Human and animal cognition in early modern philosophy and medicine

HUMAN & ANIMAL COGNITION in Early Modern Philosophy &

Medicine

HUMAN & ANIMAL Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy &

Medicine

Edited by Stefanie Buchenau & Roberto Lo Presti

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2017, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4472-0 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4472-3 Jacket art: Drawing that compares the skeleton of a human and a bird in Pierre Belon’s L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, first published in 1555. Jacket design by Alex Wolfe

Contents



Preface

Introduction Stefanie Buchenau & Roberto Lo Presti

ix 1

PART I. SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ARISTOTELIAN ANTHROPOLOGY BETWEEN

ZOOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, & EMBRYOLOGY

1. Renaissance Aristotelianism & the Birth of Anthropology Simone De Angelis 2. (Dis)embodied Thinking & the Scale of Beings: Pietro Pomponazzi & Agostino Nifo on the “Psychic” Processes in Men & Animals Roberto Lo Presti

17

37

3. For Christ’s Sake: Pious Notions of the Human & Animal Body in Early Jesuit Philosophy & Theology Christoph Sander

55

4. Renaissance Psychology: Franciscus Vallesius (1524–1592) & Otto Casmann (1562–1607) on Animal & Human Souls Davide Cellamare

74

5. Human & Animal Generation in Renaissance Medical Debates Hiro Hirai

89

6. “Rational Surgery” by Building on Tradition: Ambroise Paré’s Conception of “Medical” Knowledge of the Human Body Marie Gaille

99

v

vi | CONTENTS PART II. HUMANS, ANIMALS, & THE RISE OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY

7. Diseases of the Brain Seen through Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s Eyes Domenico Bertoloni Meli

113

8. Between Language, Music, & Sound: Birdsong as a Philosophical Problem from Aristotle to Kant Justin E. H. Smith

127

9. Boundary Crossings: The Blurring of the Human/Animal Divide as Naturalization of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy Charles T. Wolfe 10. How Animals May Help Us Understand Men: Thomas Willis’s Anatomy of the Brain (1664) & Two Discourses Concerning the Soules of Brutes (1672) Claire Crignon 11. Political Animals in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: Some Rival Paradigms (Hobbes and Gassendi) Gianni Paganini

147

173

186

PART III. E IGHTEENTH-CENTURY INQUIRIES INTO THE NATURE OF SENSIBILITY

12. Degrees & Forms of Sensibility in Haller’s Physiology François Duchesneau 13. Anthropological Medicine & the Naturalization of Sensibility Stephen Gaukroger 14. Cabanis & the Order of Interaction Tobias Cheung 15. Self-Feeling: Aristotelian Patterns in Platner’s Anthropolog y for Physicians and Philosophers (1772) Stefanie Buchenau

201

221

236

246

CONTENTS | vii

Notes

259



Bibliography

317



Contributors

343



Index

347

Preface

The idea for this book originated at a conference held at the Humboldt University in Berlin in September 2012 within the framework of scholarly collaboration between two research programs: the German Alexander von Humboldt Forschungsprogramm “Medicine of the Mind, Philosophy of the Body” (2010–2015), and the French ANR-Philomed Project “La refonte de l’homme: découvertes médicales et philosophie de la nature humaine, XVII–XVIII siècles” (2009–2013). These two programs shared an interest in the medical and philosophical discourse on human nature, in the relationship between mind and body, and in the notion of health and disease. Both programs investigated the reception and the transformation of medical ideas in broad intellectual and social contexts, and both adopted a variety of different approaches: philosophical, philological, historical, and epistemological. The chronological focus of the Alexander von Humboldt research program was on antiquity and the reception of ancient ideas in the early modern period; the PHILOMED Project was centered on the early modern period. These two perspectives proved to be complementary, opening up a broader chronological perspective on this key issue of Western thought. This book would have never seen the light of the day without the invaluable help and assistance of John Noël Dillon, who provided excellent linguistic guidance for the entire volume, and Evangelia Nikoloudakis, who helped us throughout the editing process. We would also like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche for their generous support. Special thanks are due to Philip van der Eijk and Jim Lennox for their encouragement and support and to the colleagues who took part in the conference but whose papers could not be included in this volume for a variety of reasons: Peter Distelzweig, Nunzio Allocca, and Stefano Perfetti. We also would like to thank the University of Pittsburgh Press and especially Abby Collier and Alex Wolfe for their helpful and patient assistance in preparing the volume for print.

ix

Introduction Stefanie Buchenau & Roberto Lo Presti

This volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates about human and animal cognition in the early modern age. At first sight, early modern dualism seems to imply the dismissal of most of the earlier medical and philosophical research perspectives on human cognition. If thought and cognition need to be viewed as properties characterizing those substances that are not part of the physical world, as the Cartesians assert, then it is necessary to establish a radical dichotomy between the mind and the body and between humans and animals; the view that considers mental functions as depending on and, possibly, developing from physical functions, seems to set out from the wrong premise. However, a closer glance reveals that this perspective on the modern age is somehow distorted. It is clear that the moderns never ceased to approach cognition—the brain and its functions—from both a medical and a philosophical perspective. They never lost interest in the anatomical structures and the physiological conditions underlying the rise, differentiation, and articulation of human and animal forms of cognition. On the contrary, they expanded the earlier practice of comparative anatomy and physiology to give it a new experimental and scientific basis, and they deepened their investigations of the human brain and the nervous system. Doing so, they drew on traditions from both antiquity and the Renaissance more than 1

2 | STEFANIE BUCHENAU & ROBERTO LO PRESTI any other branch of science. Their field of inquiry had been largely established by Aristotle, whose zoological and psychological works attest to his intention to create a comprehensive “scientific” discourse on the soul as the informing principle of animal life. Aristotle structured this discourse in several different ways: in De anima, as a purely theoretical investigation into the nature and the properties of the soul; in the Parva naturalia, as an account of the affections and activities common to the soul and body (perception, sleep and wakefulness, dreams, memory, life and death, respiration, etc.) based on the complex interplay of theoretical principles and empirical observations; in the Historia animalium, as a descriptive account of the bodily and behavioral features of different animal species; and in De partibus animalium, as a systematic functional account of the structures of animal species. All of these works continue to be read in the modern age; and the Aristotelian soul or principle of animation and its functions remain a continuous object of meditation, even among the most fervent Cartesians. The aim of this book is to provide fresh insights into these developments, and into the theories of human and animal cognition in early modern western Europe, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Against a prevailing tendency in current scholarship, the book looks at medical and philosophical theories as expressions and interacting factors of a coherent, although complex and multifaceted, research agenda. In our view, the interplay between medicine and philosophy throughout early modern Europe is so constant, strong, and fertile that it seems impossible to fully grasp the intellectual content and the conceptual structure of a theory or a work by considering it as “merely” philosophical or “merely” medical without looking at how “medical” materials may have been embedded or echoed in “philosophical” speculations and vice versa. In the past few years this larger approach has informed a number of works focusing, respectively, on (1) the interplay and dialogue between philosophy and medicine,1 (2) the rise and constitution of a form of knowledge defined by some scholars as early modern “anthropology” or “philosophical anthropology,” where philosophical, medical, theological, ethical, and juridical issues are deeply intertwined;2 (3) the early modern (re)thinking of “nature,” and more specifically of “human nature” as a conceptual space shaped by the tension between the universal and the particular;3 (4) early modern attempts to set, but also to cross, the boundaries between the categories of “human,” “animal,” and “artificial.”4 Most of the available studies, however, still attest to a tradition treating

INTRODUCTION | 3 medicine, philosophy, and science as quite distinct and distant forms of knowledge; they view history of medicine, history of philosophy, and history of science as separate research fields having different objects and adopting different methods of investigation. The underestimation of the interplay between early modern medical and philosophical discourse on human and animal cognition proves to be evident when one considers, for example, some of the most significant pieces of scholarship published in the past few years on Aristotelian psychology. The otherwise excellent book by Sascha Salatowsky on the early modern commentary tradition on Aristotle’s De anima as well as Dennis Des Chene’s study on the late Aristotelians’ conceptions of the soul do not tackle momentous issues such as those concerning, respectively, the influence exerted by Galen’s “materialistic” psychology on early modern Aristotelians, many of whom had received a medical education and/or even held chairs of medicine, and the fact that psychology gradually turned into an “anatomy of the soul” based on and in some cases even incorporated into an anatomy of the brain.5 It is therefore not surprising that such works fail to fully acknowledge that medical studies were thoroughly integrated within natural philosophy in antiquity and the early modern age.6 In fact, this wide philosophical and medical perspective is what shaped modern views on the soul, on moral psychology, on first philosophy, ethics, and theory of knowledge. In order to challenge those disciplinary approaches and reconstruct the debate between natural philosophy and medicine in the early modern age it therefore seems necessary to cross the boundaries between disciplines and make different perspectives interact. This is one aim of our book: to bring together contributors from various disciplinary backgrounds and areas of expertise (history of modern philosophy, epistemology, ancient philosophy, history of medicine, history and philosophy of biology, history of the classical tradition), who all share an interest in intellectual history and whose research is very much concerned with processes of formation, aggregation, and transformation of ideas as well as patterns of thought. A second aim of the book is to overcome a tendency toward an “atomization” of the early modern age that has resulted from a need for specialization and that postulates a sharp distinction between Renaissance studies, studies on the age of the Scientific Revolution, and eighteenth-century studies. It considers a time frame that somehow escapes current patterns of periodization and suggests the existence of a fil rouge extending from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century and of a continuous and creative reception of Scholasticism up to the Enlightenment, which despite its

4 | STEFANIE BUCHENAU & ROBERTO LO PRESTI obvious dismissal of its hylomorphic premises, remains deeply embedded within the older tradition. The earlier, more atomistic view has, of course, helped to bring out the discontinuities in the history of early modern philosophical and scientific thought, but in many cases it has also overshadowed the continuities, leading to overlooking the longue durée processes of assimilation, adaptation, and hybridization of ancient traditions as a constitutive aspect of early modern investigations into human nature. While the arrangement of the chapters in three parts follows both a chronological and a thematic criterion, such longue durée processes are emphasized throughout the book. This form of presentation may clarify in what sense new approaches to the human and animal nature (meaning approaches that were, or were proclaimed, or aimed to be new) arose from the dialogue with, and the rethinking of, traditional forms of knowledge. The first part, “Sixteenth-Century Aristotelian Anthropology between Zoology, Psychology, and Embryology,” contains contributions focusing on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man. The second part, “Humans, Animals, and the Rise of Comparative Anatomy,” explores the impact of comparative anatomy on philosophical and medical conceptions of body and soul as well as on ideas on the human position within the scala naturae. The third part, “Eighteenth-Century Inquiries into the Nature of Sensibility,” analyzes the rise to prominence of sensibility in the medical and philosophical Enlightenment. All chapters share a common epistemological approach to the general subject; approaching cognition in manifold philosophical, theological, and medical dimensions, they adopt a historically wide viewpoint allowing appreciation of the presence of ancient traditions and patterns of argumentation in the modern philosophical and medical discourse. For these reasons, this book is addressed to a broad audience of scholars working in the fields of history of science, history of medicine, history of (early) modern philosophy, history of the classical tradition, history of ideas and intellectual history, and above all to scholars who are interested in bridging the gaps between each of these disciplines and connecting them with each other. In the latter half of the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century, the epistemological and methodological paradigm of comparative anatomy became central to emerging medical and philosophical discourses

INTRODUCTION | 5 on perception and thought. In many ways, this process was connected to renewed interest in and new approaches to the Aristotelian discourse on the soul and ensouled bodies. As many scholars have noted,7 early modern Aristotelianism is not indicative of a conservative culture or a culture in decline, as one might be inclined to think. It became one of the most sophisticated and accomplished expressions of the principles of the humanistic turn. Early modern Aristotelianism both prompted a reconsideration of the theoretical and methodological assumptions of medieval scholasticism and fostered a new and more independent, yet also more respectful, approach to the ancient “authorities.” This is the period when scholars returned to the original texts, reading them in the original Greek—in some cases for the first time in the Western tradition—and applying rigorous and sophisticated philological criteria to the task of editing, translating, and commenting on them. The rediscovery of the ancient texts not only led to a new understanding and, in some cases, the actual (re)discovery of ancient ideas, but also made it possible to raise issues and elaborate new ideas that could be presented not only as interpretations of ancient authorities, but also as original developments created in dialogue with and in emulation of the ancients. This is especially true of Aristotelian milieus in Italy and Protestant northern Europe, since it was here that the study of natural philosophy was most intimately connected to medical and anatomical interests and concerns. This Aristotelian Renaissance and the close interaction of natural philosophy and medicine—that is, the Aristotelian and the Galenic traditions—that this Renaissance prompted serve as the background for the contributions to part I of this volume. The chapters in this section investigate some of the most representative figures and key issues of the sixteenth-century debate on the nature of human and animal cognition and the differences between them. The authors aim to show how different conceptions of the relationship between humans and animals developed depending on the specific questions and aims of the “research program” in which they emerged. While the Aristotelian “zoological project” considers man within a broader investigation of the animal world, Aristotelian psychology—especially the account of the nature, origin, and properties of the human intellect in the third book of Aristotle’s De Anima—approaches the difference between man and animal from a much more “anthropocentric” view, explicitly tackling the issue of what makes man unique in the living world. Of course these two approaches should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are complementary, not only in

