appetite nor our aversion causeth us to desire or shun this or that; that
is, we do not desire because we will. For will itself is an appetite; and we do not shun
something because we will not to do it, but because now appetite, then aversion, is
generated by those things desired or shunned, and a preconception of future
pleasure and displeasure necessarily follows from those same objects.5

Taken simply as denying free will or the hypostatisation of an autonomous

faculty which could initiate action apart from or even against ones own motives,
this is on the mark. Yet if there were not something real intended by the verb to
will, distinct from any passing desire, it would be hard to see any point in the
injunction, respicefinem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what
you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it
(Lev 96). In an ethical context Hobbes himself speaks of a constant endeavor,
(Lev 215) and his underlying intent as a political writer was to bring his fellow
citizens to act in accord with their own long-term interests, which for him meant,
from a deeper understanding of those interests and thus a firm commitment to
their own far-sighted desires. His theory of civil sovereignty presupposes that
53.2 Jeffrey Bar~~uw

men generally desire to live securely, happily and elegantly, but he still sees the
need to reinforce that desire so that it will carry over into the determination of a
long-term commitment: we can so live, I insist, if we so will.so
Hobbesian psychology may seem at first to sweep aside problems such as
weakness of the will (akrasia) or recognising the better but pursuing the worse
(Video meliora, proboque,/Deteriora sequor), but his conception of deliberation
as alternate succession of appetite and fear regarding a contemplated course of
action in fact makes it easy to see how immediate impulses or short-sighted
interests might prevail in certain actions over what was otherwise known to be for
the best. The presentation of deliberation in Leviathan brings out this possibility
clearly:

And because in Dehberation, the Appetites, and Aversions are raised by

foresight of the good and evih consequences, and sequels of the action whereof we
Deliberate; the good or evil effect thereof dependeth on the foresight of a long
chain of consequences, of which very seIdome any man is able to see to the end. But
for so farre as a man seeth, if the Good in those consequences, be greater than the
Evill, the whole chaine is that which Writers call Apparent, or Seeming Good (Lev
129).

In the same context Hobbes also presents deliberation in a way that suggests an
inner distance to the impulses to action. Though he sees it as culminating in will;
the Act, (not the faculty), of Willing, a final resultant appetite or aversion which
necessarily carries over into action (or the decision not to act), he also says,

Deliberation is expressed Subjunctively; which is a speech proper to signifie

suppositions, with their consequences; as, If this be done, then this will follow;
and differs not from the language of Reasoning, save that Reasoning is in general1
words; but Deliberation for the most part is of Particulars. The language ofDesire,
and Aversion, is Imperative (Lev 128).

There are a number of ways in which play or slack, a laxity of

determination,53 enters into Hobbess conception of the causal necessity that
obtains in human thought and action, without making that conception any less
coherent. Perhaps the most dramatic is his idea of curiosity as the quintessential
human trait, the basis of what truly distinguishes man from beast. The claims
which Hobbes makes for curiosity are striking in themselves, but also because
they go against the notion that he had a low and even degrading view of human
nature and because they open up a new perspective within his conception of the
workings of the human mind. A second principle of mental vivacity or attention
is introduced: not look to the end but look for an as yet unknown effect that
might become a new goal.

THE SINGULARIN OF CURIOSITY

Curiosity for Hobbes is the desire to know, and particulariy to know causes or
by way of causes. He presents it almost always in the most positive terms. The
section headed admiration and curiosity in Human Nature begins on a
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 533

characteristic note expressing appetite for experience, a venturesome openness to

what is new,

Forasmuch as all knowledge beginneth from experience, therefore also new

experience is the beginning of new knowledge, and the increase of experience the
beginning of the increase of knowledge; whatsoever therefore happeneth new to a
man, giveth him hope and matter of knowing somewhat that he knew not before.
And this hope and expectation of future knowledge from anything that happeneth
new and strange, is that passion which we commonly call ADMIRATION: and the
same considered as appetite, is called CURIOSITY, which is appetite of
knowledge.

The same quality of initiative and engagement characterizes the most

fundamental level of human motivation, epitomised in endeavor.S5
Man is distinguished from the beasts, Hobbes continues, by the faculty of
imposing names as well as this passion of curiosity. The decisive difference is
that animals are immersed in an immediacy of appetite as their interest is limited
by their survival instinct.

For when a beast seeth anything new and strange to him, he considereth it so far
only as to discern whether it be likely to serve his turn, or hurt him, and accordingly
approacheth nearer to it, or flieth from it: whereas man, who in most events
remembereth in what manner they were caused and begun, looketh for the cause
and beginning of everything that ariseth new unto him. And from this passion of
admiration and curiosity, have arisen not only the invention of names, but also
supposition of such causes of all things as they thought might produce them. And
from this beginning is derived all phiIosophy.

