CRITIQUE OF HOBBES ON CAUSATION

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2019.

As regards causation, the nominalist, sensist and mechanistic materialist Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) maintains that there are only the efficient cause and the material cause, that formal
and final causes are really aspects of efficient causality, and that both the efficient cause and the
material cause together make up the ‘entire cause.’ For the author of De cive (1642), Leviathan
or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), De corpore
(1655) and De homine (1658), “the aggregate of accidents moving is the ‘efficient cause’; the
aggregate moved, the ‘material’; together they can account for the whole movement, or
generation – ‘formal’ and ‘final’ causes being nothing but aspects of the efficient causation:
formal cause designates the production of knowledge in us by the action of the efficient
aggregate of the known essence; final cause designates the special way sensate beings act as
efficient causes.”1 Copleston observes that “within the ‘entire cause,’ Hobbes distinguishes
between ‘efficient cause’ and ‘material cause.’ The former is the aggregate of accidents in the
agent or agents which are required for the production of an effect which is actually produced,
while the latter is the aggregate of requisite accidents in the patient. Both together make up the
entire cause. We can, indeed, talk about the power of the agent and the power of the patient, or,
rather, about the active power of the agent and the passive power of the patient. But these are
objectively the same as the efficient cause and the material cause respectively, though different
terms are used because we can consider the same things from different points of view. The
aggregate of accidents in the agent, when considered in relation to an effect already produced, is
called the efficient cause, and when considered in relation to future time, to the effect to be
produced later, it is called the active power of the agent. Similarly, the aggregate of actions in the
patient is called the material cause when it is considered in relation to the past, to the effect
already produced, and the passive power of the patient when it is considered in relation to the
future. As for the so-called ‘formal’ and ‘final’ causes, these are both reducible to efficient
causes. ‘For when it is said that the essence of a thing is the cause thereof, as to be rational is the
cause of man, it is not intelligible; for it is all one, as if it were said, to be a man is the cause of
man; which is not well said. And yet the knowledge of the essence of anything is the cause of the
knowledge of the thing itself; for, if I first know that a thing is rational, I know thence that the
same is man; but this is no other than an efficient cause. A final cause has no place but in such
things as have sense and will; and this also I shall prove hereafter to be an efficient cause.’2 For
Hobbes final causality is simply the way in which efficient causes operate in man, with
deliberation.”3

Giving a description and critique of Hobbes’ sensist, materialist, and mechanistic views
on causality, and how he prepares the subjectivist and skeptical path for the nominalistic, sensist
and pan-phenomenalist attack on objective efficient causality operating among the real things of
the extra-mental world by David Hume (1711-1776), James Daniel Collins writes: “Another
important definition laid down in first philosophy by Hobbes is that of cause. In the strict sense,

1
É. GILSON and T. LANGAN, Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant, Random House, New York, 1963, p. 46.
2
T. HOBBES, Concerning Body, II, x, 7; E. W., I, pp. 131-132.
3
F. COPLESTON, A History of Philosophy, Book II, vol. 5, Image Doubleday, New York, 1985, pp. 21-22.

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philosophy asks about the entire generation of an event rather than about any single cause. Not
one particular causal factor but the entire causal scheme or principle of generation is the object of
inquiry. Hence Hobbes defines cause as such as the entire cause, ‘the sum or aggregate of all
such accidents, both in the agents and the patient, as concur to the producing of the effect
propounded; all which existing together, it cannot be understood but that the effect exists with
them.’4 The body which generates motion in another body is the agent, and the body in which the
motion is generated is the patient. The aggregate of accidents in the agent is the efficient cause,
whereas the aggregate in the patient is the material cause. Together, they constitute the entire
cause or generation. Formal and final causes are only aspects of efficiency. Formal cause is
reduced to the producing of knowledge in us by the definition of the essence; final cause is found
is found only in beings with sense and will, and is equivalent to the way efficient cause operates,
with deliberation, in man. Since philosophy seeks only the generation or material-and-efficient
cause of things, it can be developed exclusively within the mechanistic framework. That causal
power is always accidental and always conditioned by spatial contiguity and variations of local
motion, is a postulate read into the very definition of cause, thus forestalling any discussion of
creative causation or immaterial activity.

“There is an aspect of Hobbes’ doctrine on cause that is apt to be overlooked. The use of
the term ‘accident’ in the definition of cause is a warning that his causal theory is bound up with
his theory of knowledge. Accidents concern motions of bodies precisely insofar as they affect the
sentient subject. Hence Hobbes’ entire approach to the axioms of motion and the nature of cause
is infected by a deep-seated subjectivism and skepticism, that often go unacknowledged. There is
always a reference of the causal or generative process to the human mind and the names it
employs in reasoning. Hence philosophical knowledge of consequences of fact or cause-and-
effect is always conditional or hypothetical. What we know through the senses are only the
causal conditions leading to sensation. What we know through reason are the relations
connecting certain of our names. We can legitimately affirm only that, if the causal process were
of such-and-such a nature, then it might with necessity be generated through such-and-such
elements. Hobbes’ hesitation about the objectivity of causal demonstrations, together with his
insistence on the necessity of the cause, gave Hume considerable food for thought.

