| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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(Gardner 3–5). The First Partition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in particularlays out concepts and terminology that, like Hobbes’ theory of sensation, influenced John Locke’s empirical philosophy. Burton categorizes, in his inimitable way, the writings of others on the operations and maladies associated with thought. Ranging through a wealth of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance material, he incorporates the latest medical findings on “the physiology of thought” (Stahmer). Of special significance, he cites Peter Abelard’s position that “there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the sense” (Pt. I, Sec. I. Mem. 2. Subs. 10), which is also a Hobbesian postulation. Conceptually and lexically, he sets the stage for Locke’s sensory model of cognition with terms like Imagination, Reflection, Senses, and Understanding, while at the same time voicing proto-Hobbesian ideas.
Ever his own authority, Hobbes—possibly reacting to Burton’s over-the-top, maddening style—represents a starting point, practically speaking, for a more intensely focused and disciplined study of cognition. He “definitely held” from the outset, “that all that exists, including all human cognitive processes and actions, was nothing but motion” (Martinich 90). He moreover states at the beginning of Leviathan that individual thoughts “are every one a Representation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an Object” (Leviathan 13). He enlarges by stating definitively that
His premise is that there is no a priori existence to thought. Thoughts simply result from pressure upon the senses which,