6 | STEFANIE BUCHENAU & ROBERTO LO PRESTI Aristotle—as one may easily see, for example, in his De generatione animalium— but also in the works of many sixteenth-century Aristotelians. In the opening chapter of this book, Simone De Angelis argues that the genesis and configuration of early modern “anthropology,” that is, the “science of man” as it was known from the eighteenth century onward, can be traced as far back as the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the product of two kinds of relationships: first, within the framework of Aristotelianism, the relationship between zoological and psychological discourses; and second, within a wider framework intersecting with yet going far beyond Aristotelianism, the relationship between natural philosophy, theology, medicine, and natural law theory. The tension and interplay between the accounts of human and animal cognition in Aristotle’s zoological and psychological works are the subject of investigation in chapter 2, which focuses on the reception of the third book of De anima and Aristotle’s zoological works within the Paduan milieu. Three major points are raised here: (1) both Pomponazzi and Nifo tend to grant animals a variety of mental faculties; although they are connected to the sensitive soul, they are nevertheless characterized as forms of “sensitive thinking”; (2) early sixteenth-century Paduan Aristotelianism very clearly tends to emphasize the aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and psychology that suggest his acceptance of a gradualist concept of the scale of beings; and (3) the great contemporary interest in animal cognition as a general theoretical issue goes beyond even the scope of Aristotle’s own investigations. The position of man within the scale of beings and the particular nature and faculties of the human soul was of course a matter of concern not only in secular Aristotelianism, but also, and quite understandably, in confessional Jesuit Aristotelianism. In chapter 3 Christoph Sander recounts how elements of Aristotelian psychology were adopted by the Christian Church to rationalize the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century. He further shows how the contrast between ecclesiastical and secular streams of Aristotelianism prompted the dogmatic declaration made at the Fifth Lateran Council (1513) that the immortality of the human soul could be maintained on philosophical—more specifically, on Aristotelian—grounds. Against this background, Sander explores how some qualifying patterns of the Aristotelian idea of man were transformed into a Christian anthropology, how the vegetative and sensitive faculties of man were related to his immortal intellectual soul, and where man stood with respect to plants, animals, and angels.

INTRODUCTION | 7 These debates also concerned the Protestant tradition. Chapter 4 gives an illuminating analysis of how medical, anatomical, and secular knowledge, on the one hand, and theological knowledge, on the other, intersected in Protestant anthropology. Davide Cellamare reconstructs a central debate between Casmann and Vallesius over animal and human souls. First, he shows that Casmann, in arguing that human beings were radically different from other animals, sought to respond to Vallesius, who, by rethinking the nature of the term “reason,” had admitted that brutes may have a share in the soul’s highest cognitive faculties. Cellamare then proceeds to show that the divergence between the forms of rationality that Casmann and Vallesius assign to brutes may result from the different anatomical sources used by both authors. Cellamare shows that Casmann’s claim that the souls of brutes and men were fundamentally different depends extensively on Christological elements inherent in the type of anthropology depicted by his Psychologia. With chapter 5, we move to the domain of the embryological discourse and take up one of most controversial issues of Aristotelian embryology, namely, Aristotle’s account of the intellect as “coming from outside” rather than emerging from the generative process, as the vegetative and sensitive parts of the soul are said to do. Hiro Hirai shows that this doctrine—which is extremely problematic and controversial per se, since we do not know what Aristotle actually meant—was not considered as self-evident by Renaissance medical writers. Although they discuss the emergence of life and the origin of souls in animal and human generation within an overarching Aristotelian theoretical framework, they do not hesitate to formulate theories that adapt, develop, and in some cases even substantially depart from what we find in Aristotle’s De generatione animalium, often under the influence of medical ideas from the Galenic tradition. This process of rethinking a key issue of Aristotelian embryological discourse materializes in different ways: Jean Fernel advocates the celestial origin of the soul by drawing on the Renaissance Platonism in vogue at the time, rejecting the naturalistic or physicalist interpretation of Galen’s conception of the soul; Jacob Schegk adheres to Aristotle’s axiom that “intellect comes from above” by making the Creator the immediate origin of human souls and establishing his theory of the everyday creation of human souls by God; Daniel Sennert advocates the theory of the creation of the first soul of each species and the subsequent “multiplication” (not creation or production) of souls, clearly rejecting Aristotle’s axiom. The last chapter in this section shifts the focus from Aristotelian

8 | STEFANIE BUCHENAU & ROBERTO LO PRESTI natural philosophy to medicine. In chapter 6, Marie Gaille gives an indepth account of the theoretical and epistemological scope of Paré’s approach to the human body and, more generally, to human nature. On the one hand, she shows to what extent and on what premises Paré rejects what he calls the “philosophical” approach to the human body and puts forward a medical method of investigation of man; on the other hand, she explores how this shift from philosophy to medicine affected the understanding of the relationship between man and the other animals. According to conventional wisdom, the scientific revolution is characterized by the “mechanization” of the world picture and by the emergence of new doctrines that challenged ancient methods, principles, and psychology. While this description may suit physics and the inanimate world, it is less true of the living world: here, a variety of ancient traditions and explanatory paradigms—humoral, chemical, and biomechanical—subsisted, competed, and served as the basis for new scientific adventures. Comparative anatomy had ancient roots in Aristotle and Galen, but it took a fresh angle in the early modern period in the works of Malpighi, Claude Perrault, Willis, and others. These comparative anatomists take a broad view, ranging from animals to human beings, and employ an analogical method to shed light on the human organism. Such a bottom-up approach to human beings, beginning with animals and creatures that rank lower on the “scale of beings” and emphasizing homologies between them, was potentially humiliating for man; and yet, undoubtedly, animal bodies had certain practical and epistemic advantages over human bodies. Not only were they more accessible to anatomists, but they also presented analogous features in greater variety and in simpler form. Animal bodies set the structure of organs and functions and their interrelationships right before the eyes, revealing “mechanisms” that would have remained hidden if one’s attention was limited to the human organism.8 These new comparative practices are the focus of several chapters in part II of this book. Nico Bertoloni Meli shows that the Italian physician and university professor Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s reliance on ancient comparative methods and experimental practices enabled him to draw analogies between the natural and diseased state of the animal and the human brain. While contemporaries such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli frequently criticized the ancients, especially Galen, Morgagni considered that modern scholars’ prejudices against the ancient “have often carried them too far beyond proper bounds.” What separated Morgagni from the ancients and

INTRODUCTION | 9 gave him new insight into the location of brain functions was a broad survey of a great number of individual cases and a new visual emphasis, evident in vivid verbal descriptions, rather than the use of novel microscopic techniques. Justin E. H. Smith’s chapter investigates comparisons between humans and a particular animal species, birds. He questions the typical opposition between birds and humans in terms of song or music versus speech and language. In a broad historical survey ranging from Aristotle and Lucretius to Kant, Smith shows that philosophical ornithological inquiries “reached a peak of intensity in early modern Europe,” leading to new physiological research in the works of Pierre Bélon, Leibniz, and Athanasius Kircher. Smith further shows that, just like the debate on apes inspired by Edward Tyson’s Orang-outan, sive Homo sylvestris, or the Anatomy of a Pygmy Compared with that of a Monkey (1699), the debate on birds is characterized by the paradoxical tendency to “anchor linguistic capacity in a certain physiological conformation” while decoupling the two. The desire to preserve human superiority also sometimes emerges in early modern research in the form of reluctance to consider birds as speakers: while humans may be said to imitate avian music, the notion that humans may imitate an avian “language of nature” is more problematic. Instead, early modern philosophers tend to believe that birds “counterfeit” and “parrot” human speech. These comparative debates on the human/animal divide were inspired by a variety of philosophical traditions. Charles Wolfe explores the Epicurean tradition in France and beyond. He shows how materialism, with its emphasis on the animation of matter, tended to blur boundaries and reduce the anthropological distinction between humans and animals to a gradual difference of more or less human. Authors such as Bayle, Lamy, La Mettrie, Diderot, and Collins took a growing interest in primates, dogs, foxes, sheep, and beavers and their respective forms of cognition and volition. One could consider these attempts to base humanity on material structures as humiliating to man or, on the contrary, as creating the conditions for a true humanism that dispenses with the illusory idea of humanity as an imperium in imperio. As La Mettrie put it, “That the mind possesses such a corporeal structure need not be feared as a blow to our self-esteem.” A major challenge for these comparative studies was the brain and the particular nature of the human brain, as indicative of a human soul and superiority over the animal. As Claire Crignon discusses in chapter 10, on Thomas Willis, the new comparative practices of seventeenth-century

10 | STEFANIE BUCHENAU & ROBERTO LO PRESTI anatomy gave rise to novel doctrines of the soul. In this context, Willis’s views on the use and limits of comparative anatomy are far from incoherent; in fact, they herald the arrival of a new psychology. Willis neither attempts to simply anchor humanity in particular anatomical structures of the brain nor considers the anthropological difference between man and animals to be invisible and undetectable by “the hands and the tools of the anatomist.” Instead, he proposes a new doctrine of man as a “two souled” and “amphibious animal,” possessing a middle nature and belonging to an order between angels and brutes, communicating “with brutes by the corporeal soul” and with angels “by the intelligent, immaterial and immortal soul.” While Willis considers the rational soul to be the faculty that can carry “man not only beyond the brutes, but . . . above his natural State,” he nonetheless emphasizes its dependence on what he calls the “corporeal” and “sensitive” soul, which appears before the anatomist’s eye. The features that one may hold to characterize the human being in particular include physiological particularities (such as the brain, the hand, the upright posture), and cognitive faculties (reason, understanding) that are often connected to human language. In chapter 11, Gianni Paganini focuses on a different faculty or phenomenon traditionally ascribed to humans, sociability, and explores its possible application to animals. He shows that early modern attempts to theorize animal politics typically drew on either the Epicurean or the Aristotelian paradigm. While Gassendi favored the Epicurean, Hobbes preferred the Aristotelian paradigm, even though he included Epicurean elements. In Gassendi’s reinterpretation of Epicurean political philosophy in the Ratae Sententiae, a contract as a social phenomenon is available only to man, because he alone is capable of logos. Hobbes, on the contrary, grants animals a kind of diminished politics by replacing the Epicurean binary opposition between humans and beasts with a graded scale according to the biological continuity of all living beings. In his view, animals are capable of expressing “consent” but are nonetheless incapable of true “union.” Such a union can be achieved only by an “artificial” social contract. Whereas Aristotelianism viewed sensibility as a faculty common to animals and humans, the Enlightenment tended to transform sensibility into a properly human faculty at the foundation of reason or even, to some extent, displacing reason. The chapters in part III measure the distance between modern and ancient theories and investigate the reasons for the terminological shift from “sensation” to “sensitivity,” sensibilité, Gefühl, and

INTRODUCTION | 11 Empfindsamkeit. They also explore the background of the growing interest in a human type of sensibility over the course of the eighteenth century. Strikingly, all the authors in this section underline the medical and physiological context from which these new notions emerged before spreading to the fields of philosophy, ethics, and politics. They all hint at the major influence of Albrecht von Haller, who in his De partibus corporis humani sentientibus et irritabilibus (1752–1753) drew a novel distinction between sensibility and irritability. Although Haller conducted experiments on animals, he was led to assert in the preface of his treatise that his findings supported a “new division of the parts of the human body.” In his view, the faculties of sensibility and irritability could be isolated and located in particular bodily organs: sensibility, the faculty causing obvious signs of pain and pleasure, is immanent in the nerves, while irritability, the faculty of contraction, is a property of muscles. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, these new insights and their philosophical implications were debated throughout Europe.9 In chapter 12, François Duchesneau examines the epistemic and methodological content of Haller’s claims in greater detail: Haller’s project was to determine the physiological properties and inherent forces (vires insitae) of distinct types of fibers as elements of the animal and the human body. As Duchesneau explains, Haller relies here on the analogy of human and animal sensibility and the idea that the “operations [of an animal soul] are no different from our own as long as we limit ourselves to what may be termed empirical references.” Haller applies distinct empirical criteria to determine these physiological properties: motile effects in the case of irritability and broader psychological and behavioral effects in the case of sensibility. In contrast to irritability, sensibility can be viewed as expansive and as developing into higher functions as part of a larger, integrative network. These claims generated lively debate among physicians and philosophers such as Whytt, Unzer, Blumenbach, Diderot, Bichat, and Barthez, and they shaped forms of vitalism in later physiology. The way in which Haller’s investigations into the physiology of sensation and sensibility entered the philosophical debate—especially in France— and decisively contributed to the integration of medicine and philosophy within a materialistic and vitalistic anthropology is one of the main points raised by Stephen Gaukroger in chapter 13. He argues that the rise to prominence of sensibilité in eighteenth-century French philosophy can be traced back to the integration of anthropology into medicine and to earlier debates between members of the medical faculty of Montpellier. In

