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eight months. This third visit was one of exceptional interest to him. In Italy he became intimately acquainted with the renowned Galileo. There also he met Beregardus. In such company his interest in physical science was greatly quickened and his knowledge of recent scientific discoveries and investigations greatly enlarged. After returning to Paris, through the kind offices of Père Marsenne, he was admitted to a circle of scientific men. To fully appreciate the effect of association with these men of science on Hobbes's future thinking, we must take into consideration the nature of the new philosophy which was being promulgated at that time. Galileo had discovered the laws of motion and had announced all physical phenomena to be explainable on the basis of moving matter and its laws. This explanation had been quite generally accepted by scientific men. It resulted in the mechanical conception of nature which not only dominated the physical science of the time but also greatly influenced the philosophy of nature of the leading continental philosophers of the seventeenth century. This view of nature greatly interested Hobbes, and it was not long before, in his own mind, he was applying the principles of the mechanical philosophy to other phenomena than those of nature. He soon beheld all phenomena, physical, mental, and social, comprehended in one general system and explainable on the basis of motion and its laws. As Falckenberg says with reference to Hobbes's philosophy: "Mechanism applied to the world gives materialism; applied to knowledge, sensationalism of a mathematical type applied to the will, determinism; to morality and the state, ethical and political naturalism."[1]
In 1637 he returned to England. He found his native country becoming more and more involved in political and ecclesiastical strife. The estrangement between the king and Parliament was becoming more decided; the controver-
- ↑ History of Modern Philosophy, trans., p. 72.