Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 241
the small movements in the body below the threshold of consciousness that start
the process off, constitute what Hobbes calls ‘appetite’ (E I 407). With
appropriate adjustments aversion is treated in the same way. Aversion is
connected with retreat from an object of sense whose effect on a creature is to
retard vital motion.
In roughly the way that he tries to conjure imagination, memory and other
cognitive operations out of the basic capacity for sense, Hobbes tries to relate a
long list of passions to the basic affections of appetite and aversion. There are
many complexities, but the idea that the passions are kinds of motion involving
the heart is never abandoned. The heart and its motion are also appealed to in
Hobbes’s conception of biological life, and his conception of biological life is
brought into deflationary interpretations of the ideas of spirit, soul, eternal life
and resurrection. In a famous passage in Chapter 44 of Leviathan he says:
The soul in Scripture signifieth always, either the life, or the living
creature; and the body and soul jointly, the body alive.
(E III 615)
As for life itself, ‘it is but motion’ (L, ch. 6, E III 51). When God is said in
Genesis to have ‘inspired into man the breath of life, no more is meant than that
God gave him vital motion’ (L, ch. 34, E III 394). Death consists of the ceasing
of this motion, but the ceasing of this motion at a time does not preclude an afterlife.
If God created human life out of dust and clay, it is certainly not beyond Him
to revive a carcass (E III 614–15). For the same reason, it is unnecessary to hold
that a soul leaves the body at death in order to make sense of resurrection. One
can say that life stops and then starts again at the resurrection, with no
intervening incorporeal existence.
Hobbes’s materialism and Hobbes’s system
Hobbes identifies the ensouled human body with the living body, and he thinks
that the living body is a body with vital motion, that is, a body with a heart pumping
blood through the circulatory system. He identifies the passions with different
effects of vital motion, and he identifies thought or cognitive operations with
various effects on the sense organs, nerves and brain of impacts of external
bodies. It is a thoroughgoing materialistic psychology, and it is in keeping with
the method and first philosophy that Hobbes prescribes for natural philosophy in
De Corpore and other writings. Effects or phenomena of all kinds are referred to
bodily motion, the specific kinds of motion depending on the analysis of the
descriptions of the phenomena as well as relevant experiments. This is the
approach Hobbes follows for geometrical effects, pure mechanical effects,
physical and psychological effects. In the teaching of the elements of philosophy
as a whole, the assignment of causes to these effects is supposed to be
preliminary to stating the rules of morality and polity. Are the rules of morality