12 | STEFANIE BUCHENAU & ROBERTO LO PRESTI contrast to contemporary biomechanics, the médecins-philosophes at Montpellier already endorsed a nonreductive view of organisms inspired by Haller, and they believed that medicine was also concerned with individuals’ general well-being. In Gaukroger’s view, the French debate led by Condillac and the idéologues can be viewed as a program to naturalize human beings that builds on this medical and anthropological program. It is characterized by general consensus that questions of sensibility—including moral sensibility—“fell under the purview of medicine” and were susceptible to comprehensive medicalization. In the context of the French debate among the ideologues, in chapter 14 Tobias Cheung focuses on Cabanis’s Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme from 1802. He shows how Rapports can be read as the outline of a “science of man” that revised the views of Locke and Condillac and shed new light “on the animality of humans.” Following Bourdeu, Cabanis rejected Haller’s dualism of nervous sensibility and muscular irritability; he instead considered sensibility to be the more fundamental property, which subsumed irritability as a possible form of expression or consequence. In Cabanis’s view, sensibility was the source of a great variety of perceived and unperceived impressions and sentiments and of “reaction centers” such as the brain or the stomach: these interacted with one another according to stimulus-reaction schemes to maintain the inner order of living systems. Locke’s and Condillac’s error was to neglect these interactions and the interplay of different organs. Cabanis attempts to remedy these shortcomings and to connect Condillac’s statue to the complex processual framework of the production of sentiments in living beings. He retraces the evolution of these reaction centers from early fetal stages to birth and proposes a new classification. Finally, early modern medical and physiological debates not only had an impact on French philosophy, but also shaped German philosophy. Although German philosophers such as Herder, Sulzer, Platner, and Kant unanimously rejected certain materialist conclusions drawn by their French counterparts and, in contrast, still gave the notion of the “soul” a central position in the emerging disciplines of empirical psychology and anthropology, they nonetheless participated in the same critical move toward demolishing traditional metaphysics, now qualified as “speculative.”10 The example of Ernst Platner, discussed in Stefanie Buchenau’s chapter on self-feeling and the organ of the soul, is a case in point. Platner, a professor of physiology and philosophy in Leipzig, published a number of medical texts early in his career prior to his Anthropolog y for Doctors and

INTRODUCTION | 13 Philosophers in 1772. As Buchenau explains, his anthropological turn attests to the profound influence of Haller’s new physiology. Platner acknowledges that Haller’s physiological insights relate to both the body and the soul and necessitate that the soul be anchored in sensibility: he proposes to adjust Wolffian psychology in this physiological and anthropological sense. This anthropology, however, threatens man’s intermediate status between God and beasts in the chain of beings. While sometimes preserving an Aristotelian terminology, the Enlightenment breaks with the Aristotelian scala naturae and with deeper philosophical premises. The semantic shifts indicate the considerable distance separating the eighteenth century from Ancient and from Renaissance Aristotelianism. At the same time, they show the flexibility of Aristotelian philosophy that makes it a central and anthropologically fruitful reference for so many centuries.

PART I Sixteenth-Century Aristotelian Anthropology between Zoology, Psychology, &

Embryology

Chapter 1 Renaissance Aristotelianism & the Birth of Anthropology Simone De Angelis

A n ex amination of the birth of anthropology in the Renaissance must take two fundamental developments into consideration: First, any study of the birth of anthropology in the Renaissance must be framed against the background of the new scholarly trend of reevaluating Renaissance Aristotelianism. This approach challenges the traditional historiographical narrative of science, which claims that the path toward modern natural science was “anti-Aristotelian.” In the case of Paduan Aristotelianism, it suffices to mention the numerous works of Charles B. Schmitt, who has advocated a “reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism” since the 1970s.1 In this article the reevaluation of Aristotelianism is limited to the birth of anthropology.2 The second fundamental aspect is the long-term formation and transformation of scientific concepts in early modern science. This is certainly the case with the concept of natural law. Since Edgar Zilsel’s studies of the social origins of modern sciences, extensive research has been conducted on the concept of natural law and their role in the history of the natural sciences.3 However, the concept of natural law is also of fundamental importance to the field of natural law theory, which played a key role in the formation of modern anthropology. Thus, in order to understand the

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18 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS origins of anthropology, it is essential to explain first how the concept of natural law, which was originally a theological concept, changed in conjunction with natural law theory under the influence of Cartesianism in the academic world after 1650. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how modern anthropology emerged from the interaction of the commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima and the anatomical practice methods that transformed the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul into a science of man. From the research perspective of this article, the interrelationship of natural philosophy, theology, medicine, and natural law theory in the early modern age is especially relevant to the genesis of modern anthropology as a domain of knowledge about man. This anthropological knowledge was constituted in the sixteenth century and was developed substantially further in the seventeenth. The concepts of “genesis” and “configuration,” which I use in the subtitle of my book Anthropologien, cover a range of heterogeneous factors that combined to help create and establish the early modern “science of man.” Thus, Anthropologien consists of a sort of “prehistory” of the science de l’homme known since the eighteenth century and which continues to be the subject of research today.4 One might legitimately ask why I discuss “anthropologies” in the plural, implying that a plurality of anthropologies exists. I do so primarily because the concept of natural law changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (from Philipp Melanchthon to the natural law theorists Samuel Pufendorf and Richard Cumberland), and this change was accompanied by the transformation of anthropological discourse. Other factors that helped establish anthropology as a “science of man” in the early modern age may be summarized as follows: First, by the end of the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth, ancient medical texts were made available in new editions prepared by the humanists. The medical historian Vivian Nutton has observed that the “Renaissance” of the sciences took place later than the Renaissance of literature and the fine arts at the end of the Quattrocento.5 In fact, the Greek texts of the ancient authors Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, later translated into Latin by the humanists, were first published in the early sixteenth century by Aldo Manuzio in Venice. The goal of humanists such as Ermolao Barbaro and Girolamo Donato was to renew philosophy and the language of philosophy by putting philosophical and medical texts on a new philological basis, so that further discussion in the sciences would be possible. Second, the differentiation of Aristotelianism into different forms during

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 19 the sixteenth century was such an important phenomenon that scholars now predominantly talk of “Aristotelianisms” in the Renaissance. There are essentially two major forms of Aristotelianism in the sixteenth century: Scholastic Aristotelianism (e.g., in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas), which was taught in monastic schools; and Paduan Aristotelianism, which focused on exegesis of Aristotelian texts. At the University of Padua, it was Pietro Pomponazzi in particular, and later Jacopo Zabarella and Cesare Cremonini, who advocated the authentic interpretation of Aristotelian texts in contrast to the Christian interpretation of Aristotle practiced in Scholastic Aristotelianism. Third, as Marco Sgarbi has recently shown, the ongoing reevaluation of the Aristotelian tradition has reached the point that the rise of British empiricism, usually linked to the names Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, is now also largely attributed to the reception of the works of the Paduan Aristotelian Jacopo Zabarella.6 Sgarbi substantiates his findings in particular by citing discussions of Zabarella’s doctrines of logic and method in hitherto neglected English textbooks. According to Sgarbi, Zabarella’s conception of knowledge and method is based on experiential empiricism, which relies on sensory perception and observation.7 The main context of Zabarella’s epistemological position was probably provided by both Pomponazzi’s philosophy of the sensus and the study of anatomy in Padua, which was based on autopsy and closely linked to interpretation of Aristotle’s text De Anima. Fourth—and this is fundamental—in the early sixteenth century, commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima entered a new phase, especially in Padua, with the reception of the so-called graeci interpretes—that is, Themistius, Philoponus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and others. In 1495, Alexander’s commentary on De Anima, translated by the humanist Girolamo Donato, was first published in Venice; it went through several editions in the first half of the sixteenth century and became a fundamental text for exegesis of Aristotle in Padua, especially in the works of Pomponazzi and Zabarella.8 Finally, another important Aristotelian, Federico Pendasio, must be considered in the context of the University of Padua, where he taught natural philosophy and theoretical medicine. In the 1560s, he was a colleague of the logician Jacopo Zabarella, the Galenist Girolamo Capodivacca, and the famous anatomist Girolamo Fabrici da Aquapendente. Pendasio’s extant manuscripts attest to the ambivalent status of commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima in the sixteenth century, which was an object of both exegesis and a renewed effort of Christianization. In contrast, Pendasio himself reconciled commentary on the text (following Alexander) and the practice

20 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS of dissection. He successfully motivated his students to attend anatomy lectures. His position is particularly interesting because it vividly illustrates how interpretation of the Aristotelian text and the dissection of the human body came together in Padua. Before delving into details, I would like to add some further reflections on the structure of the topic. From a structural point of view, it is possible to discuss the genesis of anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on three analytical levels. These levels help us organize and interpret the textual material of both traditions—Aristotelian and theological—on the soul and human nature. The analytical levels in question are the thematic, the epistemological, and the exegetical: 1. The thematic level concerns the relationship between natural law and medicine. The concept of natural law underwent significant change between Melanchthon’s doctrine of the soul and the natural law theories of Pufendorf and Cumberland. 2. The epistemological level concerns the relationship between autopsy and authority. This relationship is governed by the ancient and late medieval doctrine of authority and testimony.9 3. The exegetical level consists of two different aspects: In the sixteenth century, interpretation of Aristotelian texts was based on the fundamental distinction between intentio (auctoris) (authorial intention) and veritas (truth). This distinction enabled commentators to come to terms with philosophical views that were considered dangerous by Christian doctrine. In the seventeenth century, however, the theory of accommodation (i.e., the view that God accommodated his words to the cognitive capacity of ordinary people) was fundamental for separating ethica as a moral philosophy drawing on reason and experience from theologia practica or moral theology, which is based on Holy Scripture. The separation of the two domains or moral systems was the result of a development in the history of science that coincided with the reception of Cartesianism and Copernicanism in northwestern Germany and the Netherlands in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

In this chapter, I will discuss the interaction of these levels of analysis and their long-term influence by presenting further textual material related to the history of anthropology. I will moreover discuss and illustrate four fundamental theses that focalize the complex process of the transformation of Renaissance Aristotelianism into a science of man.

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 21 Melanchthon’s Doctrine of the Soul in the Context of Medical Theory and Reformed Theology My first thesis is as follows: Melanchthon’s Liber de Anima led to a new typology of commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. Melanchthon’s work on the soul adopts the idea that anatomical knowledge helps explain human behavior and moral actions. This idea became a central paradigm of medical discourse until the seventeenth century. While lecturing on physics (physica) at the University of Wittenberg between the 1530s and the 1550s, Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) wrote two textbooks on the soul in which he introduced medical, psychological, and physical knowledge, establishing a new genre of commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. At the same time, he organized his encyclopedic teaching program for the artes faculty in Wittenberg. In 1540, he published the Commentarius de Anima, in which he developed his concept of the soul; he would revisit the subject in the Liber de Anima (1553). Melanchthon’s Liber de Anima was still read as an introductory textbook of anatomy in 1572. It is important to remember that during the same period in which he wrote his textbooks on the soul, Melanchthon was also developing his theological doctrine of “natural law” in the Loci Communes Rerum Theologicarum (1521, first edition). In 1550, just a few years before the publication of the Liber de Anima, Melanchthon republished the Loci Communes in Basel in a late phase of revision. He must have had this work in mind while he was writing his later book on the soul, because a basic concept of Melanchthon’s Liber de Anima is “natural law” (lex naturalis), which he applies to anthropological questions—that is, questions related to his understanding of human nature. Melanchthon’s anthropology in the 1550s is thus influenced, on the one hand, theologically by the concept of law and, on the other, by the medical “sciences” of the Renaissance, which emerged as the first printed texts of ancient medicine became available to scholars from the mid-1520s onward, especially in new humanist Latin translations from Greek. Melanchthon taught his students that anatomical knowledge was indispensable for identifying the faculties of the soul and their functions. By showing where the disciplines of psychology, natural philosophy, ethics, and anatomy converged, Melanchthon argued that only by studying them in conjunction could one gain insight into the relationship between the body and the human psyche. In this section of the chapter, I will show how Melanchthon’s concept of the soul results from the complex interaction of theological and “scientific” aspects of his thought. In particular, I

22 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS will address the question: What did students in Wittenberg actually learn from Melanchthon’s textbook on the soul? In the Liber de Anima, Melanchthon uses Galen’s psychological model to describe the seat of the soul and the internal senses: “Galen localizes the anima rationalis in the brain, because that is where the internal senses are, which are immediately used by the anima rationalis in cognition and in deductive thinking. Others [i.e., Aristotle and Theophrastus] prefer the heart as the seat of the soul, because the heart is the seat of life and the emotions, which follow cognition.”10 According to Galen’s physiological doctrine, the (immaterial) soul uses the cerebral spirit or pneuma (ψυχικὸν πνεῦμα) produced in the rete mirabile and the choroid plexus (both located in the lateral ventricles of the brain) as the material instrument of mental processes. The cerebral spirit is produced by refining the vital spirit, which itself is generated in the arteries and heart through the respiration and vaporization of the humors.11 In Melanchthon’s treatise of the soul, Galen’s doctrine of the spiritus takes on a theological dimension. In the article “On the Relation between Reformation and Academic Medicine in Wittenberg,” German historian of medicine Jürgen Helm focuses on the intersection of reformed theology and medical theory,12 concluding that anthropological questions overlap with questions of medical theory.13 Helm argues that, in Melanchthon’s treatise, anthropological questions are based on the concept of law.14 However, since Melanchthon uses the term “law” in different ways, the concept itself requires explanation. Melanchthon basically distinguishes between lex Dei, lex naturalis, lex divina, and lex humana. Schematically, his concept of natural law can be represented as shown in table 1.1. The structure of Melanchthon’s concept of law is taken from the philosophical-theological tradition of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and thus is of scholastic origin.15 However, his legal concept is suffused with specific theological ideas of the Reformation. According to Melanchthon’s doctrine of natural law, the lex Dei is expressed in different ways by the concepts lex naturalis and lex divina. Since lex naturalis and lex divina intersect and overlap, it is possible—and this is, in essence, my argument—to connect them to the medical knowledge of Galen’s psychophysiological doctrine. In the Liber de Anima, Melanchthon explains the nature of the faculties of the soul on the basis of his complex concept of law. Melanchthon had developed his doctrine of natural law in various chapters of the Loci Communes Theologici in the editions between 1521 and 1559. In the section of the Liber de Anima on the rational faculty of the soul, he again discusses the

