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Acknowledgments
I have been working on the project that gave rise to this book— thinking about Hobbes’s philosophy and reactions to it—for twenty years now. There are a number of people I should thank for their help along the way, starting with Martha Bolton, who was my dissertation advisor when I was first trying to write about Hobbes, and without whose help then I would not be writing any of this now.
Many of the conversations I’ve had about these topics have been with my students. Among them, I must particularly thank Eugenio Zaldivar and Ron Claypool. I am grateful, too, to the audiences of talks I have given about the project, especially those who have heard me try in recent years to say sensible and useful things about Locke, in talks at Texas A&M, the University of Florida, the 2019 meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA), and the 2020 online conference of the Traveling Early Modern Philosophy Organization (TEMPO). Particular thanks are due to Jessica Gordon-Roth and Patrick Connolly for their comments at the APA on the paper that became Chapter 7. I also explored a number of ideas that ended up in the book in posts on the Philosophy Modsquad blog, so thanks to the folks who responded to them, and to Lewis Powell for getting that project going. Thank you too to the numerous referees and editors who have given me feedback along the way.
Among philosophy professors though, a special thanks to Antonia LoLordo, to whose feedback and support over the years I owe a great deal. I also thank my parents, for all their encouragement. And lastly, thank you to Julie and Lucy and Hazel.
An earlier version of Chapter 7, “Locke, God, and Materialism,” was published under the same title in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 10 (2021).
Abbreviations
AT René Descartes. Oeuvres de Descartes. Ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 12 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1996. I quote the English translations in CSM.
CSM René Descartes. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91.
De Corpore Thomas Hobbes. De Corpore. References are by chapter and section number. Quotations of Chapters 1–6 use the translation in Hobbes (1981), while quotations of later chapters use the translation in EW. For the Latin text, see Hobbes (1999).
EL Thomas Hobbes. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. References are by chapter and section number.
Essay John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. References are by book, chapter, and section number.
Ethics Spinoza’s Ethics. Quotations use the translation in Spinoza (1985). References are by book, proposition, demonstration, etc.
EW Thomas Hobbes. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes. Ed. William Molesworth. 11 vols. London: John Bohn, 1839–40.
IS Henry More. The Immortality of the Soul. London, 1659.
L Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. References are by chapter and paragraph.
TIS Ralph Cudworth. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London, 1678.
Introduction
A Debate about Materialism
Are human beings purely material creatures, or is there something else to them, an immaterial part that does some (or all) of the thinking, and might even be able to outlive the death of the body? This book is about how a series of seventeenth-century philosophers tried to answer that question.
The first of those philosophers is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is best known as a political philosopher, but wrote about a wide range of topics. Even when focused on political topics, he began by looking at human psychology. Thus, for example, the first chapter of Leviathan is about representation and sensation, and the next two are about the workings of the imagination. By the time Hobbes reaches chapter 13, and his famous description of the “natural condition of mankind,” he has already sketched out a theory of human psychology, covering imagination, reason, passion, knowledge, and the causes of religious belief. Throughout this sketch, Hobbes treats the human being as a purely material being. Some aspects of this view of humans and their minds are explicit, as when Hobbes talks about the particular inner motions that lead to sensation. Other aspects are implicit: Hobbes gives his explanations of human mental activities without making any mention of an immaterial mind. He also points toward a more general materialistic position, telling us that ‘incorporeal substance’ is “insignificant” because it is “contradictory and inconsistent” (L 4.20–1). To ignore the technical details for now—Hobbes thinks that his opponent’s position,
according to which there is an incorporeal or immaterial part of human beings, literally makes no sense.
Suppose, then, that we start with Hobbes. Suppose, that is, we begin by looking at Hobbes’s materialist view—his materialist account of human beings, of nature in general, and ultimately of God—and then look at how philosophical debate developed from there. What we find, in the philosophical debates of the following half-century, is a series of philosophers reading, thinking about, and criticizing Hobbes’s materialist approach. The reaction to Hobbes was a noisy affair.1 In this book I pick out four authors from amid that noise, all of whom took Hobbes philosophically seriously, and engaged at some length with the issues his materialism raised. The four are Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, and John Locke.2 To say they took Hobbes seriously is, of course, not to say that they agreed with him—none of them did—but that they thought his views and arguments were worth engagement and (sometimes lengthy) refutation.
