His concern for definition is an expression of the analytic or inductive moment of his system whereby he tries to arrive at first principles. The subsequent moment of synthesis or deduction is an effort to derive the possible effects of those first principles. Among English philosophers he is one of the few who have tried to create systems. But it is also important to emphasize the fact that he was not a fanatical worshipper of pure deduction. Hobbes' inclination toward nominalism stems from his tendency to identify the conceivable with the imaginable .
Universality belongs to names only.
And their referent is not so much individual things as individual conceptions. And then we are confronted with a divorce between scientific propositions and reality. There is no guarantee that scientific propositions are applicable to reality. If this is the case, as it may be, reasoning will depend on names, names on the imagination, and the imagination perhaps, as I think, on the motion of the bodily organs. On the other hand, this statement can be countered with others in which a relation between our terms and reality is suggested.