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 23 Table 1.1. The structure of the natural law according to Philipp Melanchthon’s doctrine of the soul (see Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de anima, Wittenberg, Ioannes Crato, 1553). Lex naturalis

Lex Dei (God’s eternal law)

Lex naturalis (innate notions)

— the natural notion of God

Lex divina (announced in the books of Moses and written in the Gospels)

— of the theoretical principles of the sciences — of the practical principles of moral judgment — according to St. Paul, Letters to the Romans I and 2: — it is written in the heart of men and — (as a natural judgment of the mind) is immediately accessible in their conscience

Lex humana (external actions)

concept of law together with the concept of the “natural notion” or notitia naturalis, as it is called in psychological works of the sixteenth century.16 According to Melanchthon’s doctrine of law, the three laws—lex Dei, lex naturalis (or lex naturae), and lex divina—are distinct yet interrelated. The lex Dei—the eternal law and the source of all other laws17 —is, in the form of lex divina, the law that has been proclaimed in the books of Moses and written in the Gospel.18 In the form of lex naturalis, however, it is also the natural notion of God, of the theoretical principles of the sciences, and of the practical principles of moral judgment.19 It therefore is the law that (according to Paul in Romans 1 and 2) is written in the hearts of men and (as a natural judgment of the mind) is immediately accessible to their conscience.20 The lex Dei, which Melanchthon defines as a norm,21 is not restricted— like the lex humana—to external actions or to satisfying passions, as the philosophers argue; rather, it implies a triple commandment that demands complete obedience: man should cultivate fear of God and trust and love him.22 In the Liber de Anima, this conception of law finds a medical-theoretical counterpart if we consider the nature of man in relation to the law of God

24 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS before and after original sin. In fallen man, knowledge of the ius divinum that was instilled in his mind at the moment of creation has been clouded, but not eradicated;23 it can even be revived to strengthen his mind.24 This knowledge represents the image of God and proves His existence. In the Liber de Anima, Melanchthon thus describes the nature of man in light of the tripartite structure of the law described above: the original state of man (lex naturae, lex mentis) in harmony with God,25 the state of fallen man in whose mind God’s commandments have been obscured,26 and finally, the renewal of the sinful man by the word of God in the Gospel (logos) that restores the lex Dei.27 These forms of the law in man accordingly trigger orderly or disorderly movements in the affective and voluntary parts of the soul’s faculties. As Helm has explained,28 in the Liber de Anima, significance is attributed to the psychophysical function of the spiritus in relation to the effect of the Holy Spirit, which manifests itself in the Gospel—that is, in the domain of the lex divina. The Holy Spirit affects man through faith: according to Melanchthon, three causes of salvation converge in the word of God, from which every search for God must begin: the word of God, the Holy Spirit, and the human will that consents to the divine word.29 The term “spirit” has the general significance meaning of a moving force whose nature is spiritual, divine, intelligent, incorporeal, and effective and which is identified with God in the relevant chapter of the Loci Communes Theologici.30 Moreover, this passage of the Loci Communes shows how Melanchthon understands the relationship between the emanative force of the Holy Spirit and the physical effect in the cosmos and in nature, a cosmological concept that Melanchthon developed in his Initia Doctrinae Physicae, published in 1550 at the same time as the revised edition of the Loci Communes. A consequence of this physical effect is thus the effect of the Holy Spirit on the physiological level of the spiritus. But how does Melanchthon understand the intellectual participation of men’s minds in the thought of God from which his word originates? And how is his spirituality connected to the interaction of the cognitive and affective faculties of the human soul—that is, to the functions of the brain, nerves, and heart in the human organism? Melanchthon adopts the language of theology (logos, imago, Spiritus sanctus/pneuma), the philosophical and methodical doctrine of notitiae, and psychology and medicine (voluntas and affectus). We can see from his terminology that the Liber de Anima integrates several different fields of knowledge into a coherent system. The starting point for connecting the doctrine of the soul and theology

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 25 in the Liber de Anima is provided by Augustine’s definition of the soul’s faculties in man. The church father divides the (intellective) soul into three parts—mens, cogitatio, and voluntas—and assigns each one a meaning according to the doctrine of the trinity: the mind (mens) reflects God, who creates thought; since thought is the image (imago) of the thought object, an image produced in a man’s mind reflects the son of God (filius); and man’s will reflects the Holy Spirit (Spiritus sanctus/pneuma).31 The distinction between logos (mens) and pneuma (voluntas),32 introduced by Augustine according to Trinitarian doctrine, has an equivalent in Melanchthon’s psychology and anatomy. The Platonic tripartite division of the soul in rational, emotional, and passionate parts (logistikon, thymikon, epithymetikon), which Melanchthon takes from Galen’s On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato,33 overlaps with the traditional Aristotelian hierarchy of the faculties of the soul (the “[potentiae] Vegetativa, Sentiens, Adpetitiva, Loco motiva, Rationalis”34). Melanchthon localizes the functions of the intellectual and the affective-voluntative faculties, as distinct parts of the rational soul (the hegemonikon),35 by associating them with particular organs and the organ system of the human body. While he places the intellective functions in the brain, he links the voluntative function, including the affects, to the heart, which causes the feelings of pleasure and pain.36 These feelings are also caused by the nerves, namely, the sixth pair of brain nerves connected to the heart muscle.37 Melanchthon furthermore considers the heard word of God, as formed and conceived in the human mind, a precondition for cognition of God and for the act of faith: the word of God enters the human mind from outside—that is, from God or from the divine law in the Gospel. It is not one of the notitiae naturales, which are subordinated to natural law.38 The word of God initiates the process of thought-building (formatio imaginum), even if fallen man can only conceive a shadow of divine thought (i.e., of the logos = imago Dei = Filius).39 In the Liber de Anima, Melanchthon makes this argument in the context of his explanation of the internal senses (De sensibus interioribus). Melanchthon departs from Aristotle by distinguishing the function of the sensus communis from that of the internal cognitive force. In contrast, he follows Galen, who localizes the internal cognitive force in the middle part of the brain.40 Being two distinct faculties, voluntas is linked to the heart and intellectus to the internal senses that present objects to man and serve as his instruments.41 Melanchthon describes the basic process of thought in the anatomical part of the Liber de Anima, where he discusses the brain: memory failure caused by injuries to the cerebellum shows that the

26 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS cerebellum itself and the rearmost ventricle logically must be the organ of memory and the reservoir of images impressed on the cerebellum. Even if natural notions (notitiae naturales) have been obscured, thereby preventing comprehension of all thought and knowledge, Melanchthon is certain that this activity is performed by the brain and that thinking takes place in the substance of the brain, which is the seat of divine light and actions.42 This nuanced position thus enables us to understand Melanchthon’s conception of man. From his reading of the medical writings of Galen, Melanchthon acquired specific knowledge of the nature of man, which he considered well suited to giving a concrete demonstration of the doctrine of the effects of the original sin. By believing in the word of God, man receives the Holy Spirit, which is fused with the vital spirit in his heart so as to facilitate the cognition of God (agnitio Dei) in his mind—that is, to unite both the actions of the will and the affections of the soul with the will of God. Thus, human will and affections are intrinsically linked to the psychophysiological processes of the organ system of the human body.43 Thus, in God’s plan of creation, the affections are a sort of “executive organ” of moral judgment, according to the notitiae naturales. Through affection and the cognition of God, human nature is happily preserved. However, human nature can also be destroyed by severe pain. In this case, the conscience cannot suffer a sinful and immoral act that departs from the divine law.44 Melanchthon is essentially using his anatomical knowledge about the heart and its psychophysiological functions to reinterpret St. Paul’s description of natural law as inscribed in the human heart. Melanchthon argues that God has created man in such a way that both the joyful voice of a clear conscience and the tormenting pain caused by transgressing divine law are manifested in the sensible structure of the heart. The heart is the beginning of life,45 and, therefore, the law must already be in us when we are in the womb. The theological and moral significance of the affects of the soul is an important component of Melanchthon’s anthropology. It is a consequence of his firm belief that original sin produced a gap between the law known to us through the notitiae naturales and the will, affects, desires, and appetites (appetitiones contrariae),46 a gap that man cannot surmount unaided. On the one hand, the conflict between law and appetite explains man’s need for salvation-bringing spirituality.47 On the other hand, Melanchthon searches in the Liber de Anima for medical and anatomical explanations for the processes in man’s soul described above that were supported by the doctrines of Vesalius.48 This partly explains why medicine plays such an important part in Protestant theology and why it remained valid

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 27 until the seventeenth century.49 This role also influenced the reform of medical faculties at German universities, which partly adopted in their statutes the Italian model of humanistic Renaissance medicine.50 The Transformation of Renaissance Aristotelianism My second thesis is as follows: Renaissance Aristotelianism, in the particular form it took at the University of Padua, transformed the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul into a “science of man.” This transformation emerged primarily from interaction between the practice of commenting on Aristotle’s De Anima and the practice of dissecting the human body.51 At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Pietro Pomponazzi, professor of philosophy at the University of Padua, noted a fundamental contradiction: according to Aristotle, the anima, the soul as part of the physics (physica) of animated bodies, is mortal, which contradicts fundamental Christian doctrine. Moreover, according to Pomponazzi, it was impossible to prove the immortality of the soul by natural reason—that is, by the argumentative tools of philosophy. Instead, he observed, it had to be proven by the tools of faith.52 The two main exponents of the Thomistic tradition of Aristotelianism at Padua, Tommaso de Vio (Cardinal Cajetanus), and Crisostomo Javelli accepted Pomponazzi’s challenge and demonstrated that the immortality of the soul could be proven with metaphysics, not with physics.53 This separation of disciplines resulted in decoupling Aristotle’s physics from metaphysics and in reducing Aristotle’s philosophy to natural philosophy, which was regarded as inferior to the truth of Christian doctrine. This was an important moment in the history of the disciplines that enabled the Paduan Aristotelians to operate on two distinct levels—they focused on the interpretation of Aristotle’s text, privileging his Greek interpreter Alexander of Aphrodisias, on the one hand, while they separated intentio (auctoris) from the veritas (truth) of Christian doctrine, on the other. Moreover, Aristotle’s psychology was reduced to its purely physical interpretation at the same time that the practice of dissecting the human body emerged in the Renaissance and anatomy took significant steps forward. Federico Pendasio’s commentary on De Anima neatly illustrates the interaction between the new commentaries on Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul and anatomical research at the universities of northern Italy.54 The theologians and judges of the Roman Holy Office often mentioned Pendasio as a model teacher because, in his commentaries, he combined criticism of the passages of Aristotle’s

28 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS text that contradicted the Christian doctrine with detailed analysis of the content of the Aristotelian text in the context of the commentary tradition.55 The manuscript MS 1264, preserved at the University of Padua, contains a transcription of a lecture Pendasio gave in Padua on the third book of Aristotle’s De Anima, probably during the arts course in the 1566 academic year. It contains a passage in which Pendasio explains that, according to Alexander, the intellective soul—the intellectus materialis—results exclusively from the organization of the human body. In this important passage of his commentary, Pendasio encourages his students to attend anatomy lectures to better comprehend the nature of the faculty of the intellectus materialis.56 That year, anatomy was taught by William Harvey’s teacher in Padua, Girolamo Fabrici da Aquapendente. Even more revealing is a comparison of the three commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima that make mention of Alexander’s reference to the human body. More precisely, I have compared the text of Aristotle’s Arabic commentator Averroës, Girolamo Donato’s Latin translation of Alexander’s commentary, and Pendasio’s commentary on the intellectus materialis mentioned above. The findings are significant for the history of anthropology (see figure 1.1). Both Averroës and Alexander indeed refer to the parts of the human body in their texts, but only Pendasio directly mentions dissection. To understand the intellectual faculty, writes Pendasio, it is necessary to dissect the human body—more specifically, the human brain. The method of acquiring knowledge undergoes an epistemological transition from the reality of the text to the reality of the body.57 In this part of his commentary, Pendasio does not proceed to comment on another of Alexander’s texts—for example, De intellectu—as, for instance, Averroës does in his own commentary. Instead, Pendasio encourages his students to attend anatomy lectures. In other words, the strategies of authorizing and legitimating knowledge change: anatomy has become the legitimate knowledge base for the rational part of the soul—that is, the intellect. In fact, in the early 1570s, Pendasio supported Costanzo Varolio, the young anatomist from Bologna who discovered the origin of the optical nerve in the medulla.58 Pendasio even gave Varolio the opportunity to demonstrate these new anatomical findings during one of his lectures on Aristotle’s De Anima, which Pendasio gave at the University of Bologna during those years.59 Thus, the interaction between the exegesis of Aristotle’s texts and the dissection of the human body was vitally important in giving rise to a “science of man” during the sixteenth century.

