Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER III EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY--THE NATURE OF MAN We may now proceed to consider the main outlines of the analysis of cognition and volition which has earned for Hobbes the well-merited title of 'founder of empirical psychology, ' that chief contribution of the English-speaking peoples to mental science. This analysis will be found by the English reader most fully set forth in two works, the Human Nature (the first part of the treatise on the Elements of Law originally composed in 1640), and the opening chapters of Leviathan (published in 1651). We must bear in mind, however, that Hobbes is chiefly interested in the psychology of the individual mind less for its own sake than because it furnishes him with a logical foundation for his naturalistic doctrine of ethics and politics; his psychology is consequently only worked out so far as is necessary for the achievement of this ulterior end. Hobbes, as we have seen, does not attempt to deduce the principles of psychology, let alone these of ethics and politics, from the general doctrine of motion, but falls back upon our immediate experience of the main facts of human nature as we find them in ourselves. He is, so to say, an empiricist malgri lui, and it is one of the entertaining ironies of history that the English philosopher who, of all others, is most strongly insistent upon the deductive character of genuine science should be chiefly remembered by that part of his work which is most flagrantly inconsistent with his own conception of strictly scientific method. From the axiom that neither within nor without is there any reality but motion there is, in truth, no road to moral and political science. Hobbes starts, in his doctrine of man, from the usual empiricist assumption that all..