April 5– From "Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes (1651) (E is for Ethics)

Leviathan by Volbeat

April 5– From Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Summary: Oops, no summary?

Commentary: It's Hobbes's birthday! Also, E is for Ethics. The page numbers don't really make sense here, unless there's some kind of edition issue. 313 is in the middle of a Rousseau passage, and we've never mixed authors before. 322 is the blank page between the intro and first section. For the sake of sanity, I grabbed the first 10ish pages: Intro, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. 

Hobbes really likes Es and LLs. Spell check is losing its mind with this one. Then I realized T5FSOB is actually using a modernized spelling edition and tracked one of those down.

Concerning the first, there is a saying much usurped of late, that wisdom is acquired, not by reading of books, but of men

This is not a saying I think I've ever heard. I guess I can quit this whole thing then, since books don't give knowledge.

 So that sense

in all cases is nothing else but original fancy caused (as I have said) by

the pressure that is, by the motion of external things upon our eyes,

ears, and other organs, thereunto ordained.

But the philosophy schools, through all the universities of

Christendom, grounded upon certain texts of Aristotle, teach another

doctrine; and say, for the cause of vision, that the thing seen sendeth

forth on every side a visible species, (in English) a visible show, apparition, or aspect, or a being seen; the receiving whereof into the eye is seeing

We saw a little of this "things only exist because we perceive them" in one of the other readings. I don't think that the opposition is as clear here as Hobbes makes it sound. We only know things are real because we perceive them, but we can percieve them because of what they put off. 

From hence it is that the schools say, heavy bodies fall downwards out of an appetite to rest, and to conserve their nature in that

place which is most proper for them; ascribing appetite, and knowledge

of what is good for their conservation (which is more than man has), to things inanimate, absurdly.

Is this a thing "schools" actually said commonly, or is Hobbes just overly literal?

The entire imagination section feels like someone with no particular imagination trying to explain it to people. 

So when a man compoundeth the image of his own

person with the image of the actions of another man, as when a man

imagines himself a Hercules or an Alexander (which happeneth often to

them that are much taken with reading of romances), it is a compound

imagination, and properly but a fiction of the mind. There be also other

imaginations that rise in men, though waking, from the great impression

made in sense: as from gazing upon the sun, the impression leaves an image of the sun before our eyes a long time after