When Charles II, whom Hobbes had tutored, ascended the throne, the King granted a pension to his former teacher. Hobbes died in 1679, having lived beyond the age of ninety. The vigorous thought of Hobbes made a deep impression in his native country and abroad. The Leviathan is generally considered his masterpiece. The whole of human knowledge is contained within the limits of sensation.
Sensations are due to an external movement which generates an internal reaction in our organism.
The mind operates on such concepts through analysis and synthesis, composing and dividing them into their elements. This system is pure mechanical nominalism. Nevertheless, Hobbes does not deny the value of science, of knowledge of abstract causes. This science will be attained in fact as soon as we have an analytical knowledge of the elements and a synthetic understanding of their combinations. Thus Hobbes believed that he had saved science as an absolute value, even though such a value is only phenomenal, being an operation of the mind and not an objective contact with external reality.