Coincidence

A couple of weeks back, I blogged vaguely about my onetime philosophical commitment to science and hierarchical reductionism: "if I could only analyse everything by breaking it down into ever-smaller pieces, I could understand everything."

I'm currently reading critical mass by Philip Ball. It's about -- I think -- the emergent properties of society based on millions of individual actions (econophysics). In the early chapters, he talks a lot about Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and his attempts to deduce the 'best kind of society', based on logical/scientific propositions about human nature. In this section, he cites something Hobbes wrote in his De cive ('On the citizen'):

For everything is best understood by its constitutive causes. For as in a watch, or in some other small engine, the matter, figure and motion of the wheels cannot well be known except it be taken asunder and viewed in parts

Me and Thomas Hobbes, of a single mind, though 300 years apart. Who'd have thought it, eh? Maybe a career as an unpopular political philosopher is calling to me through the ether?