Note 281 — Chapter XX · (continued 3)

It may deserve to be remarked that Hobbes himself, nominalist as he was, did not limit reasoning to comparison of proposition, as some later writers have been inclined to do, and as in his objections to Descartes, he might seem to do himself. This may be inferred from the sentence quoted in the text, and more expressly, though not quite perspicuously, from a passage in the Computatio, sive Logica, his Latin treatise published after the Leviathan. Quomodo autem animo sine verbis tacita cogitatione ratiocinando addere et subtrahere solemus uno aut altero exemplo ostendendum est. Si quis ergo e longinquo aliquid obscurè videat, etsi nulla sint imposita vocabula, habet tamen ejus rei ideam eandem propter quam impositis nunc vocabulis dicit eam rem esse corpus. Postquam autem propius accesserit, videritque eandem rem certo quodam modo nunc uno, nunc alio in loco esse, habebit ejusdem ideam novam, propter quam nunc talem rem animatam vocat, &c., p. 2.