The debates I look at all relate to questions about materialism. When I talk about materialism, I have in mind a view about some object or group of objects. Often that object is the human mind, but we will also see philosophers debating materialism about other things, including animal minds and God. Whatever the object, I take materialism to be the view that the thing in question is wholly material, and has no immaterial part. I leave open just what it is to be material. As we will see, the philosophers we are going to look at disagree about that question, in ways that make a difference to the debates over materialism.
Though materialism is the central issue, the discussion of materialism by Hobbes and his critics unsurprisingly involves other philosophical questions. Thus, for example, the debate returns repeatedly to questions about ideas, such as whether they are mental images, whether we have any innate ideas, and whether we have an idea of God. It also turns often to questions of the metaphysics and epistemology of substance: of what substances are, of what kind of
essence they might have, and of how we can think about substance and essence. Sometimes the answers to these questions make a direct, and fairly obvious, difference to thinking about materialism. Thus, different views about the metaphysics of substance lead to different ways of framing questions about materialism. Other connections may seem less direct or more surprising. For instance, the view that ideas are not all mental images was associated with the denial of materialism.
I am talking here about materialism, but the philosophers I discuss did not generally use the term ‘materialism’ themselves, to describe what they were arguing about. The first person cited using ‘materialist’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is indeed More, in whose Divine Dialogues one character is described as “A young, witty, and well-moralized Materialist.”3 The terminology was thus coming into use as the debate itself was developing. We can, however, sensibly apply the term to those earlier in the debate—in particular to Hobbes, who might even have been the cause of More’s wanting to use the term in the first place.
One other shift in terminology occurs as we follow the texts through the debate. Hobbes generally talks about the distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Later, Locke talks about the distinction between the material and the immaterial. In between, we find both sets of terminology, sometimes used interchangeably. I myself adopt a similar policy. Though I tend to prefer ‘material’ and ‘immaterial,’ because I am talking about materialism, I do sometimes use ‘corporeal’ and ‘incorporeal,’ when talking about texts that do so. Though one might distinguish the corporeal from the material, I do not do so here. We should always keep in mind, though, that the different philosophers involved had their own, different conceptions of the corporeal and the material, and those differences certainly do matter.
In this book I look, then, at reactions to Hobbes’s materialism. I begin by looking at Hobbes’s view itself, then at the approaches of three critics of Hobbes (More, Cudworth, and Cavendish). In the
second half of the book I turn to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and consider the ways in which Locke’s discussion of materialism reacts to the work of Hobbes and his critics. I thus look at a significant part of the debate about the nature of the mind in seventeenth-century European philosophy, by starting from Hobbes and seeing how things develop from there.
The book is about reactions to Hobbes’s materialism. But everyone discussed, including Hobbes, was also reacting to the work of René Descartes. Cartesian views were a persistent part of the seventeenth-century debate, and are consequently a persistent part of the discussion in the book. I pay particular attention to the ways in which Hobbes and Locke engaged in some detail with Cartesian views. Hobbes’s engagement with Descartes’s views is most easily seen in his objections to Descartes’s Meditations. There Hobbes argues that we have no idea of God and no idea of substance, and suggests that the human mind is material. Hobbes is thus fundamentally opposed to the approach Descartes takes in the Meditations, which relies on the meditator’s possessing a certain idea of God (an innate idea of a perfect being) and aims to show that the human mind is an immaterial substance. Hobbes’s objections to the Meditations bring together several issues— materialism, the theory of substance, and the theory of ideas— that recur throughout the later debate. Looking at Hobbes’s objections to Descartes, and the ways in which he describes a different approach to the issues, also helps us to see Hobbes’s approach in contrast to the most famous of the contemporary alternatives. Given that, I begin in Chapter 1 by looking at those objections.
While Chapter 1 introduces Hobbes’s approach through that contrast with Descartes, Chapter 2 looks more systematically at his materialist positions. In it I first consider Hobbes’s materialist account of human psychology. Focusing on the account in the Elements of Law, I look at how Hobbes tells an extended story about the activities of the human mind, without reference to an
immaterial thinking substance. I then look at three arguments Hobbes gives for his materialist view, arguments which draw on his nominalism and his accounts of when language is absurd or insignificant. Finally, I consider Hobbes’s evolving views about God. By the 1660s, Hobbes was advocating a materialist account of God, as well as of human beings and the rest of nature.
