Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 237
Hobbes and Gassendi that takes account of their shared materialism while
accommodating other points of contact.
Matter and motion
Perhaps no passage in Hobbes’s writings declares his materialism with greater
directness than the following one from Chapter 46 of Leviathan:
The world, (I mean not the earth only, that denominates the lovers of it
worldly men, but the universe, that is, the whole mass of things that are), is
corporeal, that is to say, body; and hath the dimensions of magnitude,
namely length, breadth, and depth: also every part of body, is likewise
body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the
universe, is body, and that which is not body, is no part of the universe:
and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it, is nothing; and
consequently nowhere. Nor does it follow from hence, that spirits are
nothing: for they have dimensions, and are therefore really bodies.
(E III 381)
Hobbes is claiming that to exist is to exist as a material thing. Even spirits are
bodies. If spirits seem not to be bodies, he goes on to suggest, that is only
because in common usage ‘body’ is a term for things that are palpable and
visible as well as extended in three spatial dimensions (ibid.).
Forthright as the passage just quoted is, Hobbes’s materialism is more often
implied than asserted in his writings. The reason is not that Hobbes was particularly
prudent or cautious outside Leviathan, but that he thought that motion rather than
matter was the key concept for the explanation of natural difference and change.
It is true that, as he defines it, cause is motion, and motion is the displacement of
body, so that his frequent references to the varieties of motion, and his frequent
attempts to reduce phenomena to motion, are at the same time expressions of
materialism. Still, it is through a commitment to mechanical explanation in
physics, rather than as a result of some argument or requirement in an entirely
prior and independent metaphysics, that Hobbes is materialistic.
An early example in Hobbes’s writings of the inclination to mechanistic,
rather than materialistic, reduction comes from The Elements of Law (1640). Just
as ‘conceptions or apparitions are nothing really, but motion in some internal
substance of the head’ he says, so ‘…contentment or pleasure…is nothing really
but motion about the heart…’ (Pt I, ch. 7, i, 28). In the same vein, but from the
Introduction to Leviathan, written about eleven years later, there is the remark
that ‘life is but a motion of the limbs’. And that there is a principled basis for the
stress on motion can be seen from the chapter on the methodology of philosophy
or science in De Corpore, the first volume of Hobbes’s three-part statement of
the elements of philosophy. In that chapter, method in philosophy or science is
related to the definition of philosophy as the working out of causes from effects