An important idea, simply mentioned in passing here, will be taken up

subsequently: that the power of language arises from curiosity.
The notion of curiosity had long been saddled with the negative qualification
vain and the connotation of sinful inquisitiveness into things not only
unimportant but which could only distract man from what was important.56 But
Hobbes shows little concern with Christian misgivings about curiosity, and he
may well have felt that Bacon had sufficiently vindicated curiosity as no threat to
piety.
Inquiring into the seed of Religion, Hobbes writes, first, it is peculiar to the
nature of Man, to be inquisitive into the Causes of the Events they see, some
more, some Iesse; but all men so much as to be curious in the search of the causes
of their own good or evil fortune (Lev 168). This may seem to put curiosity in a
bad light, since where true knowledge of causes cannot be had, it leads to anxiety,
a perpetual solicitude of the time to come, and thus to a susceptibility to
superstitious religion. In this sense, Hobbes says, there is some truth to the old
adage, that the Gods were at first created by humane Feare, adding in defense of
curiosity:

But the acknowledging of one God Eternall, Inftnite, and Omnipotent, may more
easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of natural1 bodies,
and their several1 vertues, and operations; than from the feare of what was to befall
them in time to come (Lev 170).
534 Jeffrey Barnouw

This is the entry point of a minimal deism in Hobbes, by which he reinforces

Bacons claim tht curiosity is a support for piety.j For he that from any effect
hee seeth come to passe, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof,
and from thence to the cause of that cause, would conclude that there must be
one First Mover. Hobbes had already made similar arguments in the preceding
chapter, claiming that it is ignorance of natural1 causes [which] disposeth a man
to Credulity, whereas Anxiety for the future time, disposeth men to enquire into
the causes of things: because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able
to order the present to their best advantage. Curiosity is not a liability as long as
it seeks natural causes, and then it is the best foundation of (natural) piety.

Curiosity, or love of the knowledge of causes,draws a man from consideration of

the effect, to seek the cause; and again, the cause of that cause; till of necessity he
must come to this thought at last, that there is some cause, whereof there is no
former cause, but is eternal]; which is-it men call God. So that it is impossible to
make any profound enquiry into natural1 causes, without being enclined thereby to
believe there is one God Eternal]; though they cannot have any Idea of him in their
mind, answering to his nature (tev 167).

Hobbes is suggesting a distinction that will be made explicitly in Humes Natural

Hisrory ofReligion between speculative curiosity and trembling curiosity*, which
are at the root of philosophical theism and superstitious religion respectively.
Curiosity can be perverted by fear compounded with ignorance, but in itself it is
innocent.
Bacon had revived the Aristotelian view that all knowledge and wonder
(which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself .j8 Wonder
or admiration had also been the beneficiary of an aesthetic vogue of the
marvellous in the Renaissance, and Hobbes draws on this to some extent but
usually ties admiration back into cognitive curiosity. No thinker before Hobbes
had seen curiosity in such a positive light or made it so fundamental to human
nature, but there is one crucial antecedent before Bacon.
Hobbess conception of curiosity goes back to a work he often spoke against,
Aristotles Metaphysics, which does not use any term equivalent to curiosity but
begins with the famous assertion, All men by nature desire to know, and links
true knowing to wonder.

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to
philosophize. They wondered originally at the obvious difliculties, then advanced
little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the
phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of
the universe.9

In the paragraph from Human Nature Hobbes explains in similar terms how all
philosophy is derived from curiosity: as astronomy from the admiration of the
course of heaven; natural philosophy from the strange effects of the elements and
other bodies.60
Following Aristotle further he extends the distinction between man and beast
to a distinction between different types of men.
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 535

And from the degrees of curiosity proceed also the degrees of knowledge among
men: for, to a man in the chase of riches or authority, (which in respect of
knowledge are but sensuality) it is a diversion of little pleasure to consider, whether
it be the motion of the sun or the earth that maketh the day, or to enter into other
contemplation of any strange accident, than whether it conduce or not to the end he
pursueth.

Where the animal is limited to sensual desires by his nature, some men limit
themselves, Hobbes implies, by pursuing ends that stifle their curiosity, which is
reflected in their seeing everything in relation to their pre-established goal. Just
as a self-preservation drive restricts the interest and attention of animals, so
avaricious or ambitious men are limited by their self-interest.
Is Hobbes drawing an unqualified contrast here between interest linked to
desire and disinterested intellectual concern, in the vein of Aristotles
depreciation of utility and contemplative ideal of wisdom? The closing of the
paragraph in Human Nature sends mixed signals in this regard. Hobbes first
makes a crucial psychological point which we will return to, one which supports
the superiority of purely intellectual concerns (as incapable of satiety), but then
extends that point in an ironic remark that puts curiosity in the very midst of self-
interested behavior: Because curiosity is delight, therefore also novelty is so, but
especially that novelty from which a man conceiveth an opinion true or false of
bettering his own estate; for, in such case, they stand affected with the hope that
all gamesters have while the cards are shuffling. Curiosity is closely identified, it
seems, with all it had just been opposed to.
Aristotle had stressed the opposition of intellectual interest to practical
interest. The support offered for the opening assertion of the Metaphysics is
revealing: An indication of this [natural human desire to know] is the delight we
take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for
themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. Vision is the preferred sense,
not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything,
because, more than the other senses, it makes us know and brings to light many
differences between things.6 It is the most detached from its matter, an
intrinsically contemplative sense.
In the hierarchy of forms of knowledge knowing why, knowing the cause, is the
crucial factor that distinguishes art (techne) from mere experience, from practice
that knows only the fact. This leads, however, not to an instrumentalist theory of
knowledge but, on the contrary, to a contemplative ideal of wisdom, since the
dignity of the various modes of knowledge is in inverse proportion to their utility.
The science which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it
is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable for its results.62
Utility stands in invidious contrast to self-sufficiency in an object of intellectual
interest.
The first principles and the causes are the most knowable; for by reason of
these, and from these, all other things are known, not because we have any
control over these causes and the production of their effects, as the technemodel
might suggest, but because their ontological primacy keeps them remote from
human operation. Indeed Aristotle introduced the theme of the role of wonder in
the genesis of philosophy as proof that no productive science could be involved in
536 Jeffrey Barrrauw

