Hobbes envisaged a cognitive theory of vision, according to which we err because we have false impressions.(1) The boundaries between perception and cognition are blurred. Thus imagination, an active product of the mind, is but the remaining conception produced by a ‘decaying sense’, an obscure image, unable to produce a clear impression.(2)
This mist between senses and representation had another major implication: qualities are inherent to the subject, not to the object. The quantitative measure bounded reality to the language of mathematics, the qualitative aspect of experience is referred to the patient of its effect. Qualities are the byproduct of the action bodies exert upon our senses, they are perceived in the interaction with our particular and characteristic physiology.(3) Hobbes addressed the topic in a fashion similar to the Greek Sophists, sensations are deemed to be particular to every single human being.(4) The solution to the problem of sense perception was diametrically opposed to any objective stance, curiously enough Hobbes unravels this difficulty by means of the senses again. Thus ends their review in his early The Elements of Law:
And from thence also it followeth, that whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense, which also is by sense to be corrected. For as sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so also sense telleth me, when I see by reflection, that colour is not in the object.(5)
The traditional deception of the senses was not to be corrected by reason or by the submission to a different instance like authority, but rather by a new perceptual appreciation, recovering Galileo’s stress on pure, unprejudiced, observation. Knowledge was related to sensation, neither to accepted wisdom nor to individual reason.
(1) “Fools and madmen manifestly deliberate no less than the wisest men, though they make not so good a choice, the images of things being by diseases altered.” The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, VIII, p. 80.
(2) “An obscure conception is that which representeth the whole object together, but none of the smaller parts by themselves; and as more or fewer parts be represented, so is the conception or representation said to be more or less clear.” Elements of Law, I, 3, 7.
(3) “That image and colour is but an apparition unto us of that motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some internal substance in the head,” Elements of Law, I, 7 in fine.
(4) “And to proceed to the rest of the senses, it is apparent enough, that the smell and taste of the same thing, are not the same to every man, and therefore are not in the thing smelt or tasted, but in the men.” Elements of Law, I, 2, 9.
(5) Elements of Law, I, 2, 10.
