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Despite nova scientia’s influence on Hobbes, we can detect a ceratin humanistic bias(1) in his project. This is evident especially in his latter and more influential Leviathan, the traits of both the style and character of rhetoric, a relapse after his early deductive phase. Deductivism did not imply the plain conclusion of political science from natural philosophy,(2) but the inspiration it gave to renew the attitudes towards knowledge and the possibility of a true, coherent, scientia civilis, that united diverse provinces using the central metaphors, the framework, of the philosophia prima.
The importance of the senses, of experience subverting the influence of tradition, had a dated precedence in the work of Renaissance artists, but it still kept a residue of Platonism and idealism.(3) The representation of space and the laws of perspective introduced the tools to a complete geometrization of space. Sense-data had to be tempered with the conditions of an inert space where bodies were placed, rather than with authority or the conditions afforded by the plain of consistence.
Galileo, looking to the skies, discovered a moving body, a comet, in 1604. This observation sufficed to cast doubts on the cosmology of the eminent Aristotle, composed of immutable supra-lunar bodies. The stress on perception is a landmark of a different outlook, a shifting pattern, towards nature. Classically senses were deemed to deceive us, a rational order was required to correct our vision. Galileo preferred observation to the Aristotelian idea of incorruptibility. His experience prevailed on any previous conception, displaced to substratum rather than remaining on the plane of construction.(4) Denying the senses afforded the idea of a unity of the world that started decomposing when the individual’s senses acquired a position of preeminence to grasp the surrounding cosmos, becoming the principal assumption of Kepler’s vision theory, subjectified by Hobbes.(5) Optics recreated a theory of knowledge and resorted to a geometrization of space; ontology and epistemology converged in the same three-dimensional coordinate system.

Galileo's telescope

(1) Cf. especially Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Cambridge, 1996. The inherited conception was that Hobbes, admired by the achievements in natural science, attempted an application of its method to political philosophy. Skinner shows, on the other hand, the profound impact of rhetoric in his work.
(2) “Hobbes’s formal science of rights and obligations assumes the existence of a human nature which can be described by a mechanistic science of causes; but it is not itself a product of that science,” N. Malcolm, “Hobbes’s science of politics and his theory of science”, B. Willms et al., Hobbes Oggi, Milano, 1990, p. 157.
(3) Cf. E. Panofsky, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunstheorie, Berlin, 1989. E. Panofsky, A. Koyré and N. Heinrich, Galilée: critique d’art suivi de Attitude esthétique et pensée scientifique, Paris, 1993.
(4) This is also the final outcome of the ideal of Renaissance painters, turning their observation on the laws of perspective and vision to display a reliable portrait of nature. In this sense we can understand Garin’s contention about the respect of the text that obfuscates the very thing itself. Only with Renaissance the empirical study of nature obtained a soil of development, “L’homme se situe au centre de son monde et il est lui-même microcosme; et l’ensemble est uni dans un ordre rationel, dont l’homme est comme la synthèse et la formule abrégée. Mais c’est l’observation de la nature qui nous offre le secret du développement de l’homme et elle nous indique donc les voies de sa formation.” E. Garin, L’éducation de l’homme moderne 1400-1600, Paris, 1968, p. 212.
(5) Cf. V. Ronchi, “Préface”, De Homine, Paris, 1974, pp. 16 ff.