Material Memorials > Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in addition to its lasting fame as a work of political theory, provides a sophisticated articulation of mechanism, a popular position in the late seventeenth century that held that all elements of the universe were reducible to physical principles. In Leviathan, therefore, Hobbes explains memory not as the storage of sensory experience but as the “decay” of physical sensory impressions, reversing many previous theories of how memory functioned but retaining a material concept of recollection.