Why do human beings believe something they have never seen or directly experienced? We often say that we know something, that in our judgement something is true, or that we believe something and have faith in it, without considering whether these expressions describe the same thing. They do not. While reading Chapter 7 of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Of the Ends, or Resolutions of Discourse, I found that Hobbes provides an interesting sequence through which we can understand how the mind travels from opinion and doubt towards judgement, knowledge, belief and ultimately faith. What interested me most was where this sequence eventually leads: if we have neither seen God nor received a direct revelation ourselves, why do we nevertheless believe what a prophet tells us and continue to have faith in it?
Hobbes begins from the simple proposition that discourse driven by a desire for knowledge must eventually come to an end. We either attain what we are seeking or abandon the enquiry. To explain how such a resolution occurs, he refers back to the concept of will, which he established in Chapter 6. When we deliberate about an action, different appetites may pull us in different directions, but eventually one becomes the final appetite and determines what we do. Hobbes calls this the will. In Chapter 7, he uses this as a comparison for intellectual enquiry: just as the last appetite resolves deliberation and becomes will, the last opinion in our search for truth resolves that enquiry and becomes judgement.
Consider how this happens in ordinary life. We are trying to determine whether something happened in the past, or whether something will happen in the future. One possibility occurs to us, then another appears more convincing, perhaps new information changes our view, and then we reconsider again. Hobbes calls these opinions. While these different opinions continue to alternate over what is true or false, we are in a state of doubt. When that alternation finally ends, the last opinion becomes our judgement. Judgement therefore does not necessarily mean that we have discovered an absolute truth. It means that our intellectual enquiry has reached its present resolution.
This distinction matters because we often confuse reaching a conclusion with acquiring knowledge. Hobbes does not allow us to make that jump so easily. He argues that no discourse can by itself give us absolute knowledge that something is, has been, or will be. Knowledge of fact originates in sense. If I see something happen, my knowledge of that event originates in my sensory experience. After the event has passed, that knowledge remains through memory. Sense and memory therefore have a different foundation from judgement. I may judge that something happened after considering different possibilities, but that is not identical to having witnessed it and remembering what I witnessed.
Reasoning gives us another form of knowledge, which Hobbes calls science. His use of the word can initially be confusing because today we naturally associate science with observation, experimentation and laboratories. Hobbes is describing science here as the knowledge of consequences. Reason establishes that if something is so, then something else follows from it. Its knowledge is therefore conditional. Through discourse alone I cannot necessarily establish that an event actually occurred, but I can establish that if a particular proposition is true, another proposition necessarily follows from it.
This is why Hobbes gives such importance to words. Scientific reasoning must begin with properly defined names. Those names are connected into propositions or general affirmations, the propositions are connected through syllogisms, and from those syllogisms we reach conclusions. His sequence can therefore be understood as definitions of names, propositions, syllogisms, conclusions and finally science. Science is not simply the possession of a conclusion. It depends upon whether the chain that produced that conclusion has been properly constructed.
This also explains why Hobbes returns to opinion. If the words from which our reasoning begins are not properly defined, or if those words and propositions are improperly connected, reaching a conclusion does not transform the argument into science. The conclusion remains opinion. In extreme cases, Hobbes says, we may even reason with absurd or senseless words that cannot properly be understood. This is a powerful observation because a conclusion can sound convincing while resting upon confused definitions or faulty connections. We may therefore feel certain while possessing no more than an opinion.
Opinion consequently appears in two related ways in the chapter. During an enquiry into truth, different opinions alternate and produce doubt until the final opinion becomes judgement. But when discourse itself lacks the proper definitions and connections necessary for science, its conclusion also remains opinion. Hobbes is therefore making us pay attention not merely to the confidence with which somebody states a conclusion, but to the route by which that conclusion was reached. A strongly held conclusion is not necessarily knowledge.
This is perhaps even more relevant today than it was in Hobbes’s time. We constantly receive conclusions before we encounter the reasoning behind them. News reports, social media, public arguments, advertising, experts and ordinary conversations tell us not only what happened but what it means. If we begin with the conclusion and never examine the definitions, assumptions and connections underneath it, opinion can easily present itself as knowledge. This may also help explain how deception becomes possible: the human mind can be persuaded by the appearance of a coherent conclusion without examining whether the reasoning beneath it deserves our confidence.
Hobbes then turns to conscience, which at first appears to be a change of subject but actually continues his enquiry into the foundations of what we claim to know. He explains that when two or more people know the same fact, they are conscious of it together. Because they share knowledge of the fact, they can act as witnesses. Speaking against one’s conscience therefore originally meant speaking against something one knew as a witness. Later, the meaning became metaphorical and private, referring to our knowledge of our own secret actions and thoughts. This is why Hobbes can say rhetorically that “conscience is a thousand witnesses”: even if nobody else knows what I have done, I remain a witness to myself.