Chapters 3 and 4 then turn to the work of three authors who criticized Hobbes in works of the 1650s, 60s, and 70s. The first two of these, whose arguments I consider together in Chapter 3, are the Cambridge philosophers More and Cudworth. I begin by looking at the ways in which they opposed (what they took to be) Hobbes’s arguments. More, in The Immortality of the Soul, criticizes Hobbes’s argument that names such as ‘incorporeal substance’ are insignificant, and Hobbes’s deflationary account of ghosts, which More takes to be another argument for materialism. Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System, takes Hobbes as his main modern example of someone who argues for atheism from the premise that we have no idea of God. The second half of the chapter then looks at the arguments More and Cudworth give for the inadequacy of materialist (and indeed Cartesian) ontology. According to both More and Cudworth, we cannot explain the workings of the apparently material parts of the natural world without supposing that there are immaterial beings controlling the material ones. Thus, More argues that there is a spirit of nature, and Cudworth that there are plastic natures.
Though More and Cudworth are not the most familiar figures from seventeenth-century philosophy, it is worth considering their approach, for several reasons. If (as I do) we want to understand the debate as it took place, they were a significant part of it. They are, in addition, interesting and worthwhile philosophers in their own right. And even if you only care about understanding canonical philosophers such as Locke, it turns out (as I argue in later chapters) that our understanding of Locke is improved when we see how he is thinking about the work of More and Cudworth.
Chapter 4 looks at the approach of another critic of Hobbes, Cavendish. She, like Hobbes, was a materialist about the natural, created world. Unlike Hobbes, she did not believe that human thought could be explained mechanically, with reference to the motions of small bodies. Instead, she believed that thought was a basic feature of the material world—that some matter was fundamentally and irreducibly sensitive, and other matter was fundamentally and irreducibly rational. Cavendish thus shows us a very different way of being a materialist philosopher. She agrees with the thought of More and Cudworth that Hobbes’s minimal ontology cannot explain the workings of the natural world, but thinks the explanations can be given without supposing there are plastic natures, a spirit of nature, or any finite immaterial things at all.
The second half of the book focuses on the discussion of materialism in Locke’s Essay. Locke was well aware of the work of Descartes, Hobbes, More, and Cudworth. If we approach Locke’s text with those earlier discussions in mind, we can see him thinking about, drawing on, and replying to what had been said before. The Essay is the next step in the debate, and we can better understand it if we read it in the light of that debate.
Chapter 5 looks at Locke’s discussion of some distinctively Cartesian views early in the Essay, particularly in Essay 1.4 and 2.1. Locke holds that some version of dualism might be true. He argues that the distinctively Cartesian version of dualism is, however, mistaken. Thus, he argues that we have no innate ideas, and in particular no innate idea of God. He also argues against the Cartesian view that the mind is always thinking, and in doing so argues against the Cartesian view that thinking is the principal attribute, the essence, of the mind.
Chapters 6 and 7 then focus on two key texts in Locke’s engagement with materialism, Essay 2.23 and Essay 4.10. In the former Locke discusses our ideas of substances, looking in particular at our ideas of body and spirit. In the latter Locke argues for the existence of God, and at length about what God is like, opposing several
versions of the view that God is material. In both of these important chapters of the Essay we can see Locke engaging with earlier texts. In Essay 2.23 Locke draws from and builds on a discussion of More’s in The Immortality of the Soul. Locke, like More, opposes one of Hobbes’s arguments for materialism—indeed, he makes fundamentally the same objection to it that More makes. In Essay 4.10 Locke draws on Cudworth’s work to oppose materialist accounts of God. Locke here relies on metaphysical principles about the causation of perfections—such as we see in the work of Cudworth, and indeed of Descartes—to argue that the first cause cannot be an unthinking being, and also cannot be a thinking material system.
