Machiavelli’s early iteration of a break from traditional purpose found its first open embrace in Hobbes. Hobbes applied the standards of rigorous logic to religious revelation itself—and found revelation wanting. “To say [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belief from any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and may proceed from former thoughts,” Hobbes wrote. “If one Prophet deceive another, what certainty is there of knowing the will of God, by other way than that of Reason?”3
