Chapter XII: Part II: The Ethical Systems (5)

After mentioning the forms of speech where the several passions and appetites are naturally expressed, and remarking that the truest signs of passion are in the countenance, motions of the body, actions, and ends or aims otherwise known to belong to a man,--he returns to the question of good and evil. It is _apparent_ good and evil, come at by the best possible foresight of all the consequences of action, that excite the appetites and aversions in deliberation. _Felicity_ he defines continual success in obtaining the things from time to time desired; perpetual tranquillity of mind being impossible in this life, which is but motion, and cannot be without desire and fear any more than without sense. The happiness of the future life is at present unknown.

Men, he says at the close, _praise_ the goodness, and _magnify_ the greatness, of a thing; the Greeks had also the word [Greek: makarismos], to express an opinion of a man's felicity.

In Chapter VII., Of the Ends of Discourse, he is led to remark on the meaning of _Conscience_, in connection-with the word _Conscious_. Two or more men, he says, are conscious of a thing when they know it together (_con-scire_.) Hence arises the proper meaning of conscience; and the evil of speaking against one's conscience, in this sense, is to be allowed. Two other meanings are metaphorical: when it is put for a man's knowledge of his own secret facts and thoughts; and when men give their own new opinions, however absurd, the reverenced name of conscience, as if they would have it seem unlawful to change or speak against them. [Hobbes is not concerned to foster the moral independence of individuals.]

He begins Chapter VIII. by defining Virtue as something that is valued for eminence, and that consists in comparison, but proceeds to consider only the intellectual virtues--all that is summed up in the term of a _good wit_--and their opposites. Farther on, he refers difference of wits--discretion, prudence, craft, &c.--to difference in the passions, and this to difference in constitution of body and of education. The passions chiefly concerned are the desires of power, riches, knowledge, honour, but all may be reduced to the single desire of power.

In Chapter IX. is given his Scheme of Sciences. The relation in his mind between Ethics and Politics is here seen. Science or Philosophy is divided into Natural or Civil, according as it is knowledge of consequences from the accidents of natural bodies or of politic bodies. Ethics is one of the ultimate divisions of Natural Philosophy, dealing with consequences from the _passions_ of men; and because the passions are _qualities_ of bodies, it falls more immediately under the head of Physics. Politics is the whole of the second main division, and deals with consequences from the institution of commonwealths (1) to the rights and duties of the Sovereign, and (2) to the duty and right of the Subject.

Ethics, accordingly, in Hobbes's eyes, is part of the science of man (as a natural body), and it is always treated as such. But subjecting, as he does, so much of the action of the individual to the action of the state, he necessarily includes in his Politics many questions that usually fall to Ethics. Hence arises the necessity of studying for his Ethics also part of the civil Philosophy; though it happens that, in the Leviathan, this requisite part is incorporated with the Section containing the Science of Man.