In the following extracts the reader will find the prominent features of that sensationalism which to-day has so many adherents:—“Concerning the thoughts of man, I will consider them first singly, and afterwards in a train or dependence upon one another. Singly they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of a man’s body, and by diversity of working produceth diversity of appearances. The original of them all is that which we call sense, for there is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first totally or by parts been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.” The effect of this is to deny any possible knowledge other than as results from the activity of the sensitive faculties, and is also fatal to the doctrine of a soul. “According,” says Hobbes, “to the two principal parts of man, I divide his faculties into two sorts—faculties of the body, and faculties of the mind. Since the minute and distinct anatomy of the powers of the body is nothing necessary to the present purpose, I will only sum them up in these three heads—power nutritive, power generative, and power motive. Of the powers of the mind there be two sorts—cognitive, imaginative, or conceptive, and motive. For the understanding of what I mean by the power cognitive, we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually certain images or conceptions of the things without us. This imagery and representation of the qualities of the things without, is that which we call our conception, imagination, ideas, notice, or knowledge of them; and the faculty, or power by which we are capable of such knowledge, is that I here call cognitive power, or conceptive, the power of knowing or conceiving.” “All the qualities called sensible are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth on our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed are they anything else but divers motions; for motion produceth nothing but motion. Because the image in vision, consisting of color and shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the objects of that sense; it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion that the same color and shape are the very qualities themselves, and for the same cause that sound and noise are the qualities of the bell or of the air. And this opinion hath been so long received that the contrary must needs appear a great paradox, and yet the introduction of species visible and intelligible (which is necessary for the maintenance of that opinion) passing to and fro from the object is worse than any paradox, as being a plain impossibility. I shall therefore endeavor to make plain these points. That the subject wherein color and image are inherent, is not the object or thing seen.