“Although Hobbes is not sure that causal sequences among things agree with the
connections among our names, he is certain that we cannot pretend to know causal relations,
scientifically, except as necessary ones. The entire or sufficient cause is such that, being present,
the effect is produced instantaneously and necessarily. As far as philosophical understanding is
concerned, the effect cannot but be conceived as following with necessity from its entire cause.
All effects have a necessary cause and can eventually be traced to antecedents from which they
must flow. This is required in principle by the definition of cause. If it cannot always be verified
in fact, then we should look for the contingency rather in our ignorance of all the factors than in
the causal principles themselves. Like Spinoza, Hobbes maintains a rigid determinism among all
finite causes and effects. This rules out ordinary human freedom. And since Hobbes differs from
Spinoza in not applying the causal doctrine to God and hence in not invoking any extraordinary
meaning for freedom, his mechanistic determinism is un unrelieved outlook.”5

4
T. HOBBES, Concerning Body, I, vi, 10 (Molesworth, I, 77).
5
J. D. COLLINS, A History of Modern European Philosophy, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1961, pp. 111-112.

2
“…Hobbes has no room for a noncorporeal intellectual power, so that reason (the
reckoning of the consequences of general names) is wider in function than but not different in
kind from, imagination.

“Subsequent empirical philosophers, particularly Hume, have paid special attention to

Hobbes’ remarks on the consequence or train of thoughts. Mental discourse or the discursive
train of thoughts is any succession of our images, one upon the other. The fundamental principle
is that the coherence and consequence of thoughts in imagination follow from the original
coherence and consequence in sensations. What is sensed in a certain sequence, tends to be
called up by imagination and memory in a similar sequence or mental transition. But probability
rather than certainty governs natural mental discourse, since in nature the same perceived thing
may be followed now by one consequent and now by another. This qualification affects not only
our unguided or inconstant trains of thought but also those that are regulated, including
remembrance, experience, prudence, and conjecture. The major epistemological problem centers
around regulated mental discourse and its fruits.

“A mental transition is guided rather than unguided, when it springs from some
passionate thought, some organizing design based upon desire. Appetite sets a goal, and this
leads to a searching of our thought for an appropriate sequence of means to the end. The search
may go from an imagined effect to the causes that produce it (a process common to man and
beast), or it may go from an imagined cause to all the possible effects it can have (a synthetic
process proper to man alone). Remembrance is an aid in ferreting out these sequences. An
‘experiment’ is a remembrance of some particular consequence of thought, containing
antecedents and consequents, whereas ‘experience’ is nothing more than one’s having had many
experiments or remembrances of sequences. In linking experience with memory of causal
sequences, Hobbes is led to maintain that our natural, regulated discourse about cause and effect
never rises above strong probability. The experiential knowledge of causation, whether it be
presumption of the past or conjecture of the future, cannot achieve the necessity and universality
required for scientific causal knowledge. The prudent man is one who takes his thoughts as signs,
antecedent or consequent, of other thoughts with which they may confidently be joined, in
determining what is likely to come to pass or to have already occurred. But this assurance is
always approximate rather than absolute, so that the prudent man is wary in his use of signs of
causal sequence. He who has the most experience in guessing by signs proceeds with the most
certainty in his causal inference, but (Hobbes comments) ‘not with certainty enough.’6

“From a reading of this analysis of cause, it is not difficult to anticipate the doubts that
actually took shape in Hume’s mind. For, if we can never have complete assurance in our
experiential connection of antecedents and consequents, then of what value is the axiom that
from like causes like effects must follow? This is a universal and necessary statement that
experience never fully warrants. If Hobbes replies that the situation is different in the scientific
determination of causal sequences, then Hume’s problem will be whether a nominalistic sort of
science has any right to make causal pronouncements about consequences of matters of fact. Do
the names and definitions used in scientific reasoning apply at all to real sequences in nature?
Hobbes has left this application in a hypothetical state, but Hume will want to know whether the
discrepancy is not due to the mathematical orientation of Hobbes’ conception of science and
6
T. HOBBES, Leviathan, I, 3 (Oakeshott, 16).

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demonstration. If this be the case, then the Hobbesian theory of a single method in philosophy
does not succeed in overcoming the dualism between experience and science, the inferences of
the prudent man and those of the philosopher, the existential import of causality and the
necessity of its connections. And if these cleavages remain unhealed in regard to basic
speculative issues, a sound foundation has not been provided for the practical study of the
passions and social life.”7

7
J. D. COLLINS, op. cit., pp. 115-116.