ABSTRACT
Science is supposed to improve the lot of human beings, but only within limits. It gives people power over nature they do not natively have, but not power over nature comparable with God's. It gives people resources to counteract some of the ill effects of competition in conditions of scarcity, but not the power to rid their lives of all incommodities. Still, the power science delivers is not negligible: what makes that power available to creatures with as modest a natural endowment as human beings? Hobbes's answer is all to do with additions to that endowment, i.e., with the acquisition of capacities for naming, affirming and reasoning.
