nature that encompasses them to arrive at the simple components of things – the elements. This happens in stages. As a person approaches me, I first separate out body from my perception of the individual, then the property of being animated, and finally rational, in the order of most universal to least21 (EW I.4). For Hobbes these elements are not physical parts of a thing – resolution is not the mechanistic reduction of a watch or automaton into its component parts (EW I.67). Nor need the elements be linguistic entities, since we can ratiocinate without words (EW I.14). Analysis is a step by step conceptual separating out of general features, contained in an individual concept, from the concept as a whole (EW I.4–5).22
Hobbes later gives two examples to illustrate the strictly analytical method that yields the universal notions we need to attain unqualified knowledge of things. Both begin with an idea, from experience, as when we see something approaching, but now resolved from less general to more:
1 My idea of this square is resolved or analyzed into “plain, terminated with a certain number of equal and straight lines and right angles.” I can then resolve or analyze these concepts further into the properties common to all material objects: “line,” “plane,” “angle,” “straightness.”
2 My conception of gold is resolved into ideas of “solid,” “visible,” “heavy,” I can then further resolve or analyze these ideas into successively more general ones, like “extension” and “corporeity” until I arrive at the most general one: motion.
Once you have analyzed down to the most general, also the simplest, conceptual elements of your ideas you will have the causes of individual concepts of a square and gold. Hobbes’s use of the term “cause” suggests that the resolution of gold is a mechanistic reduction into the physical parts of gold. For how can concepts cause our ideas? However, Hobbes uses “cause” in the Aristotelian sense of one or more explanatory factors, since he also claims that the causes of concrete names like “body” are abstract names like “extension.”
The explanatory factors attained by resolution are common accidents of natural and artificial bodies. Recall that such accidents are the object of scientific knowledge for Hobbes. He explains:
but we seek this itself, what is an accident? in which we seek that which we understand and not that which we should seek. For who does not always and in the same manner understand him who says any thing is extended, or moved, or not moved? But most men will have it be said that an accident is something, namely some part of natural things, when, indeed, it is no part of them. To satisfy these men, as well as may be, they answer best that define an accident to be the manner by which any body is conceived; which is all one and the same as if they should say, an accident is that faculty of any body, by which it works in us a conception of itself.
(Hobbes 1999, 83; OL I.91)
An accident is not a real thing in the broad Scholastic sense of a res, which differs from substance in that it can only naturally exist by inhering in a substance. Rather accidents are the ways in which we conceive of bodies, as well as the faculties bodies possess to cause us to conceive of them in certain ways, e.g., our conception of a moving body plus the power of a body to cause us to sense motion. Basic accidents, like motion, need not be defined since everyone understands them. Hobbes refers to these self-evident ways of conceiving of bodies as “universals,” “universal notions,” and “simples,” despite denying that universals have any existence beyond the names we apply to groups of individuals. Through definitions we acquire “an universal notion of the thing defined, representing a certain universal picture thereof, not to the eye, but to the mind”23 (EW I.84). Definitions are thus key to the universal claims of science.
According to Hobbes, based on similarities among individual ideas, we signify common accidents with abstract names or universals, e.g., “extension” for similar sensations of bodies being extended, and “corporeity” for similar ideas of existing corporeal things. As long as we do not consider abstractions like extension and corporeity as existing apart from bodies, abstract names are used correctly and are the only means by which we can reason philosophically. Hence, just as we can analyze our concept of an individual square, piece of gold, and person into their conceptual parts, we can analyze the concrete name “body” into abstract names corresponding to the conceptual elements of the idea for which the name is a sign. For example, being extended is an accident we can subtract from our idea of an individual body. The corresponding abstract name “extension” is through resolution identified as a cause/explanation of the concrete name “body.” That does not mean abstract extension is thereby reified; it is not something over and above the idea of particular bodies being extended. Nor is extension the cause of the bodies themselves. The abstract name “extension” is an explanatory factor that is revealed when we resolve the idea signified by the concrete name “body.” Concrete names resolved into abstract names give us definitions. When a word stands for a compounded conception, like a person, a square or gold, rather than a simple conception, like motion,
the definition is nothing but a resolution of that name into its most universal parts. As when we define man, saying man is a body animated, sentient, rational, those names, body animated, & c. are parts of that whole name man;
(EW I.83)
But how does such an analysis into abstract terms, which combine to form definitional propositions, explain persons in the world, as experienced by us?
Since accidents are both the manner in which we conceive bodies, and the faculties by which bodies produce these conceptions in us, explanations of names obtained by resolution map on to bodily powers via the conceptual parts of ideas to which abstract names attach.24 The strictly analytical method gives us the definitions of things by separating out the conceptual parts, or explanatory factors that make up our complex ideas of individuals. That is, the abstract name “humanity” is a sign for a conception of an individual body that can be resolved into accidents of being animated and being rational. Via similarity to past ideas of such bodies the abstract names of “animality” and “rationality” attach to these conceptual parts. This allows us to compound these names into propositions, including universal ones like “Every human is a rational animal.” Hobbes claims that, without words, specifically, abstract names that stand as markers to remind us of past ideas of similar individuals, “our inventions perish, nor will it be possible for us to go on from principles beyond a syllogism or two, by reason of the weakness of the memory” (EW I.79). Employing the universal method, one combines abstract names into propositions by synthesis.
The particular method is instead a method of demonstration in which one employs synthesis2 to connect propositions by the rules for a valid syllogism. For example, from one’s definition of humanity one can deduce a consequence of rationality that is fundamental to civil science:
All human beings are rational animals.
Rationality includes the capacity to make compacts.
Therefore, human beings have the capacity to make compacts.
Hobbes ambiguously uses the terms “computation” and “synthesis” for both the process of methodically compounding the results of strict analysis into definitions, as well as the deductions by which we later connect propositions into syllogisms to answer particular questions. However, properly speaking, scientific knowledge involves syllogistic computation. The analysis and synthesis by which one arrives at definitions is preparatory to natural and moral science. The main feature of universal method for unqualified scientific knowledge is that the analysis of ideas/concrete names and combination of conceptual elements into definitions must proceed in the correct order, so that we resolve step by step from the most complex and particular, to the simplest and most universal ones until we arrive at the most universal explanatory factor signified by the
