115. The second chapter of the Leviathan, “On Imagination,” begins with one of those acute and original observations we often find in Hobbes: “That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat stay it, though the reason be the same, namely, that nothing can change itself, is not so easily assented to. For men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves; and because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, think everything else grows weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord.” The physical principle had lately been established, but the reason here given for the contrary prejudice, though not the sole one, is ingenious and even true. Imagination he defines to be “conception remaining, and by little and little decaying after the act of sense.”[266] This he afterwards expressed less happily, “the gradual decline of the motion in which sense consists;” his phraseology becoming more and more tinctured with the materialism he affected in all his philosophy. Neither definition seems at all applicable to the imagination which calls up long past perceptions. “This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, but when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old and past, it is called memory. So that, imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.”[267] It is, however, evident that imagination and memory are distinguished by something more than their names. The second fundamental error of Hobbes in his metaphysics, his extravagant nominalism, if so it should be called, appears in this sentence, as the first, his materialism, does in that previously quoted. [266] Hum. Nat., c. 3. [267] Lev., c. 2. 116. The phænomena of dreaming and the phantasms of waking men are considered in this chapter with the keen observation and cool reason of Hobbes.[268] I am not sure that he has gone more profoundly into psychological speculations in the Leviathan than in the earlier treatise; but it bears witness more frequently to what had probably been the growth of the intervening period, a proneness to political and religious allusion, to magnify civil and to depreciate ecclesiastical power. “If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with its prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty and ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience. And this ought to be the work of the schools; but they rather nourish such doctrine.”[269] [268] Hum. Nat., c. 3. [269] Id. ibid. |Discourse or train of imagination.|