Understanding Locke’s argument in Essay 4.10 also helps us to understand his well-known comment in Essay 4.3.6 that God might, for all we know, have made us think by superadding thought to our bodies (and so, that a non-Hobbesian sort of materialism might be true). Readers have been concerned since the Essay was first published about whether this claim was consistent with Locke’s argument that God could not be a material thinking being. More recently, interpreters have been divided about how to understand what superaddition is. Both these puzzles can be solved, I argue, when we see how Essay 4.10 relies on a principle about the causation of perfections. That principle shows us why God cannot be material, but also allows for a certain sort of superaddition of thought to the matter in us.
Locke clearly says that that sort of materialism might be true, though Hobbes’s sort of materialism is mistaken. Likewise, he says that a sort of dualism might be true, though Descartes’s version is wrong. Locke thinks, however, that we cannot know either of these views, materialism or dualism, to be true. Did he nevertheless believe that we had reason to prefer one view to the other? Commentators have suggested arguments in each direction: that Locke thought dualism was preferable to materialism, and that he thought materialism was preferable to dualism. Chapter 8 considers this issue, and argues that, though we should not go so far as to say
that Locke was inclined toward materialism, we should recognize the ways in which the Essay showed that materialism was a genuinely possible view, well beyond the bare suggestion that God might have made matter in us think.
Locke, then, was not himself a materialist, even though he opened up that possibility. There were, however, philosophers one might be tempted to call Lockean materialists. I do not explore the post-Lockean debate in any depth in this book, but I do conclude in the epilogue with a brief look at two such philosophers of the early eighteenth century, John Toland and Anthony Collins.
1 Hobbes against Descartes
When Descartes’s Meditations were first published in 1641, they were accompanied by six sets of objections and Descartes’s replies. Hobbes was the author of the Third Set of Objections.1 The exchange between Hobbes and Descartes can seem unproductive because Hobbes’s arguments are obscure at crucial points, and Descartes’s replies are curt, even dismissive. This short text nevertheless shows us important points of difference between the two philosophers.2 Indeed, some of the points on which they disagree continue to be at issue in later responses to Hobbes’s work, and on into Locke’s Essay.
In the Meditations, Descartes aims to demonstrate the existence of God and the immateriality of the human mind. God’s existence is supposed to be proved by two different arguments, each of which begins by pointing to the idea of God possessed by the meditator (the character who narrates the work). In the Third Meditation, Descartes argues that the only possible causal explanation for the meditator’s possessing that idea of God is that God exists. In the Fifth Meditation, he argues that having the idea of God enables the meditator to perceive clearly and distinctly the essence of God. In this way, the meditator learns that God’s essence is that of a perfect being, and that he must therefore exist. The immateriality of the mind is then supposed to be proved in the Sixth Meditation. The argument there aims to prove the mind’s real distinction from body by means of clear and distinct perceptions of the essences of mind and body. Demonstrating the mind’s immateriality is ultimately supposed to help show its immortality. Even in this quick summary, we see not just Descartes’s conclusions but also his intellectualist
method, with its focus on ideas and clear and distinct intellectual perception.
In the Third Objections, Hobbes disagrees with almost all of that. He does not deny the existence of God, but he does deny that we have an idea of God, and thus undercuts Descartes’s arguments for God’s existence. He thinks we cannot prove the immateriality of the mind, and even suggests that the mind is purely material. He is skeptical about Descartes’s epistemology of clear and distinct perception, and about the metaphysical views about essences and substances that are supposed to be discovered by it. Thus, as we work through Hobbes’s objections, we start to see a very different philosophical understanding of the world than that presented in the Meditations.
Do We Have an Idea of God?