wisdom. What is more, the primary cause involved is an end, the good, i.e. that
for the sake of which, and this end is the good in each class, and in general the
supreme good in the whole of nature. The teleology of human arts may afford an
analogy, but the ultimate ends are fixed inde~ndently of human practice, self-
sufficient like the wisdom that contemplates them, the only free science.63
In the dedicatory epistle of his English optics, a work on the noblest of the
senses, Hobbes develops his ideas on curiosity in a way that, far from qualifying
the contrast between intellectual and practical interest,crassly exaggerates it. He
begins by af~rming that all the passions of the human mind have also been
observed in other living creatures, except for curiosity, the desire to know the
causes of things. And where curiosity appears, Hobbes finds there is a
corresponding diminution of another passion which in beasts is commonly
predominant, namely a ravenous quality, which in men is called Avarice. For
desire of knowfedge, and desire of needIess riches are incompatible and
destructive one of another. He adds,

which makes me, when I hear a man, upon the discovery of any new and ingenious
knowledge, or invention, ask gravely (that is to say scornfully) what tis good for,
meaning what money it will bring in, (when he knows as little, to one that hath
sufficient, what that surplus of money is good for) to esteem that man not
suf~cientiy removed from brutaiity.64

The opposition between curiosity and avarice should not be seen as supporting
an ideal of disinterested contemplation. Hobbes has a general understanding of
the relation of theory to practice which in effect reverses Aristotles by subtly but
radically adapting his discriminating factor to an entirely different purpose.
While he did believe in the possible objectivity of science vis-&is divisive
interests in society, Hobbes has no place for the disinterestedness of metaphysical
contemplation. The end toward which science should be directed is the Benefit
of man-kind (Lev 116) and he ultimately associates curiosity with an inner
distance to practical concerns which is of greater practical benefit than the merely
instrumental use of intellect. Hobbes implies something like this when he writes
that, while poor men have lacked leisure to discover the rules of making and
maintaining commonwealths, those with leisure have lacked the curiosity, or
the method to find out (Lev 261).
Curiosity also suggests a relative detachment from aheady established goals,
which may allow us to bring intelligence to bear on the choice of ends as well as
means. In fact Hobbes does not seem to see any tension between an intellectual
concern with utility and the natural spontaneity and sea-suf~cing pleasure of
intellectual curiosity. Admiration is the passion ofjoy in novelty; for it is natural
for men to love novelty. It is virtually unique to man,

For even if other animals, whenever they behold something new or unusual, admire
it as far as they are able to judge whether it be harmful or harmless to them; men,
when they see something new, seek to know whence it came and to what use they
can put it. And so they rejoice in novelty as an occasion for learning about causes
and effects.65