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 29 Figure 1.1. Synopsis of three De Anima commentaries written respectively by Averroés, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Federico Pendasio (see De Angelis, 2010, 111).

Around 1600, the concept of anthropology underwent a further important transformation in the German context. This arose from the discussion of the concept of the soul that Rudolph Goclenius, professor of logic and physics at the University of Marburg in Hesse, had analyzed in Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes (1557), in which the latter had criticized the physician Girolamo Cardano.60 Paduan Aristotelianism had clearly crossed the Alps. Goclenius simply could not conceive that

30 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS the vegetative soul, which, according to Aristotelian embryology, was responsible for growth and nutrition, is associated with mental faculties as it built the embryo—that is, a sort of “plastic knowledge” that “knows what life is,” as Scaliger puts it.61 This discussion effectively transformed the soul into both a physical and a metaphysical concept (which reminds us of the dualism that had already been adopted by Scholastic Aristotelianism). Goclenius thus adopts a strategy of separation and differentiation on the conceptual level. First, he distinguishes anima from intellectus; anima is an intellective force (vis intellectiva), and the word or concept anima is conceived as the mind, intelligence, or reason. Thus, the anima, where Aristotle posited all corporeal and living processes, is separate from the soul of man, the anima hominis. The latter is considered incorporeal and the subject of metaphysics. Goclenius then subsumes all natural processes under the concept of natura. In reaction to Scaliger’s naturalism, Otto Casmann, a disciple of Goclenius, established a dualist anthropology. In 1594, he published his work Psychologia Anthropologica in two volumes, the former titled Psychologia (the faculties of the soul) and the latter Somatotomia (anatomy). He exclusively considers “despiritualized” bodies in these works.62 Around 1600, anthropology in the tradition of Melanchthon first became established as a textual genre (e.g., Johannes Magirus’s Anthropologia or Commentarius de Anima).63 However, Casmann’s dualist anthropology also established a dualism of both the disciplines of the mind and of the body, which predominated during the seventeenth century and would be undermined only by modern theories of natural law. An important step toward dismantling the dualist anthropology was taken by the Dutch physician Jacob de Back in the mid-seventeenth century. This time, the concept of anthropology was not mentioned in the genre called anthropologia but rather in a text propagating the doctrine of the circulation of the blood established by William Harvey. De Back’s Dissertatio de Corde was appended to the second edition of Harvey’s Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis Motu in Animalium in 1648 (1660, third edition; 1671, fourth edition).64 Thus, fifty years after Casmann, the basic scheme of anthropologia was profoundly revised by what De Back considered an anatomical fact (rem anatomicam), namely, the circulation of the blood. In his treatise, De Back now defined anthropologia as consisting of three elements: psychologia (soul), somatotomia (body), and haematologia (the doctrine of the circulation of the blood).65 The dynamics of the circulation of the blood profoundly changed anthropology, shifting it toward a unitary vision of man that would culminate in the reunification of body and soul in

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 31 Cumberland’s theory of natural law. Cumberland, in particular, drew on the English anatomists Thomas Willis and Richard Lower, who developed the physiological dynamics of the circulation of the blood in the 1660s. Willis studied the anatomy of the human brain and the nerves,66 and Lower focused on blood flow in an erect posture.67 To explain how (universal) ethics or moral philosophy became part of anthropology in the late seventeenth century, we have to consider how the concept of natural law itself was transformed. This is the subject of the next section of this chapter. The Theory of Accommodation and Cartesian Science The relationship between natural law and medicine—in particular, anatomy—that originated with Melanchthon continued to exist in the seventeenth century, even though its premises were modified. This brings me to my third thesis, which is as follows: around 1650, the University of Duisburg in northwestern Germany became a center of Cartesian science at the initiative of two Cartesian theologians, Johann Clauberg and Christoph Wittich, who defended Copernicanism and Cartesian philosophy by proposing the theory of accommodation. This theory subsequently enabled Samuel Pufendorf to separate natural law theory and ethics from theology.68 To fully comprehend how Pufendorf transformed the concept of natural law, we have to take into account some important developments in biblical hermeneutics that occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century. Even though it was not new with respect to theology, the theory of accommodation was proposed again by Christoph Wittich (1625–1694), a Cartesian theologian and professor of theology in Duisburg and later Nijmegen. The theory of accommodation was the core of his defense of Cartesian philosophy and the Copernican system.69 According to Wittich, sensus accommodatus means that, in the Holy Scripture, God descended to the cognitive level of ordinary people. Hence, in the Bible, God does not speak a learned language but rather one that is comprehensible to his people (ad captum vulgi).70 This means that the biblical text has absorbed all the prejudices of the sense perception and manner of speaking of ordinary people, even when natural phenomena are concerned. The central point of Wittich’s approach is that he connects the theory of accommodation to the Cartesian theory of cognition. It is the purpose of cognitio philosophica to eliminate or correct the prejudices of common knowledge (cognitio communis or vulgaris or historica).71 The theory of accommodation thus limits the

32 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS knowledge claims one can extract from the Bible. Moreover, according to this theory, it is beyond the scope of the Bible to teach natural philosophy. In other words, the sections of the Bible that mention natural phenomena effectively lose their authority. Utilizing the Cartesian concept of scientia based on reason and experience, Wittich successfully separates theology from the natural sciences and limits the authority of the Bible to questions of salvation, which he regards as its true purpose. Against this epistemological background, Wittich establishes a new system of distinct disciplines, identifying two sources of ethical norms—reason and experience, on the one hand, and revelation, on the other. Wittich’s system can be represented as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Physica (scientia naturalis) Theologia Theologia practica (Gospel) Ethica (scientia moralis) — Sources of ethical norms: 1. Reason, experience 2. Revelation

In Germany, it was the natural law theorist Samuel Pufendorf (1632– 1694) who tackled the task of developing ethics (ethica) as a scientia moralis in the Cartesian sense. He did so in his natural law theory, which he also understood as a moral science that claimed to govern human actions according to philosophical principles. To this end, he had to make significant changes to the theological concept of natural law as proposed by Melanchthon. Pufendorf, who had read Wittich and knew of the theory of accommodation, reorganized the system of moral disciplines in his work De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (1673). This work was translated into French by the Huguenot professor of law Jean Barbeyrac, and would have a profound impact on eighteenth-century anthropological thought.72 Pufendorf acknowledged the lex divina as a moral source written in the books of Moses and the Gospel; however, he rejected both the lex naturalis—innate notions—and the Melanchthon’s concept of imago Dei—the image of God in man’s mind. Pufendorf separated scientia moralis from the natural law of the theologians and concentrated on the primary sources of moral science: reason and experience. From these sources, he states in the preface to De Officio Hominis et Civis, “are deduced the main duties of man, above all those that enable him to live in society with other men.”73 The main concept of

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 33 his science of natural law is socialitas—sociability—which posits society as the primary objective of man’s actions. In Pufendorf’s moral science, sociability corresponds to the first law of nature:74 it is not innate but can be recognized by observing human actions and is conceived as a functional ethical principle pertaining to the domain of lex humana. The concept of law is thus fundamental to understanding the development of anthropology in the latter half of the seventeenth century, since natural law theory was conceived by taking account of contemporary developments in medicine and the sciences, especially in England. Natural Law and Medicine The fourth thesis of my chapter is the following: The theory of the circulation of the blood initiated a process that, over the course of the seventeenth century, enabled anthropology to overcome the dualistic bias represented by Otto Casmann around 1600 and become an “integrated” anthropology of body and soul. On the basis of this new medical theory, anthropology was structured according to the Cartesian–Suárezian concept of natural law, which takes into account both the domain of the physical (physica) and that of the moral world (ethica).75 Modern natural law theory is premised on the metaphysical or ontological assumption that the objects of the physical and moral worlds—that is, human actions—are governed by the laws of nature. The background of this assumption is a notion of causality—a notion of how God acts in the world—that takes into account the relationship between cause and effect. For example, while a student in La Flèche, Descartes adopted this concept of causality from Francisco Suárez’s doctrine of God’s assistance in the world (concursus divinus): God guarantees the relationship between cause and effect in the physical world—that is, he guarantees that after a cause, an effect necessarily follows.76 Descartes then transferred this concept of causality to his natural philosophy to establish the laws of motion in the Principia Philosophiae (1644). On the basis of this concept of causality, the natural law theorists also maintained that there were necessary laws (causa necessaria) governing the domain of human actions. This was particularly the case with Richard Cumberland, who, in his treatise De Legibus Naturae, published in London in 1672, explicitly refers to Descartes’s hypotheses on natural philosophy to explain his concept of natural laws in the moral world.77 Moreover, Cumberland was aware of the “law of nature” debate that was taking place at the Royal Society. In his work, Cumberland examined the

34 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS cause-effect relationship in the domain of human actions by studying the world of animated beings. The Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society, not only published papers on physics, mathematics, or the natural sciences, but also on embryology and physiology.78 We will see below how this scientific context played a central role in Cumberland’s reflections on natural law. First, however, we have to determine how Cumberland understood causality in the domain of human actions. He assumed that there is a cause-effect relationship between the psyche—psychological motivations— and the human body. As he puts it in the preface of his work, “The causes of human actions are the faculties of the human mind and body.”79 Cumberland’s moral theory draws on the concept of mutual benevolence, whereby human nature disposes man to have sympathetic feelings toward his fellow man and this benevolence is intimately linked to a preconscious level of the mind-body relationship. In this regard, he posits a natural necessity (necessitas naturalis, causa naturalis, etc.). Cumberland explains that he has taken his evidence not from the conscious actions (non ex actibus volontariis) but rather from the unconscious actions and inclinations of animals (sed ex actibus . . . quae sunt animalibus etiam insciis), which result from the structure and constitution of the body itself (ab ipsa corporis sui fabrica, et temperie proveniunt).80 Thus, moral sentiments in living beings have an unconscious origin depending on the mind-body relationship; in this sense, the moral actions resulting from this unconscious mind-body source, according to Cumberland, are governed by natural laws. Cumberland’s arguments are confirmed by the experiences of authors such as William Harvey, Walter Needham, and Marcello Malpighi, writing on “biological” matters. In other words, the late seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of the idea of altruism, and Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae presents us with significant empirical evidence of this phenomenon. The theory of the circulation of the blood accordingly plays an important role: it is the body, Cumberland states, that sets the limits of our self-preservation. In particular, it is the circulation of the blood that moderates our needs, since all corporeal needs depend on it. This has consequences for the behavior of living beings. Once their needs have been satisfied, animals are willing to help other animals of the same species. This form of altruism has a psychological motivation: an animal helps another animal that is not related to it by blood because it expects the latter to reciprocate in case of need. Cumberland thus describes a sort of “reciprocal altruism.” He held that this form of altruism varies according to the capability for empathy of creatures of the same species, which can cooperate, for example, when

RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM & THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY | 35 searching for food.81 Cumberland drew important conclusions from such moral behavior, particularly in terms of methodology. In his view, examples of moral behavior have, first of all, an indicative character, which is to say that they are evidence of moral behavior in the animated part of nature. These are phenomena of the animated world that are identified by empirical observation and that the mind can judge; however, no obligation in the sense of a lex obligans results from judgment alone. Judgment, at most, can indicate what we might consider an obligatory moral law, to which we have to make our behavior conform in case, someday, we really want to establish a law (in the juridical sense of the term). Only the latter concept of law would have an obligatory character. Cumberland thus differentiates between the juridical terms lex indicans and lex obligans, which were also known in the late scholastic tradition, for example by Francisco Suárez.82 Cumberland’s examples from the animated world hence only indicate (in the sense of lex indicans) how one could derive moral laws from animal behavior, which could serve to govern human coexistence in society. Finally, the significance of Cumberland’s work on natural law and ethics lies in the fact that he developed a series of physiological arguments against Hobbes that proved fundamental for the anthropology of the eighteenth century, for example, in the works of Johann Gottfried Herder or Ernst Platner.83 Conclusion In this chapter, I have illustrated the importance of medical knowledge for the rise of modern anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Medical knowledge, however, and especially anatomy, never stood in isolation; instead, it was always a point of intersection for other disciplines: philosophy, theology, psychology, physiology, ethics, and natural law theory. Medical knowledge was moreover linked institutionally to Italian universities of the sixteenth century, especially Padua, where Aristotelianism underwent a significant transformation primarily on account of the reception of ancient Greek commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima and especially Alexander of Aphrodisias’s treatise on the soul. As shown in this chapter, several factors contributed to the birth of anthropology in the Renaissance; one factor, however, was probably the most important— the statement in Alexander’s commentary on the soul that if one wants to know something about the material intellect or the faculty of the mind, one has to conduct anatomical research. This statement, appearing in the Latin translation of his commentary in 1495 and discussed by the Paduan

36 | SIMONE DE ANGELIS Aristotelians in their own commentaries on the soul, probably paved the way for the “anatomical Renaissance” of the sixteenth century, which was so important to the formation of modern anthropology. Nevertheless, the salient point is that the anatomical approach was not reductionist. As I have also shown in this chapter, medical knowledge always remained connected to central questions concerning man in early modern times—for example, the question of man’s obligations or duties toward God, himself, and others in society, which is precisely the question that modern natural law theories sought (provisionally) to answer. In other words, anatomy—or the study of the brain, the nerves, and the circulation of blood—was embedded in the theory of man, his mind, and his relationship to others in early modern society.

