The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume 04 (of 11)Hobbes, Thomas
Philosophy
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume 04 (of 11)
Hobbes, Thomas
Philosophy, English -- 17th century
5. Concerning other things, which some men call _spirits
incorporeal_, and some _corporeal_, it is not _possible_ by
_natural_ means only, to come to _knowledge_ of so much, as that
_there are such_ things. We that are Christians _acknowledge_ that
there be angels good and evil, and that there are spirits, and that
the soul of a man is a spirit, and that those spirits are immortal:
_but_, to _know_ it, that is to say, to have natural evidence of the
same, it is _impossible_: for, all _evidence_ is _conception_, as it
is said, chap. VI. sect. 3, and all conception is imagination, and
proceedeth from _sense_, chap. III. sect. 1. And _spirits_ we
suppose to be those substances which work _not_ upon the _sense_,
and therefore not conceptible. But though the Scripture acknowledges
spirits, yet doth it nowhere say, that they are incorporeal, meaning
thereby, without dimension and quality; nor, I think, is that word
incorporeal at all in the Bible; but it is said of the spirit, that
it abideth in men; sometimes that it dwelleth in them, sometimes
that it cometh on them, that it descendeth, and goeth, and cometh;
and that spirits are angels, that is to say messengers: all which
words do imply _locality_; and locality is _dimension_; and
whatsoever hath dimension, is _body_, be it never so subtile. To me
therefore it seemeth, that the Scripture favoureth them more, that
hold angels and spirits corporeal, than them that hold the contrary.
And it is a plain _contradiction_ in natural discourse, to say of
the soul of man, that it is _tota in toto, et tota in qualibet parte
corporis_, grounded neither upon reason nor revelation, but
proceeding from the ignorance of what those things are which are
called _spectra_, images, that appear in the dark to children, and
such as have strong fears, and other strange imaginations, as hath
been said, chapter III. sect. 5, where I call them phantasms: for,
taking them to be things real, without us, like bodies, and seeing
them to come and vanish so strangely as they do, unlike to _bodies_;
what could they call them else, but _incorporeal bodies_? which is
not a name, but an absurdity of speech.
6. It is true, that the heathens, and all nations of the world, have
acknowledged that there be _spirits_, which for the most part they
hold to be incorporeal; whereby it might be thought, that a man by
natural reason, may arrive, without the Scriptures, to the knowledge
of this, _that spirits are_: but the erroneous collection thereof by
the heathens, may proceed, as I have said before, from the ignorance
of the cause of ghosts and phantasms, and such other apparitions.
And from thence had the Grecians their number of gods, their number
of _dæmons_ good or bad, and for every man his _genius_; which is
not the acknowledging of this truth, _that spirits are_; but a false
opinion concerning the force of imagination.
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