Təbii hüquq və Siyasətin əsas elementləri-Thomas Hobbes
Part I
Human Nature
Chapter 1
The General Division of Man's Natural Faculties
1. The true and perspicuous explication of the Elements of
Laws, Natural and Politic, which is my present scope, dependeth
upon the knowledge of what is human nature, what is a body
politic, and what it is we call a law. Concerning which points,
as the writings of men from antiquity downward have still
increased, so also have the doubts and controversies concerning
the same, and seeing that true knowledge begetteth not doubt, nor
controversy, but knowledge; it is manifest from the present
controversies, that they which have heretofore written thereof,
have not well understood their own subject.
2. Harm I can do none though I err no less than they. For I
shall leave men but as they are in doubt and dispute. But
intending not to take any principle upon trust, but only to put
men in mind what they know already, or may know by their own
experience, I hope to err the less; and when I do, it must
proceed from too hasty concluding, which I will endeavour as much
as I can to avoid.
3. On the other side, if reasoning aright I win not consent
(which may very easily happen) from them that being confident of
their own knowledge weigh not what is said, the fault is not mine
but theirs. For as it is my part to show my reasons, so it is
theirs to bring attention.
4. Man's nature is the sum of his natural faculties and
powers, as the faculties of nutrition, motion, generation, sense,
reason, &c. For these powers we do unanimously call natural, and
are contained in the definition of man, under these words, animal
and rational.
5. According to the two principal parts of man, I divide his
faculties into two sorts, faculties of the body, and faculties of
the mind.
6. Since the minute and distinct anatomy of the powers of the
body is nothing necessary to the present purpose, I will only sum
them up into these three heads, power nutritive, power motive,
and power generative.
7. Of the powers of the mind there be two sorts, cognitive or
imaginative or conceptive; and motive. And first of the
cognitive.
8. For the understanding of what I mean by the power
cognitive, we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our
minds continually certain images or conceptions of the things
without us, insomuch that if a man could be alive, and all the
rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless retain the
image thereof, and of all those things which he had before seen
and perceived in it; every man by his own experience knowing that
the absence or destruction of things once imagined, doth not
cause the absence or destruction of the imagination itself. This
imagery and representations of the qualities of things without us
is that we call our cognition, imagination, ideas, notice,
conception, or knowledge of them. And the faculty, or power, by
which we are capable of such knowledge, is that I here call power
cognitive, or conceptive, the power of knowing or conceiving.