In the chapter of Human Nature following the discussion of admiration and

Hobbess Psychology of Thought 537

curiosity as passions, Hobbes takes up curiosity in a different connection,

showing how the difference of mens wits reflects a difference in their vital
constitution, that is, their characteristic passions and the ends their appetites lead
them to. Here ambition is contrasted with sensuality and allied to curiosity.
Those men whose ends are some sensual delight . . . must of necessity thereby be
the less delighted with those imaginations that conduce not to those ends, such as
are imaginations of honour and glory. These have respect to the future, while
sensuality seeks present pleasure and maketh men less curious, and less
ambitious, whereby they less consider the way either to knowledge or to other
power; in which two consisteth all the excellency of power cognitive.66
The contrast of mental vivacity and dulness rejoins the earlier topic of types of
mental discourse. The opposite of dulness is that quick ranging of mind
described in chapter 4, section 3, which is joined with curiosity of comparing the
things that come into his mind one with another. Curiosity, in other words,
implies an attention to ones own ideas or mental representations, instead of
immediately keying on what they refer to. On this basis wit is characterised as an
ability of finding unexpected similitude in things, otherwise much unlike, . . . or
else in discerning suddenly dissimilitude in things that otherwise appear the
same. This parallel and contrast of fancy and judgment has often been discussed;
what is significant for us is that Hobbes sees them as together comprising wit or
mental vivacity (a tenuity and agility of spirits) and as alike arising from
curiosity of comparing our ideas of things.
There is a corresponding defect of the mind, levity, or excess mobility in the
spirits, which proceeds from curiosity, but with too much equahty and
indifference: for when all things make equal impression and delight, they equally
throng to be expressed. Here we can see how curiosity might be at cross purposes
to the bent of mind that Hobbes pointed to with hisrespicefinem! We have seen
how, in the Leviathan, All Stediness of the minds motion, and all quicknesse of
the same (La, 139) was said to proceed from thoughts ranging abroad as scouts
for the desires, thereby exercising fancy and judgment. Natural wit, consisting in
swift succession of one thought to another.. . and steddy direction to some
approved end (Lev 134-5), seemed to rely on curiosity insofar as it was the desire
to know the causes of things. Yet, at the same time, curiosity seemed to be pulling
in a different direction from goal-oriented thinking.
Considering curiosity as an item in a catalog of the passions, Hobbes treats the
care of knowing causes as something independent of any animal concern with
self-preservation, a pleasure stirred by admiration or Joy, from apprehension of
novelty.

Desire, to know why, and how, Curiosity; such as is in no living creature but Man;
so that Man is distinguished, not onely by his Reason; but also by this singular
Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of
Sense, by praedominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of
the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual1 and indefatigable
generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal1 Pleasure
(Lev 124).

Earlier in Leviathan, however, considering the Consequence or Train of

Imaginations as discussed above as well as in his critique of prudence, Hobbes
538 Jeffrey Burnouw

grants that animals do infer the causes of given effects, that is, act on the basis of
memories of apparent causal connections. Prudence is the anticipatory
projection of already experienced correlations, a Praesumtion of the Future,
contracted from the Experience of time Past(Lev98), and is criticised by Hobbes
not only as unreliable but as restrictive since it depends on conjectured causes
which also tie expectation to past patterns. The future cast by prudence is but a
fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions Past, to the actions that are
Present (Lev 97).
By implication it is because animals are absorbed not only insensual appetites
but in concern with possible causes to anticipate what may harm or benefit them,
that they have no curiosity. The same double sense recognised earlier in the
concept interested as being absorbed by ones own concerns or, on the contrary,
eager to notice things devoid of immediate practical import, for their own sake, is
found at the etymological root of curiosity too, cum meaning care or concern.
Hobbes writes of a care of knowing causes in the sense of minute attention to
what is otherwise overlooked, and this comes of not being wholly immersed in
pressing cares and concerns.
Hobbes associates this curiosity with a second kind of causal inference or
Trayn of regulated Thoughts. . ., when imagining any thing whatsoever, wee
seek all the possible effects, that can by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine
what we can do with it, when we have it . . . [which] is a curiosity hardly incident
to the nature of any living creature that has no other Passion but sensuall (Lev
96). Curiosity here should properly be defined as desire to know effects, not
causes, to know all the possible results and uses of something in our power.
Where the inference of causes doubly restricts us to mere probabilities and to
established patterns, showing prudence to be ultimately a passive reactive
behavior, tinding out all possible effects that can be produced by a cause we have
opens up an horizon of new experiences in which human initiative is essential,
Curiosity is a desire that is of itself pleasurable, and Hobbes in fact claims this
is characteristic of desire generally, This is a view which he could have derived
from Aristotles Rhetoric, which he condensed and translated. Some pleasant
feeling is associated with most of our appetites; we are enjoying either the
memory of a past pleasure or the expectation of a future one. This certainly
applies to intellectual desire. Learning things and wondering at things are also
pleasant for the most part; wondering implies the desire of learning, so that the
object of wonder is an object of desire; while in learning one is brought into ones
natural condition.67
Hobbes follows an Aristotelian line in literary theory when he writes that
novelty of expression . . . pleaseth by excitation of the mind; for novelty causeth
admiration, and admiration curiosity, which is a delightful appetite of
knowledge. His point is that the ideas will make more of an impression if their
expression is new and varied, particularly with the admirable variety and novelty
of metaphors and similitudes, without which the phrases ofpoesy, as the airs of
music, with often hearing become insipid; the reader having no more sense of
their force, than our flesh is sensible of the bones that sustain it. This last simile
makes nice use of his Aristotelian idea that perception depends on difference. As
the sense we have of bodies, consisteth in change of [or?] variety of impression, so
also does the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of words.68
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 539

But the notion than learning involves a return to ones natural state recalls the
encompassing teleological ontological framework of such pursuits in Aristotle,
oriented to a naturally established end, the good, i.e. that for the sake of which,
and in general the supreme good in the whole of nature. Hobbes draws very
contrary implications from the identification of desire and pleasure, because he
denies ontological independence to the good or any end or goal.

First, it is clear that anyones happiness consists in what he finds good: no-one
finds something good for which he has no appetite. So he who has nothing to seek
after enjoys no happiness; and, because everything we seek must be sought with an
eye to the future, we must class happiness as the desire for good that is to come.

