Thomas Hobbes

“ That is to say, we cannot from experience conclude, that any thing is to be called just or unjust, true or false, nor any proposition universal whatsoever, except it be from remembrance of the use of names imposed arbitrarily by men. ”

“ For, being older, they remember more; and experience is but remembrance. And men of quick imagination, caeteris paribus, are more prudent than those whose imaginations are slow: for they observe more in less time. And PRUDENCE is nothing else but conjecture from experience, or taking signs of experience warily, that is, that the experiments from which one taketh such signs be all remembered ”

“ This taking of signs from experience, is that wherein men do ordinarily think, the difference stands between man and man in wisdom, by which they commonly understand a man's whole ability or power cognitive. ”

“ As for example: because a man hath often seen offences followed by punishment, when he seeth an offence in present, he thinketh punishment to be consequent thereto. But consequent unto that which is present, men call future. And thus we make remembrance to be prevision or conjecture of things to come, or EXPECTATION or PRESUMPTION of the future. ”

“ Another sort of discursion is, when the appetite giveth a man his beginning, as in the example before adduced: where honour, to which a man hath appetite, maketh him to think upon the next means of attaining it, and that again of the next, &c. ”

“ As first in the senses: there are certain coherences of conceptions, which we may call RANGING. Examples whereof are: a man's casting his eye upon the ground, to look about for some small thing lost; the hounds casting about at a fault in hunting ”

“ There is yet another kind of discursion beginning with appetite to recover something lost, proceeding from the present backward, from the thought of the place where we miss it, to the thought of the place from whence we came last ”

“ The cause whereof is the appetite of them, who, having a conception of the end, have next unto it a conception of the next means to that end. As when a man, from the thought of honour to which he hath an appetite, cometh to the thought of wisdom, which is the next means thereto ”