ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes attributes an unintelligible inclination to move to the object of sensation: Pierre Gassendi and Digby, he adds, merely restate the Epicurean opinion, quite different from his own. In the anthropological treatise in the first part of The Elements of Law, sense cognition and the cognitive processes that derive from sensation are not distinct faculties, but only distinct acts of the mind’s faculty of cognition. The methodological imperative of clarifying the meaning of the word “conception” before clarifying the way conceptions are produced has a major “anti-Cartesian” effect. In his replies to the Objectiones tertiae, Descartes does not wonder what might be Hobbes’s own doctrine on ideas as images. From The Elements of Law onward, Thomas Hobbes’s basic thesis concerning cognitive acts is that their subject of inherence is “the sentient.” Hobbes’s constant thesis that sense cognition encompasses all that is necessary for grounding the discursive status of the prelinguistic mind finds there its complete demonstration.