He goes on to argue that immediate sensual pleasure depends on desire or

novelty, and that anticipation of future pleasure plays a role in the enjoyment of
pleasant memories as well as in apparently immediate gratification. In the very
object we enjoy, enjoyment itself exists only as further yearning that springs from
the contemplation of the objects parts. So it remains true that the grounds of
good, and hence of happiness, consist in seeking.69 The desire that arises from
and reinforces attention to the parts, to detail usually passed over, is another
facet of curiosity, preserved in its now obsolete sense, careful attention,
fastidiousness. It is linked to the new seventeenth-century concern with the
minute and barely perceptible, with subtle and delicate niceties and nuances.O
The identification of happiness and pleasure with desire leads Hobbes to deny
the possibility of an objective teleological order:

For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest
Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Moral1 Philosophers. Nor can a man
any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations
are at a stand. Felicity is a continual1 progresse of the desire, from one object to
another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later (Lev 160).

In brief: Seeing all delight is appetite, and appetite presupposeth a farther end,
there can be no contentment but in proceedings.
In his final statement of these ideas Hobbes shows clearly the link between the
progressivity of desire and the intensive character of immediate enjoyment which
he associates with curiosity:

if the end be final, there would be nothing to long for, nothing to desire; whence it
follows not only that nothing would itself be a good from that time on, but also that
man would not even feel. For all sense is conjoined with some appetite or aversion;
and not to feel is not to live.
For of goods, the greatest is always progressing towards ever further ends with
the least hindrance. Even the enjoyment of a desire, when we are enjoying it, is an
appetite, namely the motion of the mind to enjoy by parts, the thing that it is
enjoying.*

This idea of spontaneous delectation, an appreciative savoring that escapes

consciousness since it seems immediate and passive, is related to curiosity in the
sense of minute attention or absorption, but the psychological connection lies
deeper. Just as he credits curiosity with making both aspects of wit, i.e. fancy and
540 Jeffre~~Barnouw

judgment, possible by allowing us to attend to our ideas of things in detail,

without being led immediately on through the ideas to the things, so Hobbes
justifies the claim that curiosity is at the origin of our power of language by
showing that without it we would have no access to identities to which names
could be attached.

Some inquisitive persons have found no satisfaction in enjoying nature unless they
have scrutinised her ciosely and known the causes of everything. They have seen,
however, that this can be done only by comparing things, but that a compa~son is
drawn not from among things themselves but in their impressions, and that the
latter can be compared only by being recalled. So they have devised notes[notrre,
marks or signs], especially names which, in the place of impressions that had
disappeared, would suggest ones like them. It is probable that beasts cannot do this
because, owing to their physical constitution, they possess no pleasure other than
the carnal, by which they would be able to be concerned with their impressions, or
to distinguish their impressions from the actual things these are the impressions of,
or to remember them [i.e. the impressionsf.73

The desire which leads men to be interested in impressions in their own right is
a form of curiosity, which Hobbes claims as the first of the two ways the nature
of man is seen to surpass thecommon nature of animals and source of the second
way, the use of names, from which almost the whole of human civilisation flows.
In this aspect Hobbess idea of curiosity identifies an inner distance, a space of
awareness that allows things to appear. This is different from the appearances
which animal response depends on, for curiosity allows man to distinguish
appearance from thing, yet his attention to the appearanceper se informs him in
a new way about the reality.
Curiosity in a Iarger, more familiar sense is also essential to Hobbess
conception of human desire as an unending progress from one object to another.
Its psychological basis is the disposition proper to man to seek all the possible
effects and uses of whatever he has to work with. That there can be no final or
supreme good, no good in itself, means that human goals arise within experience,
remain open to change, and should engage our initiative and intelligence just as
the choice of means to a given end would.
This view of man suits Hobbess conception of the citizen of a sovereign state,
who in effect has renounced or alienated certain natural rights in order to secure
others, including safety, which means not only a bare Preservation, but also all
other Contentments of life, which every man by lawful Industry, without danger
or hurt to the common-wealth, shall acquire to himselfe (Lev 376). Among the
passions that incfine men to peace Hobbes mentions not only fear of death, but
Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a Hope by their
Industry to obtain them (Lev 188). The state can confer no more to their civil
happiness, than that being preserved from foreign and civil wars, they may
quietly enjoy that wealth which they have purchased by their own industry.74
Hobbess emphasis on individua1 industry or enterprise implies that the goals
must be determined by those who pursue them. Wealth may in&de all that can
be achieved by human endeavor, and it will contribute to human happiness, for
Hobbes, to the extent that it is connected with endeavor in the broad common
sense, with pursuit and achievement. This attitude evidently has social roots that
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 541

point to a correlation with features of the economic life of that time, as with other
aspects of the culture, but one correspondence worthy of mention is with the
spirit of experimentation and discovery that was associated with the new science.
Hobbes differed with Bacon as with Boyle on the role of experiment in
establishing scientific truth, but his conception of man captured as much or more
of the sense of the mind opening itself to new things to be undertaken and tried.
Finally, curiosity is the leading passion of Hobbess own life and work. He
could be writing autobiographically when he explains why sciences and arts are
not only useful but good in themselves:

For nature hath made man an admirer of all new things, that is, avid to know the
causes of everything. So it is that science is the food for so many minds, and is
related to the mind as food is to the body; and as food is to the famished, so are
curious phenomena to the mind. They differ in this, however, that the body can
become satiated with food while the mind cannot be filled up by knowledge.75

With this an horizon of endless possibilities is opened up in the real world, for in
the sciences causes are sought not only of those things that were, but also of those
things that can be.

