---
title: "A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Modern Philosophy — The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume"
author: "Frederick Copleston"
year: 1959
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Copleston+History+of+Philosophy+British+Philosophers+Hobbes+to+Hume"
in_stock: false
related: ["copleston-history-philosophy-4", "copleston-history-philosophy-3", "descartes-meditations-philosophy", "damasio-descartes-error"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Volume V is the second part of Copleston's originally projected Descartes-to-Kant book: it carries no introductory chapter and no Concluding Review because both are shared across Volumes IV, V and VI — the introduction sits at the front of Volume IV and the Review closes Volume VI — so this volume is read as one panel of a single argument about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought."
  - "Its subject is British philosophy from Hobbes through the Scottish philosophy of common sense, and its spine is the empiricist principle traced through Locke, Berkeley and Hume: what the mind can claim to know is progressively narrowed as innate ideas, then material substance, then necessary causal connection and a stable self are each called to the bar of experience."
  - "Copleston frames Hobbes's materialism and mechanism at one end and the Scottish common-sense reply to Hume at the other, so the volume is not a flat survey but a movement from a confident science of bodies in motion to Hume's scepticism and the reaction it provoked."
references:
  - "Copleston, F. (1959). A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Modern Philosophy — The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Copleston, F. (1960). A History of Philosophy, Vol. IV: Modern Philosophy — From Descartes to Leibniz. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy."
glossary_terms:
  - "the empiricist principle"
  - "nominalism"
  - "primary and secondary qualities"
  - "esse is percipi"
  - "the association of ideas"
  - "personal identity"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Copleston follows the empiricist principle as it narrows what the mind may claim to know — Locke removing innate ideas, Berkeley dissolving material substance, Hume unsettling causality and the self. Read against this library's insistence on the reality of psyche, which of these subtractions cuts closest to inner life, and which merely clears away a false certainty?"
  - "Hume's analysis leaves personal identity a bundle of perceptions with no substantial self behind it, and the Scottish common-sense philosophers answer by appeal to what ordinary conviction cannot help but assume. Where does depth psychology's account of a self that is made rather than found stand between Hume's dissolution and Reid's restoration?"
  - "The volume opens with Hobbes excluding theology from philosophy and reducing mind to body in motion, and it moves through Berkeley's argument that to be is to be perceived. How do these two extremes — a fully material self and a fully mental world — frame the mind-body problem that the neuroscientific and Jungian shelves of this library each try to answer?"
seo_title: "Copleston's History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Hobbes to Hume | Seba"
seo_description: "On Copleston's fifth volume — the British philosophers from Hobbes to Hume: materialism, the empiricist principle, Locke and Berkeley, Hume's scepticism, and the Scottish common-sense reply."
---

**The Second Half of a Divided Plan**

The fifth volume should be read with its own preface in hand, because that preface tells the reader what kind of book it is not. Copleston had first intended to cover the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, up to and including Kant, in a single book; the material would not allow it, and he divided the matter into three, treating each as a separate volume while preserving the original plan in one respect. There is a common introductory chapter and a common Concluding Review for Volumes IV, V and VI. The introduction stands at the beginning of Volume IV, *Descartes to Leibniz*; the Concluding Review — where the nature, importance and value of the various styles of philosophizing are weighed both historically and philosophically — is reserved for the close of Volume VI. Volume V therefore opens without an introduction and ends without a review, since it is the second part of the originally projected fourth volume, *Descartes to Kant*. The reader is meant to feel the join: this is one panel of a larger argument, devoted to British philosophical thought from Hobbes up to and including the Scottish philosophy of common sense.

**Hobbes and the Materialist Opening**

The volume begins with Hobbes, and the opening chapters set a deliberately hard tone. Philosophy for Hobbes is the reasoned account of bodies and their causes, and it is defined so as to exclude all theology from its province; its divisions, its method, and its nominalism are laid out before the world is redescribed as matter in motion. Copleston follows the mechanist chain patiently — causality and mechanism, space and time, body and accidents, motion and change — down to the vital and animal motions from which Hobbes derives the passions, the will, and the account of good and evil, ending in what the volume names an atomic individualism. The second Hobbes chapter carries this individualism into politics: the natural state of war, the laws of nature, the generation of a commonwealth through covenant, the rights of the sovereign and the liberty of subjects. What the exposition establishes is the volume's lower boundary — a philosophy confident that a science of bodies can account for mind, society and value alike, against which everything that follows can be measured.

**Locke, Berkeley, Hume: The Empiricist Line**

The interpretive spine of the volume is the empiricist principle worked out across three philosophers, each narrowing what experience will underwrite. Locke, given four chapters, begins by attacking innate ideas and grounding all materials of knowledge in sensation and reflection; from there come simple and complex ideas, the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, the problematic notion of substance, and the separation of real from nominal essences, before the account of the degrees, extent and reality of knowledge and the treatment of reason and faith. Berkeley presses the principle further: starting from the theory of vision and the critique of abstract general ideas, he argues that the *esse* of sensible things is *percipi*, that sensible things are ideas, and that material substance is a meaningless term — leaving a world of finite spirits, the order of nature, and God. Hume then turns the same method on the mind itself. Impressions and ideas, the association of ideas, and above all the analysis of causality and the nature of belief dismantle the necessary connection Hobbes had assumed; the existence of bodies, personal identity and the existence of God are each left unsecured, and the outcome is scepticism.

**The Reaction and the Common-Sense Answer**

Copleston does not let the empiricist line stand alone. Around it he sets the figures who resisted its drift — earlier the Cambridge Platonists, with Lord Herbert of Cherbury's natural religion and Cumberland, holding for an intelligible moral order against Hobbes; later the students of religion and ethics who worked in Locke's wake, from Clarke, the deists and Butler to the moral-sense tradition of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Butler and the calculations of Mandeville, Hartley and Paley. Newton and Boyle mark the scientific setting in which these debates ran. The volume then closes on the direct reply to Hume in the chapter "For and Against Hume," where Adam Smith, Price, and the Scottish philosophers of common sense — Reid above all, with Campbell, Beattie, Stewart and Brown — answer scepticism not by refuting its logic but by insisting that ordinary conviction cannot coherently be surrendered. The book thus ends where its own preface said it must, at the threshold of the Concluding Review deferred to Volume VI.

Read as series architecture, Volume V is the panel in which the modern mind, having in Volume IV tried to found itself by reason, submits itself instead to experience and finds how little experience will certify. For this library the volume earns its place as the exact record of that narrowing: causality, the self, and the reality of an outer world — the very things depth psychology and neuroscience later work to recover — are here first shown to be claims that experience alone cannot underwrite.