Seventeenth-century Europe was the birthplace of materialism and of mechanism. From the precision astronomical measurements of Tycho Brahe in Denmark over the last thirty years of the sixteenth century to the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660, European thought about the nature of the material world changed fundamentally. The universe of 1600 was still the classical cosmos of the fixed earth surrounded by the planetary spheres, whereas the post-telescopic universe of 1660 was infinite, and very largely empty, except for the orbiting planets and the stars. Material substance also was coming to be seen less as a combination of earth, water, air, and fire, and more as changing agglutinations of atoms. And what seemed to hold everything together were law-like regularities which could be expressed mathematically: exact regularities that governed the motions of the earth and planets around the sun, the behaviour of magnets, the hues and unchanging colour sequences produced by white light when passed through thick glass or water, and the combination of chemical substances in reactions. For whereas the physical world of ancient and medieval scholars could be visualized as a sort of sentient organism responding to stimuli, that of the seventeenth century was increasingly seen as analogous to clockwork, in which one part pushed another to move the planets around the sun on the one hand, or drive the blood around the body under the mechanical action of the heart on the other.
The mechanical clock bedazzled the imagination of the age in much the same way as the computer bedazzles ours, producing many largely speculative analogies devised to explain all manner of things. For were not the entire material world, the astronomical cosmos, and the bodies of both humans and animals just component parts or sub-systems of one gigantic piece of precision clockwork, namely, the universe? The radical new physics of René Descartes in France came to be known as the “mechanical philosophy”, and claimed to explain everything in terms of self-acting, self-responding mechanical motions. And for a quarter of a century down to his death in 1650, the Christian Descartes would wrestle with the problem of how the immaterial immortal soul and mind could relate to the physical body and wider material environment, so that thoughts and physical actions synchronized perfectly. For this is the origin of that science-driven “mind–body” problem which is still with us today, and which the New Atheists do their best to claim is an irrelevance, in their strident insistence that there is really no “mind” in a spiritual sense: only a programmed survival instinct deriving from the material circumstances of our physical bodies.
Yet when it comes to positing theories of pre-programmed materialist determinism to explain human thought and action, the New Atheists are Johnny-come-latelys, for Thomas Hobbes beat them to it by some 300 years.
I personally would love to have met Hobbes, for evidence suggests that he could have been jolly good company. Hobbes had a sense of humour and a gift for forging long-lasting friendships. The son of an outrageously eccentric Wiltshire parson (given, among other things, to gambling and heavy drinking), Thomas Hobbes was an abstemious, frugal, and well-off bachelor. Educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, he once became one of the secretaries to Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor (perhaps the most influential British philosopher of all time), and after 1608, he found a comfortable lifelong home as tutor and friend to the families of several successive Earls of Devonshire, living on their estates, and in London, Paris, Italy, and elsewhere. He so impressed and entertained the young King Charles II (whom he had once tutored) that Charles gave the elderly Hobbes “free accesse to his Majesty” and permission to drop in at Whitehall Palace whenever he pleased. Hobbes, moreover, either knew personally or corresponded with most of the great minds of the age, including Descartes and Gassendi, and had even visited the elderly Galileo at Arcetri near Florence in 1638. Active to the end, writing, talking, and playing “real tennis” into his seventies, he died peacefully at ninety-one, in 1679.
Familiar, like so many scholars of that age, with Lucretius, atomism, atheism, and scepticism, the young Hobbes searched for a clear unchallengeable truth, and believed, like the ancient Greeks, that he had found it in geometry and logic. For who could falsify the demonstrable proofs of Euclid’s geometry? Having established this principle, he then aspired to build upon it, with further chains of logical proofs about everything. And in his magnum opus of 1651, Leviathan, he asked how we might establish a stable and efficient political system. And here is where he became notorious, for he began by arguing that before we can talk about government, we need a full analysis of what individual human beings are like; for each person, one might say, is a sort of atomic unit of the total state or nation. So know your “atoms” before talking about society as a whole!
Like a logical reductionist, Hobbes broke “Man” down into his or her most basic functional units. For what are our bodies but self-acting machines?
For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs… why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? (Leviathan, Introduction)
And from the natural machine of Man, Hobbes proceeds to build up the artificial machine of the state.
Yet no one before had spoken of human beings in these stark, mechanistic terms. And from the machine body, Hobbes next went on to develop mechanistic models for cognition, thinking, and behaving that – substituting clockwork and wheels for neurons and brain circuitry – were astonishingly similar to the speculative psycho- and neuro-babble of modern-day reductionists, albeit, in Hobbes’s case, expressed with much greater clarity, elegance, and wit.
For Hobbes, Man exists solely to preserve his own skin, for as long as possible, for we are all pre-programmed, or “hard-wired”, self-preservers. Indeed, we are locked into preserving our individual selves just as rigidly as a clock is locked into striking twelve when the mechanism is triggered. Morality is an invention of the social group, devised simply to stop us killing each other, and hence extending our individual lives and “Felicitie” (Hobbes’s term for happiness): a sort of tribal insurance policy, for we only form “society” as a way of protecting ourselves individually from surprise attack. For “society” and public-spiritedness are in fact illusions: individual skin-saving is all that matters in the long run. No one, moreover, can know the mind or feelings of another person. All we can do is pick up on physical clues, and think something like: “How would I act if this were happening to me?” Then we would ratiocinate or calculate how best we might gain a survival advantage over that person: calculating the odds, just like a computer! Or, in the mid-seventeenth century, like one of Sir Samuel Morland’s early geared calculating machines.
