 This account of the origin and nature of ideas shows Hobbes’ clear empiricist leanings; however, Hobbes does not hold that knowers should uncritically accept what the ideas of sense objects seem to represent. Like many other philosophers in the seventeenth century, Hobbes held that our knowledge of the external world was not direct but was instead mediated by ideas. This recognition that “we compute nothing but our phantasms or ideas” (Hobbes 1642–43 [1973: 450]; cf. OL  I.82)[3]  resulted in two worries about human knowledge.