ABSTRACT
The present essay belongs to a mixed genre, since it mingles matters of traditional ethics, political history and literature, while in turn this mixture is intended to provide a place especially for the cardinal question for modern science, a discipline determining the shape of the modern world, namely the problem of describing motion. This ultimate scientific concern is so broad in its application that virtually no sphere of human life or thought escapes its influence. Furthermore, our modern world depends historically for its exacting pragmatic experimentalism, leading to a materialist ethics, upon revolutionary changes in the science of motion that effectively began in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.1 Much has recently been made of a material use of mechanical devices like clocks, pumps, thermometers and telescopes in these developments, but all such devices depend upon their deep relation to movement, which remains conceptually fundamental. Nor does this founding statement apply merely to Hobbesian thought; it has general force in all the major modern philosophic systems. If these claims are just, there is no way to avoid mixing science and ethics, or literature and ethics, as soon as we cast a philosophical eye upon the omnipresence of movement in human life, including the twists and turns of thought itself.