A central theme of Hobbes’s objections appears when he addresses the Third Meditation. In that meditation, the meditator claims to discover within himself an idea of God, which is an idea of “a substance that is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else” (AT 7:45).3 This idea does not just allow its possessor to think about God, it allows him to have a non-relational conception of God’s attributes. Hobbes objects “that there is no idea of God in us” (AT 7:180).4
To motivate that claim, Hobbes begins by considering other ideas, working through a list of example ideas from the Third Meditation: ideas of a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel, and God.5 Hobbes’s central thought is that an idea is an “image made up of a certain shape and colour,” which represents its object by being a “likeness” of it (AT 7:179). Here we see a view about what ideas are— mental images—and a view of how they represent—by resembling. Given this view, Hobbes finds it easy enough to see how one can
have an idea of a man, the sky, or even a chimera. He takes the view to show, however, that we can have no ideas of angels or of God. No doubt people have images that they associate with the words ‘angel’ and ‘God.’ Perhaps you associate the image of “a beautiful child with wings” with ‘angel,’ or the image of a white-bearded man on a cloud with ‘God’ (AT 7:179). In neither case, Hobbes thinks, do we seriously believe that these images resemble the thing we are trying to think and talk about. Those images may allow us metaphorical or artistic representations of angels and God, but people do not seriously think the images look like angels or God. Thus, those images are not ideas of angels or God. Indeed, we have no ideas of angels or of God.
Hobbes’s view about ideas may seem open to obvious objections. Here I note and briefly discuss four, though there are surely others.6
First, what are we to say about ideas that derive from senses other than sight? Perhaps one might grant that, for example, my idea of my dog Lucy is a mental image of her. At least that seems to be a possible view. But how can my idea of a smell or a taste or a sound be a mental image? Hobbes must understand ‘image’ in an extended sense, so that there are images associated with all the senses, not just with sight. Thus, my idea of the smell of my cup of coffee is the image I derive from smelling the coffee, as my idea of Lucy is the image I derive from seeing her.7
Second, we should note Descartes’s reply to Hobbes. He agrees that if ideas are indeed images, then there is no idea of God, or indeed of an angel, but he thinks that is the wrong theory of ideas. Although the Third Meditation says that ideas are “as it were” (in Latin, tanquam) images (AT 7:37), Descartes denies, in replying to Hobbes, that ideas actually are images. They are instead “whatever is immediately perceived by the mind” (AT 7:181). Thus, one can have an idea that is not an image, such as the meditator’s idea of God.8
This reply fits together neatly with Descartes’s distinction between two ways of representing things, using the imagination
and the understanding. He illustrates this, at the start of the Sixth Meditation, by discussing how we think about mathematical objects. Consider a chiliagon, a thousand-sided figure. We can think about this, and discover its features—say, the sum of its internal angles. We can also think about a figure with a thousand and one sides, and calculate the slightly larger sum of its internal angles. Although these two shapes are similar, we can distinguish them using the understanding. We cannot, however, distinguish them using the imagination. To imagine a chiliagon—to summon a mental image of it—is to imagine an almost circular figure with many tiny sides. To imagine a figure with a thousand and one sides is also to imagine an almost circular figure with many tiny sides. Although we can distinguish the shapes, we cannot distinguish them using the imagination. Thus, Descartes concludes, we have two ways of mentally representing objects, only one of which uses images.9
Descartes connects that view to the question of whether the human mind is wholly material. Thus, he says that Hobbes “wants the term ‘idea’ to be taken to refer simply to the images of material things which are depicted in the corporeal imagination” (AT 7:181). That is, Descartes takes mental images to belong in the imagination, which is corporeal. Non-imagistic ideas, however, belong in the immaterial mind. To deny the existence of an immaterial mind is therefore to deny the existence of non-imagistic ideas. That connection might seem puzzling to us, looking back; today’s philosopher might well ask why there should not be non-imagistic ideas in a material mind. But even if the connection between the two views is contingent, it certainly is one that Descartes made.10
Third, whatever we think of those Cartesian views, we can note another objection to Hobbes’s view that there is no idea of God. People do seem to manage to think about God. If we think about things by having ideas of them, that seems to imply that we do have an idea of God. If not, what is going on? Is Hobbes suggesting that we cannot think about God at all?
Hobbes is not suggesting that. Instead, he thinks that there is a second way in which one can think about things, one that does not involve having an idea of them. He illustrates this with an analogy to a man born blind who thinks about fire as the cause of sensations of heat, despite having no idea of fire.11 We think about God, Hobbes says, as the first and eternal cause of things.12 Thus, we have a way to think about God. But unlike an idea of God, this way of thinking about him does not give us a non-relational representation of any of God’s attributes.13
Despite Hobbes having extended his theory in this way, the contrast with Descartes’s view still seems clear. However, we also find Descartes saying that “I use the term ‘idea’ to apply to what is established by reasoning as well as anything else that is perceived in any manner whatsoever” (AT 7:185). Is the Hobbesian relational thought about God not something “established by reasoning”? One does not come to think of God as the first cause as the result of sensation alone. Rather, one realizes that current things have causes, and those too had causes, and so on, until one comes to think about and believe in a first and eternal cause.14 Both the relational thought of God and the belief in God’s existence seem then to be “established by reasoning.” Should we then say that, in Descartes’s sense of ‘idea,’ Hobbes thinks we have an idea of God?
