Metaphysical judgments operate tacitly within political and scientific discourse: not as a “system” from which political conclusions are explicitly deduced but as something logically entailed in the basic elements of the discourse itself, and often unarticulated.

Here we take up the relation between Hobbes and Locke that forms the central question of Reilly’s pivotal eighth chapter.

Reilly’s argument rests upon a questionable methodology and upon ignoring the profound transformations to the meaning of “nature,” “reason,” “God,” and “Christianity” in early modern mechanistic philosophy.