Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

place; and so both the terms of the distinction are the same. And in
particular, of the essence of a man, which, they say, is his soul,
they affirm it to be all of it in his little finger, and all of it
in every other part, how small soever, of his body; and yet no more
soul in the whole body than in any one of those parts. Can any man
think that God is served with such absurdities And yet all this is
necessary to believe, to those that will believe the existence of an
incorporeal soul, separated from the body.
And when they come to give account how an incorporeal substance
can be capable of pain, and be tormented in the fire of hell or
purgatory, they have nothing at all to answer, but that it cannot be
known how fire can burn souls.
Again, whereas motion is change of place, and incorporeal substances
are not capable of place, they are troubled to make it seem possible
how a soul can go hence, without the body, to heaven, hell, or
purgatory; and how the ghosts of men (and I may add, of their
clothes which they appear in) can walk by night in churches,
churchyards, and other places of sepulture. To which I know not what
they can answer, unless they will say, they walk definitive, not
circumscriptive, or spiritually, not temporally: for such egregious
distinctions are equally applicable to any difficulty whatsoever.
For the meaning of eternity, they will not have it to be an
endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render
a reason how God's will and pre-ordaining of things to come should not
be before His prescience of the same, as the efficient cause before
the effect, or agent before the action; nor of many other their bold
opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they
will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time,
a nunc-stans, as the Schools call it; which neither they nor any
else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite
greatness of place.
And whereas men divide a body in their thought, by numbering parts
of it, and in numbering those parts, number also the parts of the
place it filled; it cannot be but in making many parts, we make also
many places of those parts; whereby there cannot be conceived in the
mind of any man more or fewer parts than there are places for: yet
they will have us believe that by the Almighty power of God, one
body may be at one and the same time in many places; and many bodies
at one and the same time in one place; as if it were an
acknowledgement of the Divine Power to say, that which is, is not;
or that which has been, has not been. And these are but a small part
of the incongruities they are forced to, from their disputing
philosophically, instead of admiring and adoring of the divine and
incomprehensible Nature; whose attributes cannot signify what He is,
but ought to signify our desire to honour Him with the best
appellations we can think on. But they that venture to reason of His
nature, from these attributes of honour, losing their understanding in
the very first attempt, fall from one inconvenience into another,
without end and without number; in the same manner as when a man
ignorant of the ceremonies of court, coming into the presence of a
greater person than he is used to speak to, and stumbling at his
entrance, to save himself from falling, lets slip his cloak; to
recover his cloak, lets fall his hat; and, with one disorder after
another, discovers his astonishment and rusticity.
Then for physics, that is, the knowledge of the subordinate and
secondary causes of natural events, they render none at all but
empty words. If you desire to know why some kind of bodies sink