Chapter 2 (Dis)embodied Thinking & the Scale of Beings Pietro Pomponazzi & Agostino Nifo on the “Psychic” Processes in Men & Animals

Roberto Lo Presti

The first decades of the sixteenth century are universally recognized as a decisive moment in the history of the Aristotelian tradition: on the one hand, we witness the rise of what has been called “secular” or “medical” Aristotelianism at Italian universities;1 on the other, we see that various fields of rational inquiry—psychology, anatomy, and comparative physiology of the animal faculties—become intertwined under and even outside the broad umbrella of Aristotelianism and coalesce into autonomous discourses on human nature. These discourses in turn pay special attention to the momentous issue of the uniqueness of human thinking in comparison to other forms of animal cognition.2 Is thinking a function of the ensouled body or is it entirely independent of the body? Is thinking a faculty that men are endowed with because they are generated and perishable living beings or rather because they participate in an external, divine, and imperishable intellect that acts as the universal agent of thinking? Is man the only living being endowed with reason or are other animals also capable of grasping reality and behaving in ways we might describe as “intelligent” or even “rational”? Is it possible to identify different forms and degrees of thinking? If so, can these be connected, on the one hand, to different parts of the soul and, on the other, to different animal species besides man? These are just some of 37

38 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI the most fundamental questions that became objects of fierce controversy among the philosophers actively engaged both in commenting on Aristotle’s psychological and zoological works and in using this institutional practice as the basis for developing a new, integrated investigation of human nature. The liveliest of these debates was undoubtedly that on the immortality of the soul, which set two of the most prominent Aristotelians of the time against one another, Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) and Agostino Nifo (ca. 1473–1538). This debate, which is one of the best studied chapters in the history of early modern Aristotelianism,3 revolved primarily around Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s reception and interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of the intellect as set forth in De anima, III, 4–8 and developed further in the three main branches of the late ancient and medieval Aristotelian tradition: Greek, Arabic, and Latin. It is no wonder, therefore, that modern scholars have generally, if not exclusively, focused their attention on the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological implications of Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s Intellektlehren. In this chapter, I shall try to shed light on two aspects of Pomponazzi’s mortalist and Nifo’s immortalist views of the rational soul that have been relatively neglected by scholars of the last decades, in spite of their importance for our general appreciation of Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s contribution to the birth of the science of man. Accordingly, I shall explore how Pomponazzi and Nifo conceived of animal cognition in comparison with and/or in opposition to human “intellectual” thinking, and I will consider how they coped with the inherent ambiguity of Aristotle’s psychophysiology of “mental faculties.” On the one hand, and especially in some passages of De anima, Aristotle clearly suggests an ontological discontinuity between brute animals and man: brute animals possess only perception, while man is the only being endowed with a rational soul. On the other hand, and especially in his zoological and ethical works, Aristotle seems to espouse a much more gradualist conception of the differences between various cognitive faculties and, accordingly, between the beings endowed with such faculties. In what follows, I will first briefly outline the ambiguity of Aristotle’s views on animal cognition by reviewing some key passages of his psychological and zoological works, before glancing at how this ambiguity was perceived and dealt with in the Greek and Arabic commentary traditions. I will then turn to Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s own reception and rethinking of Aristotle’s views. In the final section, I will draw some conclusions and

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 39 try to assess whether, to what extent, and in what regard Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s views on animal cognition clash and are as far from each other as their views on the immortality of the soul. Animal Cognition in Aristotle and in Late Antique and Medieval Aristotelianism Paradoxical as it may appear, only two passages in the entire Aristotelian corpus explicitly state the “canonical” Aristotelian doctrine of the incorporeity of thinking and the related doctrine of man as ontologically distinct from brute animals because man is the only animal endowed with a rational soul and a thinking faculty: these are De anima II, 3 (414a29–b19), where the theory of the tripartition of the soul is put forward, and De anima III, 4–8, where Aristotle expounds his theory of the intellect. In a number of other contexts (other passages of De anima and Parva Naturalia, but especially in the zoological and ethical treatises), both the contrast between the respective activities of the rational and the sensitive part of the soul and the “cognitive” gap between man and brute animals appear less marked and absolute.4 Aristotle seems prepared to recognize that some bodily factors—the quality of the blood, upright posture, the softness of the skin, the capacity of the brain to cool bodily heat properly, the accumulation of warm residual matter in the region of the diaphragm, and even youth and old age—are somehow connected to and capable of influencing or even determining a human being’s quality of thinking and degree of intelligence and perceptiveness. Aristotle, however, often adopts a similar reasoning strategy not only in reference to different individuals within the human species, but also—and, for the present volume, most interestingly—in reference to other animal species, both compared with each other and with man, allowing and accounting for degrees of intelligence and variations in cognitive ability on a scale of lesser or greater ability.5 In doing so, despite the radical theoretical distinction between the sensitive and rational parts of the soul and between rational and irrational animals set forth in De anima, Aristotle seems to imply that a natural philosopher must adopt a much more gradualist, relativizing approach in order to describe the cognitive behavior exhibited by many animal species and to account for the commonalities and/or similarities between their behavior and that of human beings.6 It is precisely in light of this gradualist approach that it makes sense for Aristotle to attribute a degree of knowledge (gnosis) to animals by claiming, as he does in Generation of Animals, I, 23 (731 a31–b4), that animals

40 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI “have sense perception, and sense perception is a kind of knowledge.” Elsewhere (Metaphysics I, 1, 980 a27–39), Aristotle is also prepared to attribute memory, a kind of intelligence, the ability to learn and even a degree, however small, of experience to some animals; he is even willing to ascribe practical reason (phronesis) to animals (Nichomachean Ethics VI, 7, 1141 a26–28) and explicitly includes this kind of reason in his list of the “characters” (ethea) of animals (Historia Animalium I, 1, 488 b12–29). In this connection, a crucial question is that concerning the status of imagination (phantasia) in Aristotelian psychology. On the one hand, Aristotle conceives of imagination as a function of the sensitive soul and therefore as an entirely embodied function that requires a bodily organ to carry it out; he also attributes this function to some animal species. On the other hand, imagination is said to provide the “raw materials,” so to speak, with which the intellect produces the objects of abstract thought.7 It therefore is no surprise that when the commentators on Aristotle had to address the bodily aspects of an otherwise “immaterial” faculty such as thought or the distinction between man qua “thinking animal” and brute animals qua “perceiving animals,” they focused their attention primarily on what we could describe as the psychophysiology of the imaginative faculty. A good example of this theoretical and exegetical strategy appears in a passage of John Philoponus’s commentary on De anima II, 9, 421 a22ff.,8 where Aristotle establishes a direct, although somewhat unclear, connection between degrees of softness of the flesh and degrees of intelligence in human beings and argues that man is more intelligent (phronimoteros) than other animals because of the accuracy of his sense of touch—this accuracy being a consequence of the softness of human flesh. Philoponus explains the link between softness of flesh and intelligence by arguing that soft flesh makes it easy for the body to discharge impurities, which in turn makes the pneuma purer and facilitates both the imaginative and the rational faculty. This explanation imposes Neoplatonic and Galenic concepts on an Aristotelian theoretical framework—see, for example, the definition of flesh as an “auxiliary cause” (sunaition) of intelligence (phronesis) and the claim that the movements of the soul are affected together with, but are not generated from, the mixtures of the body—but it interests us here for two reasons in particular: first, because it establishes an explicit connection between the activity of the imaginative faculty and level of intelligence; second, because this very connection between intelligence and imagination allows Philoponus to explain why some animals, such as worms, are less intelligent than man or are not intelligent at all, despite the fact that their flesh is

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 41 softer than that of man. Such animals, in Philoponus’s words, lack a perfect, fully developed imaginative faculty (teleion to phantastikon). Averroës also allows that some animals possess a kind of cognition, albeit one that is partial and inferior to that with which man is endowed. In commenting on De partibus animalium, II, 4, 650 b18ff.,9 Averroës follows Aristotle in arguing that animals that have thinner, purer, and colder blood are more intelligent (here the Latin translation of Averroës’s commentary uses the adjective prudens, the standard translation of the Greek phronimos) while animals that do not have blood may be more “learned” (eruditiora) than animals that do. Furthermore, in commenting on De partibus animalium, IV, 10, 686 a25ff.,10 Averroës states that man is more “accomplished” and more intelligent (perfectior prudentiorque)—his use of the comparative here is very significant—than all other animals, and for this reason nature has equipped him with the necessary instruments for all operations of the intellect.11 In Albert the Great’s De animalibus, the bodily aspects of thinking and animal cognition are objects of special interest and deep theoretical investigation. On the one hand, Albert recognizes—even more explicitly than Philoponus—the link between prudentia and bonitas imaginationis; on the other, he is very careful in distinguishing between different forms and degrees of “mental” activity, in identifying their seat—that is, the part of the soul and potentially the bodily organ responsible for each of them—and in comparing and drawing analogies and making distinctions between human and animal cognition both on anatomical and more specifically on psychological grounds. What Albert regards as specific to mankind is man’s possession of a “discerning intellect” (discretivum intellectum) that does not depend on any bodily organ; instead, the intellect resides in the rational soul, immaterial and ontologically distinct from the body.12 Yet, when it comes to defining other cognitive or even “rational” faculties, such as the so-called estimative or ratiocinative faculty (from the Latin expressions facultas aestimativa and ratiocinatio), Albert explicitly attributes this faculty to the sensitive soul, locates it in the ventricles of the brain together with imagination and memory, and refers to the “animal spirit” as the bodily instrument with which all these faculties operate.13 This connection between the estimative faculty, the sensitive soul, and the ventricles of the brain proves to be absolutely essential to Albert’s comparative investigation of human and animal cognition. Albert makes the striking anatomical observation that the brain is the internal organ that is more similar in different animals than any other, so that “once one has

42 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI reached a perfect knowledge of the human brain, it is easy to grasp the substance of the brain of the other animals in relation to the human brain.”14 The psychological counterpart to this anatomical observation appears in another of Albert’s statements, in which he admits that some animals are endowed with a “certain power” (quaedam vis) like the cogitative and compositive faculty (sicut cogitativa et compositiva) in man. He then argues that, although some people define this analogue of human reason as “sensible cogitation” (cogitativa sensibilis) or “compositive and discerning imagination” (fantasia componens et dividens), the most accurate definition is to call it the “estimative” (aestimativa) faculty.15 Albert describes this faculty as a kind of rational thinking, whereby the adjective “rational” qualifies the ability of some animals to acquire knowledge of particulars on a higher level than is possible with sense perception and always directly related to their practical utility. The extent and originality of Albert’s effort to combine a gradualist conception of the mental faculties and the ontological uniqueness of man as a rational being, however, emerge most clearly when he considers the cognitive abilities of the so-called pygmei.16 In relation to these beings, which are both anatomically and behaviorally described as half-man and half-brute (they are said to imitate rational thinking), Albert makes it immediately clear that they do not in fact possess reason at all. Hence, insofar as a pygmeus is an irrationabile animal, an insurmountable ontological gap separates it from man. Yet, when Albert moves from a strictly ontological to a cognitive/epistemic plane, he is prepared to shorten the distance between men and pygmies significantly, granting the latter a cognitive faculty that he defines as a “shadow of reason” (umbra rationis) and even ranks as superior to and nobler than the estimative faculty, which he is willing to grant other animals.17 Rethinking the Scala Naturae in Pomponazzi’s Theory of the Mortality of the Soul Three key issues have emerged from this cursory glance at the late ancient and medieval tradition of Aristotelian commentaries that also play a fundamental role in Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s views on the relationship between human and animal cognition: (a) the need to explore the links between imagination and thinking; (b) the individuation of forms of cognitive activity that, while sharing certain traits with rationality, are not an expression of the rational soul; (c) the effort to combine, in a logically and theoretically consistent way, the theory of the ontological uniqueness of man, and potentially also that of the ontological gap between man and

