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363 u c h a p t e r i i u Of Human Nature, and Right Reason. By the Word [Man], I understand an Animal endow’d with a Mind; and Hobbes himself, in his Treatise of Human Nature, acknowledges the Mind to be one of the principal Parts of Man.1 Natural Philosophers, both antient and modern, Des-Cartes, Digby, More, but especially Seth Ward, in opposition to Hobbes himself, have sufficiently proved the distinctness of the Mind from the Body, under which all the Animal Faculties are compriz’d;2 so that I should but light a Candle to the Sun at Noonday, in offering to add to their Arguments. However, I cannot but take notice, that Hobbes has unluckily stumbled at the Threshold of his Treatise de Cive, in reducing the Faculties of human Nature to four Kinds, bodily Force, Experience, Reason, and the Passions:3 For beside, that the first of these, bodily Force, contains all the rest, in his Opinion, who acknowledges no other Force, but that of Body; it is contrary to all Use of Words, to call Experience a Faculty of our Nature; whereas it is properly to be reckon’d among those things, which are accidental to our 1. Hobbes, Humane Nature: or, The Fundamental Elements of Policy (1650), 1.5, p. 3. CumberlandmistakenlyattributesHobbes’scommentto1.3.Notethatthiswork is the first English version of Hobbes’s Elements of Law (1640). 2. Cumberland refers to Descartes, Les Passions de l’Ame (1649); Digby, Of the Immortality of Man’s Soul (1644); More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659); and Ward, In Thomae Hobbii Philosophiam Exercitatio Epistolica (1656). [Maxwell] “Dr. Samuel Clarke having, in my opinion, set the Immateriality of the Soul, and its Distinctness from the Body, in the best light, of any Writer I have met with; I have, in the Appendix to this Treatise, given his Reasoning upon that Head in as succinct a manner as was consistent with Perspicuity.” 3. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 1.11, p. 21. Man defin’d, 364 chapter ii Senses, both internal and external, of which Memory is sometimes the Effect, tho it is not it self Memory, as it is by him defin’d, in his Treatise of Human Nature, Page 36.4 Nay further, it is well known, that things we have experienc’d, do sometimes slip out of our Memory: But, if by the word Experience, he understands a Habit acquir’d by Experiments, it is a mistake to reckon it among the Faculties; except he would reckon Geometry, a Knowledge of the Law; and other Sciences, both Theoretical and Practical, amongst our Faculties, because they are Habits.But this is not a Matter of sufficient importance to dwell longer upon: Let us rather a while consider the foregoing Definition of Man. By the word [Animal ] I understand, what the Philosophers agree is to be found in Brutes, the Powers of receiving Increase by Nourishment, of beginning Motion, and of propagating their Species; andIalsowillingly so far allow them a sensitive Power, as we may bestow the Name of Sensation5 (in which I see no Absurdity) on the Motions impress’d on the Organs by the Objects, and thence transmitted, by the Nerves appropriated to the Senses, into the Brain, and sometimes thence communicated to the Muscles, where they excite Motion, or to the Heart or Lungs, and perhaps to other Intestines, by means whereof various Affections are excited. However, I suppose the Power of observing or distinctly perceiving these Motions to be peculiar to the Mind, so as freely to contemplate what in them, for example, determines the Figure of the Object, what, a Situation in the Object, different from that which is in the Retina; what, its Magnitude, what, its Motion; what in the Surface thereof, or what Refraction in the Medium, does so diversify the Motions of Light, as to exhibit all the various Phaenomena of Colours: for I do not see, what in the corporeal substance of the Brain can separate from one another all these (crowding at once into the Eyes, by means of the same percussion of the Rays of Light;) compare them with one 4. Hobbes, Humane Nature, pp. 35–36. 5. [Maxwell] “Tho Motions, impress’d upon the Organs of Sense, may occasion Sensation, yet no Motion, of any kind, is Sensation: If itwere,Matter,whichiscapable of all kinds of Motion, would be capable of Sensation and Thought. But for...

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