Our mechanical programming is founded on two basic drives: “Vainglory”, or advancing our individual selves as far as we can; and “Fear”, or calculating the odds of what will happen to me if I miscalculate. What if this person is a bit cleverer than me, and will kill me when I am not on my guard? Or can I really gain an ascendancy here, and make him fear me to the point where I have full control? Self-sacrifice and altruism were no more than madness, or defects in the mechanism: a sort of self-destructive aberration. Indeed, as brutal and as mechanistic as anything dreamed up by a modern-day bio-reductionist.
And what was all this eventually in aid of? Answer: the abovementioned “Felicitie”, or personal security.
And while Hobbes had no notion of evolution in 1651, he certainly was fully aware of man’s close physical cousinship with the beasts. No doubt, during his many years in Continental Europe, he had witnessed human and animal cadaver dissections in Paris, Montpellier, Padua, and Bologna – major centres of research in anatomy and physiology – for attending dissections was considered part of a seventeenth-century learned gentleman’s education. In London, moreover, Hobbes was a friend, and in 1658 a beneficiary in the will, of Dr William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood under the systolic (contractive) force of the heart. For as even the most devoutly Christian anatomists knew, the joints, blood vessels, muscles, and mechanical actions of human and animal bodies shared numerous structural and functional features in common. And Hobbes was by no means unique in recognizing that humans could often be savage and bestial in their behaviour as well.
Where he was unusual, however, was in the seemingly horrendous conclusions he came to in seeing humans as mechanically determined super-beasts who only really differed from dogs, wolves, and monkeys in the wider repertoire of tricks and subterfuges they could perform. For what separated the dog from his master was the master’s vastly greater command of language and conceptual manipulation. To Hobbes, words were “wise men’s counters”, enabling them to calculate, think, and impose their “Vainglory” upon the less intellectually agile creation, both human and animal, with greater efficiency. Dominance, therefore, came through mankind’s greater intellectual sophistication and ability to deal with more complex situations. But the bottom line was that humanity’s superiority was no more than a survival tool. It was even said that Hobbes’s thoroughgoing materialism led to his being more afraid of ghosts when he concluded that they might be physical than when he believed them to be mere incorporeal spirits – for a material ghost might do him physical harm!
From 1651 until into the nineteenth century, the term “Hobbist” came to be synonymous with “atheist”; yet was Hobbes an atheist? It is true that in chapter 47 he discoursed on a “Comparison of the Papacy with the Kingdome of Fayries” and “of Darknesse”, but in many respects this is an English Protestant airing well-established national prejudices against perceived Roman Catholic “superstition”. On the other hand, one can scarcely turn a leaf, especially within the last 400 pages of Leviathan’s 700, without encountering a profound and intimate knowledge of Scripture, and of biblical, Old and New Testament, history. Nowhere more so, in fact, than in his massive and deeply theological eleven-chapter section entitled “Of a Christian Common-Wealth”.
And this could not have come about from a 63-year-old – as Hobbes was in 1651 – dimly recollecting his long-dead father’s sermons in Malmesbury Parish Church, or his own undergraduate lectures in divinity at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. No: such detailed knowledge could only result from a lifetime’s regular study of the Scriptures. Far from being an atheist, moreover, Hobbes sees God as the “Artificer”, the master clockmaker or grand mechanician, who had built the great cosmic engine and set it in motion. And there is nothing chaotic in this vast and orderly creation, any more than there is in the going of a fine watch. Hobbes’s system is not about greed or self-conscious nastiness. Rather, it is about the neutral actions of a mechanism, no more a product of evil or cruelty than are the parts of a watch which in their normal going strike, bounce off, and push each other in an endless cycle. And all sixteen of the Leviathan chapters in his large section entitled “Of Man” are intended to serve as a preliminary to his greater purpose of analysing humanity’s political condition, and exploring the roots of natural loyalty and disobedience.
So Hobbes, I would argue, was no atheist, in spite of what both Puritan and Royalist contemporaries might have called him. Much more likely, he was a deist, who believed in a divine creator God who had set his creation in motion, but then had left the world and all that it contained – including us – to run by its own mechanical laws.
Hobbes is vital to our discussion for two reasons. Firstly, because he trumps the materialist New Atheists in pretty well everything, 300 years ahead of them, in matters ranging from man’s relation to the animal creation to the self-seeking roots of morality to the resemblance of all our actions to those of automatic pre-programmed machines. And secondly, Hobbes is very largely ignored in the modern-day literature dealing with science, Christianity, belief, and unbelief, perhaps because he has slipped almost entirely into the domain of the political scientists, and is now studied primarily by students of either politics or the English Civil War. But when we do pay attention to his scientific ideas, we are reminded that there is nothing new under the sun, especially as far as materialist notions are concerned.