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 43 beasts, with the continualist and gradualist representation of the animated world as a scala naturae. In the following pages, I will therefore arrange the textual materials I wish to discuss according to this thematic tripartition. In this section, I will address Pomponazzi’s ideas as expounded in his treatises De immortalitate animae (1516)18 and Quaestio utrum anima rationalis sit immaterialis et immortalis (1503–1504);19 in the following section, I will turn to Nifo’s theories. Pomponazzi was not only committed to arguing for some kind of connection between imagination and rational thinking, that is, the intellect, but also, and much more radically, was determined to prove that the human intellect is necessarily and inherently dependent on imagination, since not even the most universalizing form of thinking is possible in man unless the imagination supplies phantasmata as the objects from which abstract thought is produced. Pomponazzi bases this view on two crucial passages of Aristotle’s De anima, I, 1, 403a8–9, where Aristotle raises the question of whether thinking is either a form of imagination or impossible without imagination, and III, 7, 431a14–17, in which Aristotle actually appears to endorse the view that the activity of the human intellect, which itself is immaterial and is not performed by any bodily organ, nevertheless consists in some kind of reworking of products of the imaginative faculty, since “the soul never thinks without a mental image” (oudepote noei aneu phantasmatos he psyche). This was the key premise for Pomponazzi’s rejection of the immateriality of the intellect and its absolute independence from the body. He thus could argue for the mortality of the soul as a whole. Pomponazzi admits that the intellect is independent from the body as a subject,20 but not as an object, since it depends on the phantasmata provided by the imagination, which is an entirely embodied and therefore corruptible faculty of the sensitive soul, which Pomponazzi locates—in accordance with the Arabic neo-Aristotelian and neo-Galenic theory of the internal senses—in the front ventricles of the brain.21 To prove that the intellectual and the sensitive sphere are distinguishable but not separable in man, Pomponazzi makes use of a number of arguments taken (and modified) both from Aristotle’s texts and from his own experience, so to speak. In chapter 6 of De immortalitate animae Pomponazzi first remarks that I who am writing these words am beset with many bodily pains, which are the function of the sensitive soul; and the same I who am tortured go over their medical causes in order to remove these pains, which

44 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI cannot be done save by the intellect. But if the essence by which I feel were different from that by which I think, how could it possibly be that I who feel am the same as I who think? For then we could say that two men joined together have common cognitions (mutuas cognitiones), which is ridiculous.22

He then proceeds to emphasize that Aristotle “in De anima II places the vegetative in the sensitive soul, as the triangle in the quadrilateral. But it is plain that the triangle is not in the quadrilateral as something distinct from it in existence: what is potentially a triangle is actually a quadrilateral. Hence, since for Aristotle the sensitive soul is related to the intellective in mortals in the same way, the sensitive soul will not be a thing distinct from the intellective (sensitivum non erit distincta res ab intellectivo).”23 Affirming that the intellective soul in mortals is not distinct in existence from the sensitive, and, even more explicitly, that “the sensitive (soul) in man is identified with the intellective” has two major consequences: the first is that the intellective soul should be conceived as essentially and truly mortal and only relatively—that is, only insofar it does not depend on the body as subject—immortal. The second consequence, and for our purposes the most interesting, is that Pomponazzi’s theoretical framework qualifies the abstracting and universalizing power of the human intellect, which Albert the Great, for example, had hailed as the hallmark of the divine nature and ontological uniqueness of man as compared to all other animated beings. Pomponazzi’s position significantly deemphasizes the power of the intellect: Nor can it know a universal unqualifiedly but always sees the universal in the singular, as everyone can observe in himself. For in all cognition, however far abstracted, we form some bodily image (idolum aliquod corporale). On this account the human intellect does not know itself first and directly; and it composes and thinks discursively (componitque et discurrit), whence its knowing is in succession and time. The complete opposite of this occurs in the Intelligences, which are utterly freed from matter. The intellect, then, existing thus halfway between the material and the immaterial (medius existens inter immaterialia et materialia), is neither completely here and now nor completely released from here and now. Wherefore its operation is neither completely universal nor completely particular; it is neither completely subjected to time nor completely removed from time.24

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 45 It is particularly easy to see how Pomponazzi’s theory of the mortality of the soul downgrades the ontological status of the human intellect if we consider how Pomponazzi compares and differentiates between various forms of thought. On the one hand, he accepts the distinction—very common among medieval and early modern Aristotelians, as we have seen—between a “rational” or “intellective” power, which is an expression of the rational soul, and a “cogitative” power, which is counted among the sensitive powers. On the other hand, when Pomponazzi places this kind of “sensitive thinking” (identified as the cogitative power), human intelligence and divine intellect in a hierarchy, he accordingly deviates from the very well established tradition of representing human intelligence as closer to the divine intellect, from which it emanates and in which it participates, than to the cogitative power, with which animals are also thought to be endowed. Pomponazzi explicitly argues that “we shall place the human intellect immediately (immediate) above the cogitative and below immaterial things, partaking of both, so that it clearly does not need the body as subject . . . and needs it as object. . . . Whence it must be placed absolutely (absolute) among material forms.”25 Two points here deserve to be stressed: first, Pomponazzi’s use of the adverb “immediately” suggests that the human intellect, while occupying a middle position between the cogitative power and the divine intellect, is nevertheless somewhat closer to the former; second, Pomponazzi claims that the human intellect should be regarded as a material form in absolute terms, just as all the sensitive powers are, since it is the act of the organic body. The clearest passage in which Pomponazzi qualifies the human intellect as essentially material and only relatively immaterial appears in chapter 9 of De immortalitate animae: And the soul possesses powers that are organic and unqualifiedly material, those of the sensitive and the vegetative soul. But since it is the noblest of material things and lies at the boundary of immaterial things, it savors somewhat of immateriality (aliquid immaterialitatis odorat), but not unqualifiedly. Whence it possesses intellect and will, in which it agrees with the gods; but rather imperfectly and equivocally (verum satis imperfecte et aequivoce), since the gods themselves are completely abstracted from matter, while it knows always with matter, since it knows with phantasms (cum phantasmate), with succession, with time, with discursiveness, with obscurity. Whence in us intellect and will are not truly immaterial things (non sunt sincere immaterialia) but relatively and to a slight extent (secundum quid et diminute). Whence it ought to be called more truly reason than

46 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI intellect (ratio quam intellectus). For, so to speak, it is not intellect but the trace and shadow of intellect (vestigium et umbra intellectus).26

Here the relativization of the human intellect and the consequent diminution of its ontological status finds its most radical and striking expression: not only does Pomponazzi regard the human intellective power as immediately superior to the cogitative, but he even conceives it more truly as vis cogitativa rather than as intellect. Pomponazzi significantly qualifies the human intellect as a “shadow” of the true, entirely immaterial, and universal intellect, adopting the very same metaphor used by Albert the Great to characterize the “thinking-like” cognitive activity of the pygmies as ultimately irrational and therefore not merely inferior to, but even incommensurable with the human intellect. The very fact that Pomponazzi revived a metaphor used previously to distinguish between human (and therefore rational) and animal (and therefore irrational) forms of thinking in order to argue that the human intellect is inferior to the intellect as such—that is, to the (divine) intellect considered in absolute terms—must indicate how Pomponazzi conceived of the status of man on the chain of animated beings and especially in the animal kingdom. Also in regard to this issue, Pomponazzi vacillates between two views: on the one hand, he places man halfway between the gods and the beasts; on the other, he exhibits a clear tendency to deprive human nature of any metaphysical attribute and attaches men (or at least a majority of them) to the beasts rather than to the gods.27 Two passages of the De immortalitate animae perfectly exemplify both these views, which Pomponazzi develops so as to complement rather than conflict with one another: There are therefore in the universe three kinds of animated beings, and, since every animated being knows, there are also three ways of knowing. For there are animated beings entirely eternal, there are also those entirely mortal, and there are the mean between these two. The first are the heavenly bodies, and, in knowing, these in no way depend upon a body. The second are the beasts, which depend on the body as subject and as object, whence they know only singulars. The intermediate beings are men, not dependent on the body as subject but only as object; whence they regard neither the universal unqualifiedly, like the eternal beings, nor the singular alone, like the beasts, but the universal in the singular.28 Now all this agrees with nature, which proceeds by degrees. . . .

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 47 Then come animals having only touch and taste and an indeterminate imagination (indeterminatam imaginationem). After them are animals which arrive at such perfection that they are thought to have intellect. For many operate like craftsmen, as by building houses; many like citizens, as bees; many have almost all the moral virtues. . . . Indeed, almost an infinite number of men seem to have less intellect than many beasts.29

The close resemblance of some animal species to man, which in the aforementioned passage results from a “bottom up” approach to the scala naturae, is highlighted even more emphatically when Pomponazzi views the chain of animated beings from a “top down” perspective. If in the former case some forms of animal cognition are elevated to the rank of intelligent human behavior, in the latter case it is man who is downgraded and reduced to the rank of a beast. As Pomponazzi puts it, “if we examine the habitable regions many more men resemble beasts than men (multo plures homines assimilantur feris, quam hominibus), and you will find that those who are rational are most rare (perrarissimos).”30 Furthermore, even rational men, if we carefully examine their way of thinking, prove to be essentially irrational but “are called rational in comparison with others who are most beastlike (in comparatione ad alios maxime bestiales).”31 Therefore, it is no surprise that what is described as a strong resemblance between men and beasts on the epiphenomenal level of cognitive behavior is then regarded as a real correspondence when—as for example in the Quaestio utrum anima rationalis sit immaterialis et immortalis—Pomponazzi attempts to define the nature of the (rational) human and the (sensitive) animal soul as acts of an organic body. Here he spells out how men and beasts correspond in the clearest terms: “we see that men are like other animals (nos videmus homines esse sicut alia animalia).” Namely, insofar as animal and human bodies are structured according to the same anatomical principle (they are made up of the same parts, arranged and differentiated in the same manner), the way in which the soul joins and actualizes the body as an organic unity must also be the same in men and in other animals.32 Nifo and Animal Intelligence: A Challenge against or a Resource for the Immortalist View? Agostino Nifo was undoubtedly the most powerful and influential opponent of Pomponazzi’s views on the mortality of the soul. Appointed

48 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI Extraordinary Chair of Philosophy in 1485 at the University of Padua for the explicit purpose of counterbalancing Pomponazzi’s teaching from an Averroistic perspective, Nifo entered the controversy on the immortality of the soul in 1518 by publishing a treatise of his own titled De immortalitate animae to refute the theses put forward by Pomponazzi just two years before.33 The content, scope, theoretical framework, and institutional context of this controversy have been thoroughly investigated (see note 5) and thus need not be my primary concern here. I will limit myself to emphasizing a crucial point in Nifo’s argument in favor of the immortality of the soul: in order to argue, against Pomponazzi, in favor of the immortality of the rational soul and at the same time to reject Averroës’s views on the uniqueness of the active intellect as the eternal and universal power that joins the individual soul from the outside while remaining independent and unmixed with it—in other words, in order to argue for the immortality of the individual rational soul—Nifo attempts to reconcile individual immortality with the unity of the intellect by envisaging the intellect as two different forms, a forma dans esse, which unifies the organic body and brings it into actuality, and a forma assistens, which uses the body as an instrument and governs it as a sailor steers his ship. As Pine points out, this interpretation—which is deeply influenced by a Neoplatonist conception of the soul and derived by Nifo from thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, and John of Jandun—makes “the intellect . . . both the highest form of the body and the assisting form of the body. As the highest form of the body, the intellect is the organizing principle of bodily activity and perishes with decay of bodily powers. Conceived in this way, it is individuated and multiplied. But as forma assistens, it simply assists the body in the knowing process. It is a single, divine form, undifferentiated and one for all men.”34 Both in his commentaries on Aristotle’s psychological and zoological works and in his treatise De immortalitate animae, Nifo repeatedly insists on the divine nature and origin of the intellect or intellectual power (vis intellectiva or intellectualis), as he calls it many times, and therefore on its ontological distinctness from all other cognitive faculties. Against Pomponazzi’s view that the human intellect is just one step above the cogitative power in the hierarchy of faculties—since it is immediately superior to it, as we have seen— Nifo objects that this is a silly way to establish a hierarchy between the faculties or degrees of the soul (hic ordo frivolus est). Intellect cannot be put alongside the other degrees of the soul (non ponitur in latitudine caeterorum graduum animae), because intellect comes from outside, while all the other degrees

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 49 of the soul come from matter and seed (cum illi gradus sint ex materia et semine: hic extrinsecus accedat).35 These “other degrees” of the soul that Nifo mentions are described as different aspects or forms of the sensitive soul: the most elementary form is that of animals that possess only sense; the intermediate form is that of animals that are also endowed with locomotion; the third and noblest form of the sensitive soul is found in animals, such as men but also pygmies,36 who possess the ability to reason (ratiocinationem) and intelligence or the cogitative faculty (dianoeam, id est ratiocinativam sive cogitariam).37 Therefore, like Pomponazzi, Nifo also admits the existence of mental faculties that are defined as “rational” and yet are an expression of the sensitive soul and not peculiar to man, but shared by other animal species. Nifo’s explanation, however, differs from Pomponazzi’s in that Nifo asserts the existence of a clear ontological gap: both between the various forms of ratiocinatio sensibilis and the intellect, which he argues neither proceeds from the nature of an animal nor is a degree of the soul, but rather joins the soul from outside; and also between man, to whom Nifo attributes a truly universal intellectual grasp on things, and beasts, whose thinking never goes beyond the cognition of particulars. Nifo takes this ontological gap between man and beast to its logical extreme in a passage of his commentary on De anima, where he argues that man, as he is endowed with a “speculative intellect” (intellectum speculativum), cannot be counted among the animalia sensitiva (ergo homo excluditur a tali latitudine) and therefore stands beyond rather than at the top of the scala naturae. Only if we want to rank animals unreservedly (si velimus graduare animalia simpliciter), that is simply according to their mortal features, may we place man at the top of this hierarchy (inter animalia constituemus hominem in ultimo).38 In its general lines and major premises, Nifo’s approach to the nature of thinking as well as to the difference between human and animal cognition should undoubtedly be located in a strongly dichotomous and polarizing theoretical framework. If we consider more closely, however, how Nifo explains the interaction of different mental faculties and the existence of various forms and degrees of the same mental faculty, and how he accounts for the objective resemblance of some crucial aspects of cognitive behavior in men and beasts, then we can appreciate Nifo’s efforts to shorten the distance and to build bridges, so to speak, between the human intellect and the mental faculties of the sensitive soul, as well as between humans and animals. Let us take the case of the imaginative faculty as an example. Since it is part of the sensitive soul, Nifo conceives of this faculty as ontologically

