Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [45]
Hobbes states in the first pages of Leviathan (1651), written during the turbulent years of the Civil War and Commonwealth, that all men are by nature the enemy of all other men and can live together in peace and prosperity only by ceding their right of self-determination to an autocratic government, preferably a monarchy. Without the “terror” through which such a ruling power enforces civilized behavior, life is inevitably “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This dour philosophy came not from some sickly, ill-favored misfit but from a tall, handsome man who was lively, friendly, and exceptionally healthy throughout his long life.
Hobbes had reasons other than misanthropy for his Royalist views. After being educated at Oxford, he spent many years as tutor to several sons of the Cavendishes, a noble family (one of his pupils became the first Earl and another the third Earl of Devonshire), and in Paris he lived among Royalist émigrés during the Commonwealth and tutored the future Charles II.
It was fortunate for him that he had such connections. A devotee of the sciences, he was an outspoken determinist and materialist, and in his later years a group of bishops accused him in Parliament of atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness, and recommended that the white-haired, dignified Hobbes be burned. But the accusation failed to win action, the House of Lords defeated a bill condemning Leviathan, the King gave Hobbes a pension, and he prudently turned his mind and pen to less incendiary topics. Though “Hobbist” remained for many years a term of abuse among the clergy and believers, Hobbes lived quietly, continued to write and to play tennis in his seventies, translated Homer in his eighties, and died just short of ninety-two.
It is not Hobbes’s view of human nature but his empiricist epistemology that earns him a place in the pantheon of psychology. Having visited Galileo and been greatly impressed by his physics, Hobbes concluded that all events are matter in motion; applying this to psychology, he reasoned that all mental activities must be motions of atoms in the nervous system and brain reacting to motions of atoms in the external world.23 He did not say how the movement of atoms in the brain could be a thought; he simply asserted that it could. Only today are psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists beginning to answer that question.
Hobbes boldly declared that no part of the universe is incorporeal, that “soul” is only a metaphor for “life,” and that all talk of the soul as an incorporeal substance is “vain philosophy” and “pernicious Aristotelian nonsense.”24 Naturally, he dismissed the doctrine of innate ideas, since these were supposedly built into the incorporeal soul. He said that everything in the mind arises from sense experience: Complex thoughts are derived from simple ones, and simple ones from sensations:
Concerning the thoughts of man… singly, they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object… The origin of them all is that which we call sense, for there is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.25
The notion, of course, was not new; it had been advanced in one form or another by Alcmaeon, Democritus, and Aristotle, among others. But Hobbes went farther than they, using a principle of physics that would later be known as Newton’s First Law of Motion to explain how sensory impressions become imagination, memory, and general knowledge:
When a body is once in motion, it moveth, unless something else hinder it, eternally; and whatsoever hindereth it cannot in an instant, but [only] in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it; and as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after: so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then, when he sees, dreams, etc. For after the object is removed,