Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes doesn’t romanticize religion; he anatomizes it. In a single chilly line, he reduces the sacred to a psychological reflex: fear aimed at what can’t be seen, measured, or controlled. The phrase “natural seed” is doing quiet but brutal work. It suggests religion isn’t divine revelation so much as an instinctive human growth, sprouting wherever uncertainty and vulnerability are watered. If you want gods, Hobbes implies, start with storms, sickness, death, and the mind’s compulsive need to assign agency to them.

The subtext is political as much as metaphysical. Writing in the long shadow of England’s civil wars, Hobbes treats “things invisible” as a volatile resource: invisible causes breed invisible authorities, and invisible authorities compete with the state. Fear becomes a technology that priests and factions can cultivate, turning private anxiety into public obedience or public revolt. That’s why he frames religion as something “everyone in himself calleth” it: the emphasis is on interior naming, not external truth. Religion is a label we attach to a felt condition.

The sentence’s archaic cadence also functions as rhetorical containment. Hobbes sounds almost scriptural while stripping scripture of its privileged status. He mimics the tone of holy language to smuggle in a secular diagnosis: the origin of religion is not God reaching down, but humans looking up and flinching. In Hobbes’s world, the point isn’t to sneer at belief; it’s to explain how fear becomes a competing sovereignty, and why a stable commonwealth must manage it.