Perhaps we should, but we should be careful to avoid confusion. Even if one wants to call the relational thought of God an idea of God, it is important to see that it is not the idea of God that is discussed by the meditator in the Third Meditation. The meditator’s idea represents God as having certain intrinsic attributes. The Hobbesian thought about God represents God merely relationally, and says nothing at all about what non-relational features God has. Perhaps this thought counts, from Descartes’s perspective, as an idea of God. But it is not the idea of God that Descartes wants to focus on, and which plays such an important role in his arguments. That brings us to a fourth objection to Hobbes’s denial that we have an idea of God. Hobbes tells us there is a minimal way in which
people manage to think and talk about God. However, people appear not just to do that, but also to think and talk about God’s attributes. Thus, when the meditator says that God is “supremely intelligent,” he appears to be describing God in a way that others can understand, whether or not they agree that this is a correct way to describe God.15 If Hobbes is right that we can only think about God as a first cause, what is going on when someone claims to be thinking about God as supremely intelligent?
Hobbes presents some thoughts about such descriptions of God in his tenth objection, which responds to the passage in which the meditator describes the idea of God as that of “a substance that is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else” (AT 7:186). Descartes gives several descriptions of God here. Most, if not all, of them have content that goes beyond the Hobbesian thought of the first cause. Hobbes’s main aim in his objection is to show that we could have thoughts behind such descriptions without having the innate idea of a perfect being that Descartes says we do.
Consider one example. Hobbes says that “to say that God is infinite is the same as saying that he belongs to the class of things such that we do not conceive of them as having bounds” (AT 7:187).
Hobbes and Descartes agree that one can legitimately say that God is infinite, but they think very different things are going on when one does so. Descartes thinks one is ascribing a positive, nonrelational attribute to God. Hobbes thinks one is describing one’s own inability to conceive of bounds or limits of God. Such an inability might be in part the result of God actually possessing the attribute Descartes ascribes to him. But the inability could also be the result of a limit in human cognition, and that alone. For all Hobbes says here, God might even have bounds—it is just that we do not conceive of him in that way. More generally, one thing that Hobbes can do, when faced with language that seems to ascribe attributes to God, is argue that that language is not in fact doing what it seems to be doing. This claim about the alleged infinity of God is an early
example of Hobbes giving a non-straightforward account of language that seems to describe attributes of God.
Before moving on from Hobbes’s discussion of God, I should answer one question. What does this discussion of ideas of God have to do with the supposed topic of this book, materialism? First note that Hobbes eventually did endorse materialism about God, even though he did not do so in the Third Objections. We will see more about this in the next chapter. Second, several seventeenthcentury philosophers perhaps expected materialists about the mind to also be imagists about ideas—taking them to have done away with the possibility of non-imagistic thought when they did away with the immaterial intellect.16 Third, there are possible arguments for metaphysical conclusions from the view about ideas. Ralph Cudworth, for example, thought that Hobbes’s denial of the idea of God was the basis of an argument for atheism, and one might also suggest a similar argument for materialism about the mind, starting from the alleged inconceivability of an immaterial mind.17
The Nature of Finite Minds
Hobbes does not discuss human beings and their minds at great length in the Third Objections. He says enough, however, to show us the outline of a view of human minds that is very different from Descartes’s.
We have already seen Hobbes mention some finite minds, in talking about angels. Hobbes says we have no idea of an angel— we may have an image that we associate with the word ‘angel,’ but it is not an image that resembles an angel. Instead Hobbes seems to suppose that we think about angels via a description, as “invisible and immaterial creatures who serve God” (AT 7:179–80). To think about angels as creatures who serve God is to think of them relationally, in something like the way we are supposed to think
