introduction to Hobbes’s 1629 translation of Thucydides (EW VIII.32). It is possible that Hobbes also read the Physiologiae, whose first book comprises a detailed discussion of God’s relation to the world according to Stoic doctrine. Like Hobbes, Lipsius rejects the pantheistic tendencies in Stoicism: “The Stoics say that God is the world itself, when strictly speaking he is its soul” (1604 I, 8, 16; see also 1604 II, 4, 78). And he also rejects the full corporeality of God (1604 I, 9, 20; see also 1604 II, 4, 75–8). Nevertheless, Lipsius’ thorough scholarship would have provided abundant classical material to inspire and ground a modern materialist theology like Hobbes’s.
Another Stoic doctrine discussed in detail in Lipsius’ De constantia, namely fate, emerges early in one of Hobbes’s most famous controversies, the protracted argument about liberty with Bishop Bramhall. Bramhall draws on distinctions made by Lipsius in his critique of Hobbes’s views as Stoic or hyper-Stoic.7 As usual, Hobbes protests that he has not derived his position “from the authority of any sect, but from the nature of things themselves” (EW IV.260–1; see also EW V.244–5). Bramhall’s final word in the dispute, his 1658 “Castigations” of Hobbes, went unanswered. But the Castigations were published together with Bramhall’s “Catching of Leviathan.” He there again disparagingly saddles Hobbes with the epithet “Stoic”: “If he had not been a professed Christian, but a plain Stoic …” (1842–1844, IV.426).
2.1.3 The Cavendish Circle
Finally, there was fertile Stoic soil in Hobbes’s closest intellectual community, the so-called Cavendish Circle, which comprised the prominent Cavendish brothers, William and Charles, Margaret (wife of William), Walter Charleton, Kenelm Digby, and others. Lipsius’ thought was a major inspiration for the Circle. But the philosophy of Margaret Cavendish is especially pertinent in relation to Hobbes. Although she was explicitly opposed to Hobbes’s mechanistic version of materialism, Cavendish’s own thought was distinctly Stoic in ways similar to Hobbes’s. In order to account for the immense diversity and activity in nature she found it necessary to demarcate self-moving “animate” from inert “inanimate” matter.8 Like Hobbes’s corporeal God, (as we will see below) her animate matter was thoroughly intermixed with inanimate matter and like Hobbes she tries to explain “how so fine, subtle and pure a part as the animate matter is can work upon so gross a part as the inanimate” (2001, 158).
She declined to deify animate matter, though she does say it is “a kind of God or Gods to the dull part of matter” (Cavendish 2001, xxi).9 Hobbes and Cavendish are at bottom kindred Stoic spirits, though their systems diverge on the precise nature of material activity.
2.2 Stoic Roots
2.2.1 Space and Body
Hobbes and the Stoics agree that space and time are infinitely divided and extended, that space has the same dimensions as body, and that time has the successive being of motion. But these structural features are accepted by many philosophers, ancient and modern. I would like to focus on two more controversial ontological questions in Hobbes’s philosophy of space and time: the reality of space independently of body and the reality of time independently of mind. The similar way that Hobbes and the Stoics struggled to meet these philosophical challenges is testimony to the affinity of their systems and Hobbes’s deep Stoic debt.
For Hobbes, our concept of pure space is causally and perceptually derived from body. A person left alone after a “universal annihilation,” remembering the former locations of bodies, would form a “conception of that we call space; an imaginary space indeed, because a mere phantasm, yet that very thing which men call so” (EW I.93). Hobbes is emphatic that whereas the magnitude of body is real, imaginary space is not: “For imaginary space is the effect and magnitude is the cause; this an accident of the mind, that of body existing out of the mind” (OL I.93; EW I.105). Place or locus is likewise merely an abstraction from magnitude: “place is nothing out of the mind, nor magnitude anything within it … place is feigned extension, but magnitude true extension” (OL I.93; EW I.105). So it is not surprising that Hobbes is antagonistic toward ancient (e.g., Lucretian) and modern (e.g., Torricellian) demonstrations of local vacuums (EW I.411–26) and dismissive of void space beyond the world: “there is no real space outside it; but there is no imaginary space either” (Anti-White III.2; 1976, 41).
Hobbes also heaps abuse on Cartesian a priori arguments against the vacuum: “to argue that that there can be no vacuum ‘because vacuum is nothing’ is as cogent as maintaining that ‘no man can fast because to fast is to eat nothing’ … and nothing cannot be eaten” (EW I.109; Cf. Anti-White III.3; 1976, 42). Furthermore, Hobbes affirms that merely imaginary space is sufficient to separate one body from another: “if there intercede any imagined space, which may receive another body, then those bodies are not contiguous” (EW 1.108). He even holds there is real distance in imaginary space: “The ‘distance’ between two bodies, or even between two vacant spaces, is the shortest space lying between them. So if some intermediate part is removed from a continuous body the distance between its extreme parts is not thereby removed” (Anti-White III.3; 1976, 42).
Hobbes’s quasi-realism about imaginary space is highly reminiscent of the Stoics’ conception of pure space as one of the problematic “incorporeals.” As materialists they officially insist that the void is strictly non-existent or “nothing” (Stobaeus; SVF 2.503/LS 49A; 1987, 294). Accordingly, like Hobbes, they make place corporeal: “place is what is occupied by an existent and made equal to what occupies it (by ‘existent’ they mean body)” (Sextus Empiricus; SVF 2.505/LS 49B; 1987, 294). And, like Hobbes, although the Stoics deny the actual existence of local vacua, they do not rule them out a priori. As Galen puts it: “they leave void in the nature of existing things even if they deny its presence within the world” (Galen, SVF 2.503/LS 49E; 1987, 295). There is good reason to think the void extends infinitely beyond the world since it is there capable of receiving body: “it is incorporeal and without contact, neither has shape nor takes on shape, neither is acted upon in any respects nor acts, but is simply capable of receiving body” (Cleomedes, SVF 2 542; LS 49C; 1987, 294). So this “incorporeal” non-existent “subsists” as the possible places of bodies: “void is what can be occupied by an existent but is not occupied, or an interval empty of body, or an interval unoccupied by a body” (Sextus Empiricus; SVF 2.505/LS 49B; 1987, 29). This is just how Hobbes characterized imaginary space: “no man calls it space for being already filled but because it may be filled” (EW I.93).
2.2.2 Time and Mind
For Hobbes, just as our conception of space is derived from the image of body, our notion of time is derived from perceived motion: “a moved body leaves a phantasm of motion, namely an idea of that body passing out of one space and into another by continual succession. And this idea or phantasm … is that which I call TIME” (OL I.83; EW I.94).10 He insists that his own definition of time – “the phantasm of before and after in motion” – is in conformity with Aristotle’s canonical definition – “the number of motion with respect to before and after” (OL I.84; EW I.94; see also Anti-White XXVII, 1976, 339–40; Aristotle, Physics, Bk. IV, Ch. 11; 220a25-6; Aristotle 1971, Vol. 1, 373) – since “numbering is an act of the mind” (OL I.84; EW I.95).
But there is another, more radical, sense in which Hobbesian time is imaginary or subjective: “when people speak of the times of their predecessors, they do not think that after their predecessors are gone their times can be anywhere else other than in the memory of those that remember them” (OL I. 84; EW I.94).11 Likewise, in the other temporal direction, “this word future is a name but no future thing has yet any being … nevertheless, since our thought is used to conjoin [subnectere] things past with things present the name future serves to signify such conjoining” (EW I.17; OL I.15). Despite this apparent presentism, Hobbes seems to grant
