ABSTRACT
In 1647 the much-maligned English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, had a protracted illness, which he afterwards described briefly in a letter and from which description the people may identify four stages. First, there was a painful and continuing fever, during which period Hobbes was delirious. Next, as the fever waned, abscesses broke out, so that he was confined to bed for four more weeks. Then, after the abscesses healed, he suffered excruciating pain, which he attributed to sciatica. And finally, there was apparent recovery, for as the pain became milder, the will to live reasserted itself. In Aristotle’s biomechanics, there are three classes of animal movement—voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary, the last being partly in our power, as when the people decide to hold a breath for a short period of time. Endeavour, therefore, is a condition of physiological equilibrium that, for Hobbes, is always associated with the presence of life.