Jeffrey Barnouw
University of Texas at Austin

NOTES

1. The Reports of Sir Edword Coke, ed. George Wilson (Dublin, 1793) part XI, p. 98b.
Part of this passage from James Baggs Case is quoted in the Oxford Engfirh
Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), Vol. II, p. 752, art. Conation.
2. Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson, (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), pp. 118-9. Further
references to this edition will be cited within the text itself in the following form: (Lev
118-9).
3. See Jeffrey Bamouw, Respite Finem: The Importance of Purpose in Hobbess
Psychology, in Acres du Colloque Hobbes, Nuntes 1987 ed. M. Malherbe (Paris: Vrin,
1988), at notes 11-13, for a contrast with Descartes and Nietzsches assumption that
there could be a certain quantity of motion (or analogously motivation) without
direction.
4. De Corpore XV, 2. in English Works, ed. W. Molesworth (Aalen: Scientia, 1962, orig.
London, 1839) Vol. I, p. 206, (to be cited as EW).
5. See Howard R. Bernstein, Conutus, Hobbes and the Young Leibniz, Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science, 11 (1980). 25-37.
6. On the barely perceptible as a key to aesthetics, taken as the theory of sensation and
feeling, see Jeffrey Barnouw, Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics*, Studies in
Eighteenth-century Culture, Vol. 18, (East Lansing, Michigan: Colleagues Press,
1988), pp. 323-342; and The Beginnings ofAesthetics and the Leibnizian Conception
of Sensation.
7. Human Nature VII, l-2, the first part of The Elements of Law, Nuturul undPolitic. ed.
F. Tonnies (London, 1928), pp. 21-2.
8. DeHomine XI. 15, tr. CharlesT. Wood,T.S.K. Scott-Craig and BemardGert, inMan
and Citizen, (N.Y.: Anchor, 1972). pp. 53-4.
542 Jeffrey Barnouw

9. Human Nature VII, 4, Elements of Law, p. 22.

10. See the passage on the most admirable . . . of all the phenomena or appearances which
are near us, apparition itself, tophainesthai; namely that some natural bodies have in
themselves the patterns almost of all things, De Corpore XXV, 1, EW I, 389.
11. De Corpore, XXV, 3, EW I, 391; For a detailed argument, see Jeffrey Bamouw,
Hobbess Causal Account of Sensation, Journal of the History of Philosophy 18
(April 1980), 115-130.
12. There is truth in etymology: For Nature it selfe does often presse upon men those
truths, which afterwards, when they look for somewhat beyond Nature, they stumble
at. For the Schooles find in meere Appetite to go, or move, no actual1 Motion at all:
but because some Motion they must acknowledge, they call it Metaphorical Motion;
which is but an absurd speech: for though Words may be called metaphoricall;
Bodies, and Motions cannot. (Lev 119).
13. William McDougall, Outline OfPsychology (New York: Scribners, 1923), p. 72.
14. Ibid, pp. 51, 49.
15. It is still common to find Hobbes dragged in as a whipping boy in this respect in
philosophical writing not at all concerned with his ideas. A recent example: Rudolf
Makkreel, in need of a foil for Dilthey and Husserl, asserts that Hobbes and Spinoza
formed their psychological theories on the basis of mechanistic physical sciences and
thus banned the principle of purposiveness from inner as well as external experience.
Makkreel, Lebensweh und Lebenszusammenhang. Das Verhaltnis von vorwissen-
schaftlichem und wissenschaftlichem Bewusstsein bei Husserl und Dilthey, in Dilthey
und die Phifosophie der Gegenwart, ed. E.W. Orth (Freiburg: Alber, 1985), p. 395.
16. Thomas A. Spragens, Jr, The Politics of Motion. The World of Thomas Hobbes
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), p.61. Hobbes insists upon the
profound ramifications of the new model of motion precisely because he is, formally
speaking, a good Aristotelian, even while he is jettisoning Aristotles view of what
motion is (62-3). Since his philosophic radicalism extended only to a drastic
metamorphosis of the Aristotelian cosmology, and not to its outright abandonment,
it was easy for him to presume that human behavior should be perceived and
interpreted in fundamentally the same manner as the behavior of other constituents of
nature (167-8).
17. Ibid, pp. 67-8.
18. Ibid, pp. 69.
19. The Politics of Motion, p. 62. Cf. pp. 181-3, where Hobbes is explicitly assimilated to
this aspect of Spinoza, and then inertia in the form of the conatus sese conservandt* is
claimed for Hobbes.
20. De Corpore X, 7, EW I, 132.
21. De Corpore XXV, 12, EW I, 407-8.
22. De Homine XI, 3; Man and Citizen, p. 46.
23. The Politics of Motion, p. 177.
24. See part 3 below. Spragens finds it in consonance with his unidimensional
cosmology that Hobbes conceives mans inertial passions as moving within a single
emotional plane, in a rather radical and limiting conception of human motivation,
adding, However, it does follow quite logically from the destruction of the
teleological order and rationality in nature (184-5).
25. The Politics of Motion, p. 73.
26. In his earlier treatment of this topic, in Human Nature, IV, 1, Hobbes terms the
succession of conceptions in the mind, series or consequence of one after another,
. . . discursion . . . because the word discourse is commonly taken for the coherence
and consequence of words. Elements of Law, p. 10. He later finds mental discourse
unequivocal, but it should be noted that, unlike other thinkers in the same tradition,
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 543

