Early Modern Texts - Square Bracket Examples

Rights (changed)

‘Just as it is self-contradictory to think of highlands in a world where there are no lowlands, so it is self- contradictory to think of God as not existing---that is, to think of a supremely perfect being as lacking a perfection, namely the perfection of existence.’ [What Descartes wrote is usually translated as ‘mountains in a world where there are no valleys’, but that is obviously not self-contradictory. The Latin provides no escape from this, but Descartes may have been thinking in French, in which vallée can mean ‘valley’ in our sense but can be used to refer to foothills, the lower slopes of a mountain, or the plain immediately surrounding the mountain. So ‘highlands’/‘lowlands’ has been adopted as a compromise: fairly close to what was presumably meant, without being too long-winded. ]

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But the philosophy schools through all the universities of the Christian world, on the basis of certain texts of Aristotle’s, teach a different doctrine. For the cause of vision they say that the thing that is seen sends out in all directions a visible species, and that seeing the object is receiving this visible species into the eye. (In English, a ‘visible species’ is a visible show, apparition, or aspect, or being-seen.) [Hobbes includes ‘being-seen’ on the strength of the fact that several dominant senses of the Latin species involve seeing. Other senses don’t, but Hobbes’s reason for his choice will appear in a moment.] And for the cause of hearing they say that the thing that is heard sends forth an audible species (that is, an audible aspect, or audible being-seen) which enters the ear and creates hearing. Indeed, for the cause of understanding they say that the thing that is understood sends out intelligible species, that is, an intelligible being-seen, which comes into the understanding and makes us understand! I don’t say this in criticism of universities; I shall come later to the topic of their role in a commonwealth. But on the way to that I must take every opportunity to let you see what things would be amended in them ·if they played their proper role properly·; and one of these is the frequency of meaningless speech.