66 



Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, a?id Letters. 



towards the finite and relative. The question of determinism and 

 liberty, of indifference, which I have said is not before us, other- 

 wise Aristotle's analysis of will, rules eighteen centuries ; to 

 move voluntarily, is to move, a principio inirinsico ; man judges 

 of the means to attain ends, which he understands, and selects 

 those means. 



But when the tendency of thought began to desert the " Grnothi 

 seauton " the one aim of so many ages, and to attend to the phe- 

 nomena of an outer world, revealed in consciousness through our 

 senses, phenomena, so strangely undervalued, by many leading 

 minds before ; then necessarily arose a new impulse to thought, 

 concerning nature and freedom. I regard Hobbes, as the repre- 

 sentative thinker of the new era. It is well to place him with 

 reference to his age and circumstances. He is secretary to the 

 Lord Chancellor, who collects "centuries" of observations on 

 sounds, fruits, plants, etc., and who without discovery or original 

 thought, gives a new impulse to empirical science, showing us the 

 " promised land," which he did bod enter, and calls metaphysics, 

 a spinning of spiders' webs out of the thinker's brain. Kepler 

 was dead only some ten years. Galileo, was just buried. The 

 Royal Society, itself, just founded, along with other such societies 

 throughout Europe, is the clearest indication of men's minds, out- 

 ward to the phenomena of nature. A philosophy for their science 

 was indispensable, and Hobbes provided it, the " patriarch of pos- 

 itive philosophy," as Comte calls him. We know only, says he. 

 phenomena and their chain of sequences. Contrast this, with the 

 previous philosophy of which Dante is the popular representative. 

 Proceeding to nature from what is known in consciousnes.^- of the 

 active ego, and reasoning by analogy, there would be nothing un- 

 philosophical in the assumption, that natural phenomena are caused 

 by the active and productive power of spirits like us ; and this is 

 Dante's theory. How different with Hobbes ! The phenomena 

 of the active ego, are by him, little regarded. The mind is almost 

 or altogether a passive thing, moved as other passive things are 

 moved. So it takes its place in nature's chain of many links, pull 

 on any one, the whole is moved ; or rather, this chain pulls itself ; 

 freedom has disappeared. 



