129

MIND AND MOTION

[REDE LECTURE, 1885.]

The earliest writer who deserves to be called a psychologist is Hobbes;
and if we consider the time when he wrote, we cannot fail to be
surprised at what I may term his prevision of the most important results
which have now been established by science. He was the first clearly to
sound the note which has ever since constituted the bass, or fundamental
tone, of scientific thought. Let us listen to it through the clear
instrumentality of his own language:--

'All the qualities called sensible are, in the object which causeth
them, but so many motions of the matter by which it presseth on our
organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed are they anything
else but divers motions; for motion produceth nothing but
motion.... The cause of sense is the external body or object, which
presseth the organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in
taste and touch, or mediately, as in hearing, seeing, and smelling;
which pressure, by the mediation of the nerves, and other strings
and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the brain and
heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or
endeavour.... And because _going_, _speaking_, and the like
voluntary motions, depend always upon a precedent thought of
_whither_, _which way_, and _what_; it is evident that the
imagination [or idea] is the first internal beginning of all
voluntary motion. And although unstudied men do not conceive any
motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible; or
the space it is moved in is, for the shortness of it, insensible;
yet that doth not hinder, but that such motions are. These small
beginnings of motion, within the body of man, before they appear in
walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are
commonly called ENDEAVOUR[1].'

These quotations are sufficient to show that the system of Hobbes was
prophetic of a revelation afterwards declared by two centuries of
scientific research. For they show how plainly he taught that all our
knowledge of the external world is a knowledge of motion; and, again,
that all our acquisitions of knowledge and other acts of mind themselves
imply, as he elsewhere says, some kind of 'motion, agitation, or
alteration, which worketh in the brain.' That he conceived such motion,
agitation, or alteration