The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume 04 (of 11)
Thomas Hobbes · en
_T. H._ To his Lordship’s question here: _What I leave God to be?_
I answer, I leave him to be a most pure, simple, invisible spirit
corporeal. By corporeal I mean a substance that has magnitude, and
so mean all learned men, divines and others, though perhaps there
be some common people so rude as to call nothing body, but what
they can see and feel. To his second question: _What real being He
can have amongst bodies and accidents?_ I answer, the being of a
spirit, not of a spright. If I should ask any the most subtile
distinguisher, what middle nature there were between an infinitely
subtile substance, and a mere thought or phantasm, by what name
could he call it? He might call it perhaps an incorporeal
substance; and so _incorporeal_ shall pass for a middle nature
between _infinitely subtile_ and _nothing_, and be less subtile
than infinitely subtile, and yet more subtile than a thought. It
is granted, he says, that the nature of God is incomprehensible.
Doth it therefore follow, that we may give to the Divine substance
what negative name we please? Because he says, the whole Divine
substance is here and there and every where throughout the world,
and that the soul of a man is here and there and every where
throughout man’s body; must we therefore take it for a mystery of
Christian religion, upon his or any other Schoolman’s word,
without the Scripture, which calls nothing a mystery but the
incarnation of the eternal God? Or is incorporeal a mystery, when
not at all mentioned in the Bible, but to the contrary it is
written, _That the fulness of the Deity was bodily in Christ_?
When the nature of the thing is incomprehensible, I can acquiesce
in the Scripture: but when the signification of words is
incomprehensible, I cannot acquiesce in the authority of a
Schoolman.