2.

1 Sense and Imagination

Hobbes is a sort of empiricist, in that he thinks all of our ideas are derived, directly or indirectly,
from sensation.[2] In addition he tells a causal story about perception, which is largely the story of
a causal chain of motions. The object causes (immediately or mediately) pressure on the sense
organ, which causes motion inside us, all the way to the “brain and heart”. There this motion
causes “a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver itself; which
endeavour, because outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this seeming, or fancy, is
that which men call sense” (Hobbes 1651, 1.4). Quite why this endeavour from inside to out
should make the sensation seem to come from outside is unclear, for things coming from outside
should be moving the other way. At any rate, the sensation is strongly grounded in, perhaps even
identical with, the internal motions. But what, we might ask, is the quality? What is, say, red? In
this chapter Hobbes seems happy to say that red in the object is just motions in it, and that red in
us is motions in us, which give rise to or are a certain sensation. And he seems happy to avoid
the issue of whether red itself belongs to the sensation or the object. In the Elements of Law,
however, he’d been clear about the view that colours inhere in the perceivers, not the objects
(Hobbes 1640, 1.2).

Imagination is Hobbes’s next topic. His basic thought is that our sensations remain after the act
of sensing, but in a weaker way: “after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an
image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it” (Hobbes 1651, 2.2). This is a
story about how we form ideas. More generally, imagination has a crucial role in Hobbes’s
picture of the workings of the mind. One sort of imagination is what we would now call
imagination, “as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we
conceive in our mind a Centaur” (Hobbes 1651, 2.4). That is, we can take the ideas, the faded
sensations, from different experiences and combine them together. But Hobbes also connects
imagination, and “the faculty of imagining” (Hobbes 1651, 2.10) closely to memory and to
understanding. Imagination and memory, Hobbes says, are the same thing, with two names that
point to different aspects of the phenomenon of decaying sense. If we want to point to the idea or
image itself, we use ‘imagination’, but if we want to point to the decay, we use ‘memory’
(Hobbes 1651, 2.3).