Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II HOBBES: MATERIALISM AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY While Hobbes may be regarded, from some points of view, as the suctesSQ£ofJSaee5-he is, no less than Bacon himself, an independent and original thinker. His works bear no traces of Bacon's influence, and in fundamental points of philosophical theory he is directly opposed to the teaching of Bacon. The statement of the chief points of agreement and difference will bring us at once to the characteristic features of Hobbes's philosophy. In the first place, Hobbes is in full agreement with Bacon as to the practical value of knowledge; it is indeed to him, rather than to BacoTl, that we owe the dictum that 'knowledge is power.' 'The end of knowledge is power; and the use of theorems (which, among geometricians, serve for the finding out of properties) is for the construction of problems; and, lastly, the scope of all speculation is the performance of some action, or thing to be done.'1 This practical or utilitarian interest in knowledge is the dominating motive of Hobbes's whole enterprise in philosophy. That enterprise embraces the entire field of human knowledge, so that he might well have said, with Bacon,"that lie had taken all knowledge for his province. But the end to which all else is a means is that scientific understanding of the ethical and-pqlitical life of man in which Bacon too had seen the culmination oF his scientific ambition, and the practical value of which seems to Hobbes least open to question. While the 1 Works, i. 7. 56 : utility of natural philosophy and geometry is measured by the arts which they make possible and the benefits which come to men through their possession, 'the utility of moral and civil philosophy is to be estimated, not so much by the commodities we have by knowing these ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.