About the author

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) published Leviathan and works on language upon returning to England after a decade of exile in Paris. He debated with Boyle among others about experimental procedures at the Royal Society (he was never elected Fellow), and published translations of Greek writers including Homer.

About the text

This excerpt from the second chapter reflects Hobbes's plan to establish preliminary understandings that precede any serious inquiry into human nature. Reminiscent of Bacon's admonition about ‘Idols of the Mind’, he examines imagination, memory, dreams, apparitions and visions to show that what we think in fact is conditioned by training and predisposition – and therefore subject to error. This book, which contributed to social contract theory, takes its name from a scriptural reference to the largest of creatures: ‘There is no power on earth to be compared to him’ (Job 41:24). Hobbes argues for strong central authority and seeks to derive an objective science of morality. Building on Grotius's work, he begins from a mechanistic view of the world and then considers what human life would be without legitimate government, and hence society (‘the state of nature’); namely, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’

The arts of memory

Hobbes fixes within the reader's mind a set of resonant images concerning memory's fallibility. In the passage here, he remarks on the after-image resulting from staring intently at something, in this case mathematical symbols, and supplies a physical rationale for what previously had been taken merely as metaphor. A correspondent with Descartes (who wrote extensively on optics), Hobbes was attentive to how lasting impressions are fixed in the mind's eye; and elsewhere describes this process with respect to one trained in classical rhetoric and the memory arts, Thucydides, in his 1629 translation of History of the Peloponnesian War: ‘he maketh his auditor a spectator; for he setteth his reader in the assemblies of the people, and in the senates, at their debating; in the streets, at their seditions; and in the field, at their battles’ (A3v).

Textual notes

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, The matter, form, and power of a common-wealth ecclesiastical and civil (London, 1651), B1v–B2v.