Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

naturally downwards toward the earth, and others go naturally from it,
the Schools will tell you, out of Aristotle, that the bodies that sink
downwards are heavy; and that this heaviness is it that causes them to
descend. But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they will
define it to be an endeavour to go to the center of the earth: so that
the cause why things sink downward is an endeavour to be below;
which is as much as to say that bodies descend, or ascend, because
they do. Or they will tell you the center of the earth is the place of
rest and conservation for heavy things, and therefore they endeavour
to be there: as if stones and metals had a desire, or could discern
the place they would be at, as man does; or loved rest, as man does
not; or that a piece of glass were less safe in the window than
falling into the street.
If we would know why the same body seems greater, without adding
to it, one time than another; they say, when it seems less, it is
condensed; when greater, rarefied. What is that condensed and
rarefied Condensed is when there is in the very same matter less
quantity than before; and rarefied, when more. As if there could be
matter that had not some determined quantity; when quantity is nothing
else but the determination of matter; that is to say, of body, by
which we say one body is greater or lesser than another by thus, or
thus much. Or as if a body were made without any quantity at all,
and that afterwards more or less were put into it, according as it
is intended the body should be more or less dense.
For the cause of the soul of man, they say, creatur infundendo and
creando infunditur: that is, "It is created by pouring it in," and
"poured in by creation."
For the cause of sense, an ubiquity of species; that is, of the
shows or apparitions of objects; which when they be apparitions to the
eye is sight; when to the ear, hearing; to the palate, taste; to the
nostril, smelling; and to the rest of the body, feeling.
For cause of the will to do any particular action, which is called
volitio, they assign the faculty, that is to say, the capacity in
general, that men have to will sometimes one thing, sometimes another,
which is called voluntas; making the power the cause of the act: as if
one should assign for cause of the good or evil acts of men their
ability to do them.
And in many occasions they put for cause of natural events, their
own ignorance, but disguised in other words: as when they say, fortune
is the cause of things contingent; that is, of things whereof they
know no cause: and as when they attribute many effects to occult
qualities; that is, qualities not known to them, and therefore also,
as they think, to no man else: and to sympathy, antipathy,
antiperistasis, specifical qualities, and other like terms, which
signify neither the agent that produceth them, nor the operation by
which they are produced.
If such metaphysics and physics as this be not vain philosophy,
there was never any; nor needed St. Paul to give us warning to avoid
it.
And for their moral and civil philosophy, it hath the same or
greater absurdities. If a man do an action of injustice, that is to
say, an action contrary to the law, God, they say, is the prime
cause of the law and also the prime cause of that and all other
actions; but no cause at all of the injustice; which is the
inconformity of the action to the law. This is vain philosophy. A
man might as well say that one man maketh both a straight line and a
crooked, and another maketh their incongruity. And such is the