 However, immediately following these statements that seem to indicate that Hobbes took his philosophy to be tightly knit together, he argued that “civil and moral philosophy do not so adhere to one another, but that they may be severed” (EW I.73). This separation is permissible, Hobbes claimed, because in addition to learning moral philosophy from first principles each individual could simply study the motions of their own mind and gain knowledge of the same principles. That such separation could occur is difficult to explain for a strong version of the unified view because it makes it appear that Hobbes thought that one could develop civil philosophy simply by introspecting, entirely independently of any work in moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and first philosophy.