Education Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes doesn’t flatter science as a museum of truths; he defines it as a working map of cause and effect. In one clipped line, he strips “knowledge” of its cozy, contemplative reputation and replaces it with something sterner: consequences. Science, for Hobbes, isn’t what you admire, it’s what you can use to predict what happens next when you push on the world.

The subtext is unmistakably political. Writing in the shadow of civil war and sectarian violence, Hobbes was obsessed with the disasters produced by bad reasoning, wishful metaphysics, and theological certainty dressed up as public policy. If people could be taught to see how one fact depends on another, they might stop treating opinion as revelation and start treating society as a system with inputs and outputs. That’s the rhetorical gambit: redefine science not as elite curiosity, but as discipline - a method that exposes the chain reaction between belief and outcome.

It also smuggles in Hobbes’s broader program: replace arguments from “purpose” or “essence” with arguments from mechanism. “Dependence” hints at an almost engineering mindset, where explanation means tracing connections, not invoking hidden qualities. In an era when “natural philosophy” still mingled with alchemy and scholastic fog, Hobbes’s definition is polemical. He’s drawing a border around legitimate knowledge: if you can’t show the dependency, you don’t get to claim the authority.

The line lands because it’s austere and consequential in both senses - it makes science sound less like a badge and more like a responsibility.