De Homine: Of Man (English excerpts and translations)

Overview

Thomas Hobbes offers a tightly argued account of human beings as part of a mechanistic natural order. He treats mental life as motion within the body, insisting that perception, thought, memory, and language are physical processes governed by the same causal principles that operate in the material world. English excerpts and translations made these skeptical, physiological, and nominalist ideas available to a wider audience, framing moral and political questions against a backdrop of bodily passions and pragmatic speech.
The exposition moves from the simplest facts of sensation to the complexities of speech and social behavior, showing how personal appetites and aversions shape belief and action. By tracing the continuity between external motions, inner motions, and articulated signs, Hobbes reduces psychology and semantics to a unified natural philosophy that aims to explain why people misperceive, disagree, and compete.

Human Nature and Mind

Human beings are conceived as bodies in motion whose internal states mirror external impacts. Sensation arises when external bodies move the sensory organs; imagination is a faded form of sensation; memory is imagination retained over time. Reason emerges not as a mystical faculty but as the operation of comparing, composing, and naming ideas, procedures driven by appetite and fear rather than autonomous insight.
Passions are central explanatory tools: desires, aversions, hope, and despair orient action and determine the direction of thought. Will is defined as the final appetite that precedes action, and liberty is understood as the absence of external impediment to motion. Moral judgments are thus grounded in human tendencies and conventions rather than in divine commands or immutable moral essences.

Perception, Language, and Signs

Perception is treated as a chain of motions, and language functions as the public counterpart of private motions. Words are signs that stand for internal representations; naming is the social technique that stabilizes thought and enables cooperative action. Hobbes is acutely concerned with how ambiguity, equivocation, and rhetorical manipulation distort reason and provoke conflict.
Abstract notions receive particular scrutiny: general words do not correspond to universal essences but to names applied to similar experiences or constructed by custom. Logical and linguistic clarity are presented as tools for civil peace, because many disputes arise from muddled language rather than substantive difference. Grammar and definition are therefore practical instruments for reducing confusion and organizing common life.

Political Implications and Legacy

Human psychology and semantics feed directly into Hobbes's political conclusions. If humans are driven by self-regard and fearful of violent death, then social order depends on institutions that channel appetites and regulate language about rights and obligations. Clear, enforceable agreements and a visible authority become necessary to prevent the escalation of mistrust that words and passions can inflame.
The English renditions of these passages helped disseminate a materialist and linguistic groundwork for modern political and cognitive theory. By making perception, emotion, and sign-use the explanatory core of social behavior, Hobbes influenced later empiricists, theorists of language, and political philosophers who wrestled with how private sensations can be translated into public law and consent.