From conscience, Hobbes moves into what I find the most fascinating part of the chapter: belief and faith. There are countless things that we accept as true even though we have neither experienced them directly nor personally demonstrated them through a chain of reasoning. Someone else tells us. If we believe that this person has the ability to know the truth and we trust that they are not deliberately deceiving us, we may accept what they say. At this point, Hobbes observes, our discourse is no longer principally about the thing itself; it is also about the person whose testimony we have decided to trust.
This gives belief a different foundation from direct knowledge. If I witnessed an event, my knowledge begins in sense. If I reason correctly from definitions to consequences, Hobbes calls the result science. But if you witnessed an event and tell me about it, and I accept your account because I trust you, my acceptance depends upon you. This does not mean that what you tell me is false. You may be entirely truthful. The important distinction is that I do not possess your original experience. What I possess is confidence in your testimony about that experience. Hobbes calls the resolution of this kind of discourse belief or faith.
He then makes an even more subtle distinction between believing someone and believing in someone. To believe someone is to accept what they tell us as true. To believe in someone goes further, involving acknowledgement of the doctrine or authority communicated through that person. We have therefore moved some distance from the beginning of the chapter. We began with our own opinions and doubts, then considered judgement, sense, memory and reasoning, but now we are examining truths that reach us through other human beings.
This is where Hobbes brings in Scripture, prophets and the Church, and where the chapter becomes particularly thought-provoking. If I have received no immediate revelation from God myself, then my belief that Scripture is the word of God cannot originate in my own direct experience of that revelation. Someone else stands between the claimed revelation and me. According to Hobbes, our belief, faith and trust in such circumstances therefore involve the Church whose word we accept and in whose teaching we acquiesce.
The prophet presents the same problem even more clearly. Suppose a prophet tells me that God has spoken to him. The prophet may have experienced what he describes, but I did not experience it. I did not hear God speak to him, nor did I receive his revelation. What I directly encounter is a human being telling me that he has received a message from God. If I believe his account, my immediate act is therefore an act of trust in the prophet. Hobbes points out that the structure remains the same whether the prophet ultimately proves true or false: from my position as the listener, I am accepting testimony concerning an experience that is not my own.
This raises a much larger question about why religious faith can survive without direct evidence of the kind we ordinarily associate with sense. Perhaps the answer, at least within the structure Hobbes gives us, is that faith does not begin from the same place as sensory knowledge. We do not necessarily believe because we have personally seen the original event. We believe because testimony is transmitted from one person to another, and somewhere along that chain we place our trust in the person, text, tradition or institution carrying it. The claimed revelation may begin with the prophet, pass into Scripture or doctrine, be preserved by a religious community, and eventually reach someone living centuries later who regards it as true.
There is nothing uniquely religious about this human dependence upon testimony. Most of what any of us accepts about history occurred before we were born. We believe descriptions of places we have never visited and events we never witnessed. We depend upon scientists, doctors, historians, teachers, lawyers and countless other people for information that we cannot personally verify from beginning to end. Human civilisation would become almost impossible if every individual accepted only what he or she had personally witnessed. Trust is therefore not necessarily a weakness in human reasoning; it is also one of the mechanisms through which knowledge can travel beyond the limits of individual experience.
Yet the same mechanism creates vulnerability. If truth can travel through testimony, so can error. If trust allows one generation to inherit knowledge from another, it can also allow misunderstanding, exaggeration and deception to survive. The difficult question is therefore not whether we should ever trust another person. We inevitably do. The more difficult question is why we trust particular people and institutions, and whether we recognise when our claim to knowledge actually depends upon that trust.
This, for me, is what makes Chapter 7 much more interesting than its title initially suggests. Hobbes takes us through a sequence of human understanding. We form opinions; competing opinions create doubt; the final opinion becomes judgement. Facts originate in sense and survive through memory. Proper definitions and connections can produce science, while defective reasoning leaves us with opinion. Conscience concerns what we know as witnesses. Beyond all of these lies another enormous part of human understanding: things we accept because somebody else tells us, which takes us into belief and faith.
By the time Hobbes reaches the prophet, the question at the beginning of the chapter has quietly changed. We are no longer simply asking whether something is true or false. We are asking what happens when the truth being claimed lies beyond our own experience. If I did not see God, did not hear the revelation and cannot reproduce the original experience for myself, why do I nevertheless believe that what the prophet said was true and continue to keep faith in it?
Hobbes does not make that question disappear. Instead, he helps us see the human structure underneath it. Between what we personally know and what we ultimately believe lies something extraordinarily powerful: our capacity to trust the word of another human being. Perhaps the most enduring question raised by Chapter 7 is therefore not simply why we believe, but whom we trust when we cannot know for ourselves, and why we trust them enough to turn their testimony into our faith.
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