Ockham and Locke for example, Hobbes does not take mental discourse to be much
the same as verbal without being put into words. It rather involves the kind of
conceptions and their consecutions-natural signs-which we share with animals.
27. Cf. Human Nature XII, 5-6, Elements of Law, p. 48, Appetite, fear, hope, and the rest
of the passions are not called voluntary; for they proceed not from, but are the will;
and the will is not voluntary. No one can say he will will. The causes of appetite and
fear are the causes also of our will, but they work in terms of our beliefs about the
benefits and harms they bring; consequently, our wills follow our opinions, as our
actions follow our wills.
28. Of Liberty and Necessity, EW IV, 254-S.
29. De Corpore, XXV, 8, EW I, 398.
30. De Corpore, XXV, 9, EW I, 400.
3 1. Human Nature, IV, 2-4, Elements of Law, pp. 10-l 1.
32. Thomas Whites DeMundoExamined, XXX, 9, tr. Harold Whitmore Jones (London:
Bradford University Press, 1976), p. 368.
33. Ibid., pp. 368-9: XXX, 10.
34. On what came to be known as the verum factum principle, see Jeffrey Barnouw. Vito
and the Continuity of Science. The Relation of his Epistemology to Bacon and
Hobbes, Isis, 71 (1980), 609-620.
35. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1112b12-20, trans. W.D. Ross (and J.O. Urmson), rev.
J. Barnes, in J.L. Ackrill (ed.) A New Aristotle Reader, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987), p. 393.
30. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1226b10-14, trans. M.J. Woods, in A New Aristotle
Reader, p. 498.
37. Ibid., 1227al6-18, p. 499.
38. Ibid, 1226b23, 25-7, 1227a6-10, pp. 498-9. Martha C. Nussbaum, Aristotles De
Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 170, declares, The
entire notion that Aristotelian deliberation is concerned onIy with instrumental
means to an end, and not also with components of the end, was based on misreading
and mistranslation and should be now be buried. This seems to miss the point. In
Respite Finem (cited in note 3 above) I made the mistake of contrasting Hobbesand
Aristotle on the scope of deliberation, because both in fact see it as concerned
essentially with whether or not, and how, to do a proposed act. This does not mean
that either neglects the problem of ends, and indeed there they do differ.
39. Eudemian Ethics, 1227a4-5, 1226b9 and 20-1, pp. 498-9.
40. Cf Human Nature XII, I, Elements of Law, p. 47; Of Liberty and Necessity, EW IV,
273; De Mundo Examined, XXX, 26-27, and XXXVII, pp. 379-81 and 447-9.
41. Aristotle, De Anima, 433al5, trans. D.W. Hamlyn, in A New Aristotle Reader,
pp. 202-3.
42. Movement ofAnimals, 700b18-20,701al2,70la29, trans. Martha C. Nussbaum, in A
New Aristotle Reader, pp. 233-4. Hobbess conception of reasoning as calculation,
computation or reckoning, explicitly draws on the Greek (Cf. De Corpore I, 2-3; EW
I, 3-5), and reflects Aristotles idea of the syllogism. The act of reasoning they called
Syllogisme; which signifieth summing up of the consequences of one saying to
another. (Lev 106-7, cf. 110 and De Corpore, ch. IV.)
43. De Anima, III, 3,429a1-5, A New Aristotle Reader, p. 194.
44. Of Dreams, III, 461bl6, 21-2, trans. J.I. Beare, rev. J. Barnes, in A New Aristotle
Reader, p. 216.
45. De Corpore VI, 10 and XXXV, 4, EW I, 79 and 392.
46. On Youth and Uld Age 469aiO-19,469b5-10. A New Aristotle Reader, pp. 218-9.
47. Movement of Animals 701 b32-702a1, A New Aristotle Reader, pp.235-6. Cf. De
Corpore XXV, 12, EW I, 406, For the original of life being in the heart, that motion-in
544 Jeffrey Barnouw

