regards motion as mind-independent. Motion, after all, is the real cause of the image of time just as magnitude or “real space” is the cause of imaginary space: “time is the image of motion and has the same relation to real motion as a reflection in a mirror to the true face and a mirrored shape to a true shape” (Anti-White XXVIII.2; 1976, 339). Furthermore, Hobbes frequently treats the successive duration of motion as mind-independent. Sense, for example, is “some internal motion in the sentient generated by some internal motion of the parts of the object” (Anti-White XXVIII.2; 1976, 339). Indeed, the internal motions in the brain themselves “remain there for some time” (OL I.320; EW I.393).13 This persistence of sensory motions, which enables memory, is precisely what separates us from mindless objects. So rather than reduce motion and time to the mind, mental processes are themselves explained by motion and time.14
The Stoics are ambivalent about time for similar reasons. For one thing, it is not a body: “in their view time is one of the incorporeals, which they disparage as inactive and non-existent and subsisting merely in thought” (Proclus, SVF 2.521/LS 51F; 1987, 305). Furthermore, they are presentists. Thus, according to Stobaeus, Chrysippus held “only the present belongs; the past and the future subsist but belong in no way” (Stobaeus, SVF 2.509/LS 51B; 1987, 304; see also Plutarch, SVF LS 51C; 1987, 305). And yet, like Hobbes, they recognize that time is essential to motion: “time is the dimension of motion according to which the measure of speed and slowness is spoken of, or the dimensions accompanying the world’s motion” (Stobaeus, SVF 2.509/LS 51B; 1987, 304; see also Sextus Empiricus, LS 50F; 1987, 299). And there is no indication in Stoic physics that the motion of the universe, or its parts, require imagination. So they classify time, like the void, as an “incorporeal”: something subsisting, which we can speak about and quantify in science and in ordinary life, but lacking independent existence (Sextus Empiricus SVF 2331/LS 27D; 1987, 162).15
Some scholars have perceived in Hobbes’s philosophy of space and time an anticipation of Kant (Herbert 1977); others (more plausibly) have detected the influence of late scholastic Aristotelianism and nominalism.16 But the guiding principles of Hobbesian metaphysics, materialism, and (what Brandt calls) “motionalism” (Brandt 1917, 379), are what most inform and complicate his treatments of space and time. Without resorting to a “subsistent” incorporeal kind of being, Hobbes nevertheless followed the Stoics in giving time and space a sufficient reality to employ them as independent parameters of mechanistic physics.
2.2.3 Causality
For Hobbes, the knowledge of effects from their causes, and vice versa, is the defining feature of philosophy (EW I.3). His own analysis of the causal relation, presented mostly in chapter IX “Of Cause and Effect” in De corpore, is rich and somewhat neglected.17 Here, I will explore one important aspect of this analysis, which is strongly reminiscent of the Stoics’. Together with Spinoza, Hobbes is perhaps the strictest early modern “necessitarian” about the causal connections among bodies. A cause “simply” or “entirely” is a collection of accidents such that “when they are all thought to be present it cannot be understood but that the effect is produced at that same instant. And if any of them be wanting it cannot be supposed but that the effect is not produced” (EW I.122). Men call things “contingent, whereof they do not perceive the necessary cause” (EW I.130). Hobbes argues the conceptual inter-dependence of simple causes and their effects is crucial for several principles at the foundation of his physics, including “no action at a distance” (EW I.125), “same cause/same effect” (EW I.125-6), and the inertia of both motion and rest (EW I.125).
The Stoics are committed to very similar causal principles. Alexander attributes to the Stoics that “from everything that happens, something else follows, with a necessary causal dependence on it, and everything that happens has something prior to it with which it causally coheres” (LS 1987, 337; see also LS 1987, 333; 389–90). Like Hobbes, the Stoics emphasize that the necessary connection applies to what they call “complete” or “sustaining” causes, i.e., “one during whose presence the effect remains and on whose removal the effect is effect is removed” (LS 1987, 336). As Hobbes later does, they derive from this conception of complete causality the principle that “where all the same circumstances obtain it is impossible that a result that does not ensue on one occasion should ensue on another” (LS 1987, 338). We call things “accidental” or “spontaneous” only because “there are causes hidden from our sight” (Plutarch, On Stoic Self Contradictions; In Sambursky 2014, 56). And they hold that all causal connections are by direct contact or through the medium of pneuma (Sambursky 2014, 54). As Hobbes later would, albeit from a more sophisticated and quantitative perspective, the Stoics perceived their necessitarian causal principles as required by their overall materialist cosmology: “the world would be wrenched apart and divided and no longer form a unity, forever governed by a single ordering and management, if an uncaused motion were introduced” (LS 1987, 337–8; see also Sambursky 2014, 130).18
2.2.4 God
Since Hobbes was avowedly both a theist and a materialist, his God must be some sort of body. As noted above, he says so much in a brief dialogue appended to the Latin edition of Leviathan (1668), where Hobbes’s mouthpiece “B” brashly “affirms, of course, that God is body.”19 Concurrently, his longtime intellectual frenemy, Anglican Bishop John Bramhall, pressed Hobbes on the same question: since Hobbes considers “incorporeal substance” contradictory, Bramhall asks, what then does he “leave God himself to be?” (1842–1844, IV.525). Hobbes pulls no punches: “I leave him to be a most pure, simple, invisible spirit corporeal” (EW IV.313).20 In recent scholarship, this late confession of corporeal theism has generally been dismissed as either atheistic dissimulation or a clumsy statement of sincere of Calvinist minimalism.21 This is understandable. After all, taken on its face, where could Hobbes have obtained such an idea?22 The answer is: from classical Stoicism.
Consider two passages. The first is Diogenes Laertius’ gloss of the role of God in Stoic physics:
They believe there are two principles of the universe, the active and the passive. The passive is unqualified substance, i.e., matter, the active is the rational principle (logos) in it. i.e., God … In the beginning he was by himself and turned all substances into water via air and just as the seed is contained in the seminal fluid so this being the spermatic principle of the cosmos remains like this in the cosmos and makes the matter easy for itself to work with in the generation of subsequent things.
(Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers Bk. 7, 134; LS 1987, 268–9, 275)23
The second is Hobbes’s (1662) account of his corporeal God’s operation in the world:
I have seen, and so have many others, two waters, one of the river and the other mineral water, so that no man could discern one from the other from his sight; yet when they are both put together the whole substance could not be distinguished from milk. How then could the change be made in every part, but only by the activity of the mineral water, changing it everywhere to the sense and yet not being everywhere and in every part of the water. If such gross bodies have such great activity what then can we think of spirits, whose kinds be as many as there are kinds of liquor, and activity greater? Can it then be doubted that God, who is infinitely fine spirit, and withal intelligence, can make and change all species and kinds of bodies as he pleaseth?
(EW IV.310)
The parallels between these passages are striking: (i) each makes God a special kind of corporeal substance that produces the diversity among familiar bodies by acting on passive and homogenous matter; (ii) each says the divine body operates by thoroughly pervading ordinary matter (though Hobbes denies this involves complete mixing); (iii) each conceives of the divine body as intelligent. I maintain this similarity is no accident: Hobbes adapted his corporeal God from Stoic sources.
Two
