Theological Origins of Modernity

232 chapter seven
any particular eff ect because of our lack of access to the things themselves.
He like Bacon recognized that the same eff ect could be produced by a variety
of causes, and he contented himself in the belief that while much God
did might be above or beyond reason, he would never contradict it.
Such a probabilistic position cannot serve as the basis for an apodictic
science, because there can be no guarantee that the picture science paints
of the world corresponds to reality. 84 Th e brilliance of Hobbes’ position is
that this does not matter. It is not crucial that we know the actual causal
chains that govern the motions of matter. For science to achieve its goal we
need only hypothetical truth. Th e hypothetical picture that we construct
need not correspond to the actual causal pathways by which events occur;
it need only explain how to produce or prevent eff ects. Th e account
that science gives of the world is thus only a construction, that is, a hypothesis.
In a certain sense, however, hypothetical knowledge is superior
to apodictic knowledge—apodictic knowledge is merely a description of
what God did do, according to his potentia ordinata, while hypothetical
knowledge describes what God could have done by his potentia absoluta. 85
Hypothetical reasoning in this case is an exercise not in mere analysis and
description but in artifi ce itself. Th e hypothetical construction undertaken
by science is thus akin to the actual construction by which God creates the
natural world, and it can serve as the basis for the construction of one that
is more conducive to human thriving. 86
Th is new science that Hobbes develops rests upon an essentially nominalist
theory of knowing that understands words as signs. Everything we
know in his view we know through sensation. We are struck by external
objects that impart a motion to our organs of sense, thus producing a motion
in us, a phantasm. 87 Th e motions that continue in us Hobbes calls
imagination. All knowledge, he argues, is either sensation or imagination.
Our ability to think using these images, however, is limited because of our
inability to hold them all together in our mind. Th is is due to the fact that
each phantasm is unique. Th e solution to this problem and the foundation
for science is the use of signs.
Signs, Hobbes argues, are marks that serve to bring a particular thing before
the mind. Th ey do not have to be words, as in the case of rocks that mark
the end of a path, but the signs we most employ are words. Words name and
link things. Words are either proper names, which point to specifi c things,
or they are the names of names that link things together. Insofar as words
bring diff erent things together under a single term, they both assist and
mislead the understanding. 88 Th e danger is that we forget the uniqueness of
the similar things and imagine some one universal thing of which they are