io Introduction

tinuous in Hobbes's thought with the distinctions between pru-

dence and sapience and between experience and reason. Science,
sapience, and reason are the favored sides of the distinctions, and
Borot explains why. Part of the explanation is that they draw on
different cognitive faculties, and that the faculty engaged by history,
namely memory, is more limited than the faculty of reasoning en-
gaged by science. Memory stores truths only for a time, and only
particular truths. Reasoning affords both generality and depth. It can
reach conclusions that are universally valid, and can penetrate to the
grounds of truths that are witnessed and remembered. A written
history makes what is remembered last, but, without the help of
science, it cannot achieve generality and depth; it cannot be genu-
inely explanatory. Another way of putting the point is by saying that
for Hobbes, history cannot teach, in the sense of demonstrating
things. On the other hand, Hobbes thinks that history can be politi-
cally instructive, that it is more accessible than science, and that it
needs to inform civil science. So it is not valueless, and indeed is
better suited to instructing a wide audience than science. Both Behe-
moth and his very first published work, a translation of Thucydides7
History of the Peloponnesian War, were supposed to be politically
instructive, Thucydides through its sub-text, and Behemoth through
its surface meaning. The bulk of Borot's essay concerns the relation
of history to different forms of public instruction.
Victoria Silver's essay on rhetoric also dwells on Hobbes's transla-
tion of Thucydides, and on Hobbes way of marrying the goal of
instruction - of teaching the truth - with the instrument of vivid,
persuasive speech, whether in the form of history, or, despite its
pretensions to do without all of these adornments, in the form of
philosophy. She locates Hobbes's views on the relation between
rhetoric and philosophy within a long tradition of seeing the relation
as one of antagonism. Up to a point Hobbes gets beyond that, strug-
gling to reconcile eloquence and reason.
Hobbes's views on religion, touched on by so many other con-
tributors to this volume, are impressively disentangled by Patricia
Springborg in the concluding essay. An important distinction for
undertanding Hobbes in this connection is that between what goes
on invisibly and privately and sometimes involuntarily in one's
head - the formation of belief - and what is done in public with
consequences for other people. The inner sphere is outside the sov-

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