the sentient, which is propagated to the heart [i.e. sensation], must necessarily make
some alteration or diversion of vital motion, namely, by quickening or slackening,
helping or hindering the same, thus producing pleasure or pain, and appetite or
aversion, as twin aspects of a single inner motion.
48. Movement of Animals 701b29-30, 702al5-21, pp. 235-6.
49. DeMundo Examined, XXVII, 2, p. 315; cf. De CorporeX, 7,EWI, 132. 'A final cause
has no place but in such things as have sense and will; and this also.. . [is really] an
efftcient cause.
50. See Jeffrey Barnouw, Aesthetic for Schiller and Peirce: A Neglected Origin of
Pragmatism, Journal of theHistory ofldeas, 49, no. 4, (October 1988), on normative
disciplines in Peirce.
51. De Homine, XI, 2, Man and Citizen, pp. 45-6.
52. De Homine, X, 3, Man and Citizen, p. 40.
53. This phrase is from Schillers On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (cf. note 50
above), making just this point about physical determination that works through
perception and vital response.
54. Human Nature IX, 18, Elements of Law, pp. 34-5. For a broader treatment, relating
curiosity to intellectual competition and glory, see Jeffrey Bamouw, La Curiosite
chez Hobbes, Bulletin de la Societe Francaise de Philosophie 82. no. 2, (April 1988).
55. In Hobbess Causal Account of Sensation, p. 130, (see note 11 above), I pointed out
that, while conatus had generally been used to translate the Greek horme and orexis,
Benjamin Hederich, Lexicon Manual Graecum (Leipzig, 1722), related it to terms with
the root peira. suggesting trial, experiment and risk, from which English has pirate
and empirical and, via Latin, peril and experience.
56. Andre Labhardt, Curiositas. Notes sur lhistoire dun mot et dune notion. Museum
Helveticum 17 (1960). 206-24, deals with the Latin Church fathers as well as classical
antiquity. He concludes that Seneca was the only writer to give curios-usa positive
value, claiming ethical utility for it, while denying all disinterested knowledge.
57. For Hobbess resistance to deist tendencies, continuing the Ockhamist critique of
rational theology, see Jeffrey Bamouw, The Separation of Reason and Faith in
Bacon and Hobbes, and the Theodicy of Leibniz, Journal of the History of Ideas 42
(198 1), 607-628.
58. TheAdvancement ofLearning, I, i, 3, in The Works ofFrancisBacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis
and Heath, (London, 1870), III, 266. Both Bacon and Hobbes make the enterprising
spirit of the age a basic trait of the human mind. See Jeffrey Barnouw, Active
Experience vs Wish-Fulfilment in Francis Bacons Moral Psychology of Science, The
Philosophical Forum 9, (Fall 1977), 78-99; and Bacon and Hobbes: The Conception
of Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Science/Technology & rhe Humanities 1
(1979), 92-l 10.
59. Metaphysics 980a20, 982bl2-16, trans. W.D. Ross, rev. J. Barnes, in A New Aristotle
Reader, p. 255.
60. Human Nature IX, 18, Elements of Law, p. 35.
61. Metaphysics 980a20-26, in A New Aristotle Reader, p. 255.
62. Ibid 982a14-5, p. 257.
63. Ibid 982a30-b10, 982b27 p. 258.
64. I quote from the manuscript of A Minute orfirst Draught of the Optiques, but have
, modernized the spelling.
65. De Homine XII, 12, Man and Citizen, pp. 61-2.
66. Human Nature X, 3. EIements of Law, p. 38.
67. Rhetoric I, 11, 1370b14-5, 1371a31-2, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete
Works OfAristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984,
II, 2182-3.
Hobbess Psychology of Thought 545

68. Answer to the Preface to Gondibert, in EW IV, 453, 455. In Rhetoric III, 10,
14lOblO-20, Complete Works of Arisrotie, II, 2250, Aristotle says figural and novel
language gives pleasure because it best enables us to get hold of new ideas and increase
our knowledge.
69. DeMundo Examined, chap. 38, section 5, pp. 463-4, p. 464, Hobbes adapts Aristotle:
Deliberation exists only with reference to the things that lie within the power and
choice of those deliberating; therefore the yearning for things which there seems no
means of attaining is not happiness: it is torment . . . Felicity therefore consists in the
advance of the appetite from a good thing that has been obtained to another good
thing that is to be obtained.
70. See the discussion of Pascal, the Chevalier de M&e and Bouhours in Feeling in
Enlightenment Aesthetics, cited in note 6 above.
71. Human Nature VII, 7, Elements of Law, p. 23.
72. De Homine XI, 15, Man and Citizen, pp. 53-4.
73. DC Mundo Examined, XXX, IS, p. 373.
74. De Cive XIII, 4, Man and Citizen, p. 260. Cf. Jeffrey Barnouw, The Pursuit of
Happiness in Jefferson and its Background in Bacon and Hobbes, interpretation. A
Journal of Politicui Philosophy 11 ( 1983), 225-248, esp. pp. 239-4 1.
75. De Homine XI, 9, Man and Citizen, p. 50.