50 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI distinct from and inferior to intellect. But when commenting on the section of De anima (433, b28–31) in which Aristotle discusses the connection between motion, desire, and imagination in animals and in man, Nifo unhesitatingly adopts and develops the Aristotelian distinction between rational and sensitive imagination39 by attributing the phantasia rationalis exclusively to man and the phantasia sensitiva to all animals (including man) that are moved by a desire caused by and associated with the product of imagination (appetitu phantastico).40 As for the ontological status of the phantasia rationalis, Nifo cites the contrasting views of Nemesius and Averroës, without clearly favoring either of these interpretative options: according to Nemesius, the phantasia rationalis should be understood here as intellect, which would imply that the intellectual faculty governs desire in man; according to Averroës, the phantasia rationalis should be understood as a synonymous with “cogitative” faculty and should therefore be kept within the boundaries of the sensitive soul.41 But the most interesting aspect of his account is that, in arguing for the existence of a connection between motion, desire, and imagination in both man and in animals, Nifo explicitly rejects the possibility that animals are driven by a natural instinct that has no share in cognition. He writes, “all the animals are moved not by a natural, but by an imaginative desire (non naturali, sed phantastico appetitu moventur), for this happens for all [the animals]. It is therefore appropriate to say that every animal is moved by a cognitive desire (appetitu cognitivo).”42 In regard to the question of whether recollection is an activity of the intellect or of the sensitive soul, Nifo also argues that imagination and intellect are somehow codetermining faculties in man, despite their ontological and genetic incommensurability (the one is part of the perishable soul, the other has a divine and imperishable nature; the one comes from matter and seed, the other comes from outside). On the one hand, Aristotle argues that recollection is peculiar to man—while memory is common to many other animals—because recollection is a kind of inquisitio deliberativa (that is how Nifo renders the Greek to bouleutikon) and man is the only being capable of deliberatio.43 As Nifo remarks, Themistius argues on this basis that recollection is an activity of the intellect, since “other powers than the intellect can think and deliberate, but only the mind and intellect have the power to recollect (sola autem mens ac intellectus reminiscitur).”44 On the other hand, Aristotle describes recollection as an activity in which bodily factors play a significant role.45 Here Nifo faced a potential contradiction—how could he consistently define an activity as intellectual and corporeal (or based on/influenced by bodily factors) according to his own Intellektlehre?

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 51 It is therefore unsurprising that he is inclined to admit that “apparently Aristotle wanted recollection to be a bodily activity (reminiscentiam esse actionem corpoream), although he did not specify of which sense it is the act (cuius sensus actus sit).” He thus follows and develops Averroës’s reading of Aristotle’s theory of recollection: The interpreter [Averroës] affirms in his commentaries that recollection is a bodily activity, not of the intellect, but rather an activity of the sensitive faculty, which is nobler in man than in other animals because of its connection to the intellect. . . . Just as remembering is not in itself an activity of the intellect, but an activity of the sensitive part, so is recollecting not an activity of the intellect, but an activity of the common sense, which in man is (identified with) the imaginative faculty. When someone says that we recollect our thoughts (intellectionum), I admit this is true, however, not insofar as recollection is an activity of the intellect, but as recollection is an activity of the common sense, in which phantasms are located, in which are thoughts and objects of thinking are located (intellectiones et intelligibilia), like colors on a wall.46

Nifo explains recollection as an activity of the imaginative faculty—hence of the sensitive (and bodily) part of the soul—that cannot, however, take place without a connection to the sensitive part with the intellect. With this argument, Nifo attempts to give a coherent explanation of recollection as a specifically human activity, since only man participates in the intellective power. Recollection is carried out, however, by a part or faculty of the soul, imagination as common sense, that man has in common with animals. In essence, an activity that ambiguously occupies a kind of middle ground between sensation and thinking in Aristotle’s text finds in Nifo’s interpretation a clear location in a dichotomous theory of the mental faculties while retaining its inherent ambivalence. At the same time, Nifo brings a key principle into play to account for the difference between human and animal cognition. Even beyond the ontological gap that separates man, who participates in the divine intellect, from beasts, which do not, Nifo describes man as superior to beasts also with respect to the “mental” faculties located in the sensitive part of the soul, which therefore are common to both men and animals. These shared faculties are said to reach a higher degree of perfection in man than in animals thanks to a kind of “perfecting power” of the intellect. Thus, for example, Nifo applies this “perfection argument” in his discussion of whether pygmies are endowed with

52 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI recollection, a question he traces back directly to Aristotle: “In a way it can be said that Aristotle actually meant also pygmy when speaking of man, for he sometimes called them by this name. Or one has to say that Aristotle, when speaking of recollection, means ‘perfect recollection,’ which is not only of particular but also of universal apprehensions, and only man has this kind of recollection.”47 Nifo makes a very similar argument in his commentary on Aristotle’s Historia Animalium VII (VIII), 1, 588a16–589a9, where he explains why signs of characters and their differences (signa morum et differentiae) are observed more easily in man than in other animals: “man lives with a more perfect soul (perfectiore anima vivit), because the soul, thanks to which man lives, is not only sensitive (sensualis) but also intellective and divine (intellectualis atque divina). For this reason the differences of disposition (affectuum differentiae) are more evident.”48 A further field in which Nifo utilizes the “perfection argument” is the question of the place of man on the scala naturae. In his commentary on De anima, II, 3, 415a5 ff., where Aristotle distinguishes between animals endowed merely with sensation, animals endowed with locomotion, and, “lastly and most rarely” (teleutaion de kai elachista), animals that also have reason and thought, Nifo mistakes the adverbial syntagma teleutaion de kai elachista as adjectival. He then (mis-)translates the last part of the sentence as “the last and the smallest (animal has) power of reasoning and thought (ultimum autem minimum, logismum et dianoeam),”49 and identifies this animal as man. Nifo explains how man can be conceived of as the last and the smallest animal in the following terms: man is the last according to his origin, which is divine; in other words, he occupies the highest rank on the scala naturae. But man is also the smallest animal in a logical rather than a physical sense, because “man is the canon and measure of all animals: for this reason one animal is more perfect than another, because it resembles more closely to man, such as pygmies and apes; and for this reason one animal is of lesser worth than another, because it is far removed from men, such as an oyster or sea sponge. And since a canon and a measure wish to be ‘the smallest’ and nearly indivisible, man is thus the minimum of animals, albeit not the smallest.”50 Conclusions This inquiry into Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s views on the differences and commonalities of human and animal cognition with respect to their nature, extent, origin, and organs has clearly shown how profound and

(DIS)EMBODIED THINKING & THE SCALE OF BEINGS | 53 theoretically sophisticated the process of rethinking one of the most controversial aspects of Aristotelian natural philosophy was in the milieu of Paduan Aristotelianism in the early sixteenth century. Some key aspects of this rethinking process, as they emerge from the works of the two most prominent figures of this intellectual and academic milieu, deserve to be summarized and made more explicit by way of a conclusion. First, animals are granted a variety of “mental faculties.” Although they are connected to the sensitive part of the soul, they are nevertheless characterized as forms of “sensitive thinking” or, perhaps more accurately, of “reasoning.” These faculties are always said to be concerned with particulars and unable to grasp universals. Yet, insofar as they are connected to or consist of the cogitative power and/or the activity of imagination, which in man is responsible for providing the intellect with the materials from which the objects of thinking are actually thought, these faculties can even be described as somehow “rational” or as analogous to “rational thinking” in man in the proper sense of the word. Most interestingly, such a characterization of animal cognition appears, with some variations, of course, both in mortalist and immortalist contexts, such as Pomponazzi’s and Nifo’s rival theories of the soul. Second, there is a very clear tendency in early sixteenth-century Paduan Aristotelianism to emphasize the aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and psychology that suggest his acceptance of a gradualist concept of the scale of beings. Naturally, the way this general tendency manifests itself in each commentator depends very much on whether they contextually accept or reject the immortal and divine nature of the human intellect. Also in this respect, the case of Pomponazzi and Nifo is paradigmatic. Pomponazzi’s representation of the scala naturae is not only gradualist, but also fully continualist, insofar as the human intellect is said to be only slightly superior to the cogitative faculty, the highest form of animal thinking, and not at all separate from or incommensurable with it in essence. One could even say that Pomponazzi conceives of the scala naturae in relativistic terms, since he seems to affirm the superiority of man on a purely discursive level rather than in actuality. This emerges clearly from Pomponazzi’s comments on the beastlike cognitive grasp of reality to which most men are confined. Nifo’s concern, on the contrary, is to develop a gradualist representation of the modes and degrees of human and animal cognition within a conception of the human intellect as separate from and ontologically incommensurable with the cognitive faculties of the sensitive part of the soul.

54 | ROBERTO LO PRESTI Third, the great interest in animal cognition as a general theoretical issue, as well as in the definition, differentiation, and graduation of a great number of cognitive faculties, both in a single species and in a comparative perspective, goes beyond even the scope of Aristotle’s own investigations. Yet it also undoubtedly derived from them, since these concerns are also grounded in and reflect a centuries-long tradition of medical investigation and debate on the anatomophysiology of the perceptual and higher cognitive faculties and ultimately on the seat of the soul. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, this tradition, which stemmed from Galen and was vastly enriched and brought into the Aristotelian commentary tradition first by Greek and then above all by Arabic commentators, became one of the driving factors of what Simone De Angelis has described as the “genesis” and “configuration” of an anthropological science that was dedicated above all to bringing to light what characterizes a (human) animal as a man.

Chapter 3 For Christ’s Sake Pious Notions of the Human & Animal Body in Early Jesuit Philosophy & Theology

Christoph Sander

I n a satirical passage of Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso (1613), the Greek god Apollo is about to judge some Renaissance heretics and among them Pietro Pomponazzi is also brought to trial.1 Apollo is in favor of making short work of him, so he decides to burn Pomponazzi together with his library. He accuses Pomponazzi of writing a book in which he tried to prove that men are beasts (provare che gli uomini erano bestie), because they lack an immortal soul. Pomponazzi, fearing his death, protests and claims that he postulated the mortality of the soul only as a philosopher (solo come filosofo)—while, as a pious Christian, he naturally believed in the immortality of the soul. This leads Apollo to make a remarkable concession in his instructions to the executioner: accordingly, Pomponazzi should be burned only as a philosopher (solo come filosofo). The sarcastic punchline of the story, hinting at Roman censorship, gives us an interesting insight into some crucial aspects of early modern intellectual history. The fictitious trial has to be understood against the background of the centenary of the papal bull Apostolici regiminis (1513) issued by the Fifth Lateran Council.2 The bull was probably not issued in response to Pomponazzi specifically, but rather to a style of reasoning advocated by Pomponazzi and others, which challenged the Catholic Church by proposing a so-called notion of “double truth.”3 According to this 55

56 | CHRISTOPH SANDER position, philosophy could arrive at different conclusions from those that are true and certain according to faith. This raised an epistemic problem, namely to what extent natural reason could prove doctrines of faith. Of the questions on which these two domains of reason and faith allegedly contradicted one another, the most important concerned the nature of man, in particular his immortal soul.4 As Apollo puts it, denying the immortality of the soul means abolishing the distinction between men and beasts. As Christian scholars adopted Aristotelian philosophy during the Middle Ages, the scholastics conventionally explained human beings in relation to brute animals—secundum convenientiam et differentiam, as it was called.5 Animals and men share certain abilities related to their physical and organic existence, such as nutrition and sense perception, and differ with regard to their intellectual and incorporeal abilities, such as free will or discursive thinking.6 It was considered heresy to deny that reason was unique to man, just as it was to claim that beasts have reason.7 Man’s intellectual abilities were attributed to an immortal rational soul, which made human beings the noblest animal (homo animal nobilissimum).8 The human soul, as the Council of Vienne in 1311 famously declared, was defined in Aristotelian terms as the form of the body (forma corporis) in order to guarantee the unity of a human being made out of body and soul.9 Hence the Aristotelian science of the soul was of the utmost theological importance. Among early modern Catholics, however, it was especially the Society of Jesus (SJ, founded in 1540) that designed a philosophical and theological curriculum to preserve the heritage of the Lateran Council, following Aristotle in philosophy and Thomas Aquinas in theology.10 By means of its official Ratio studiorum (1599), the Jesuit order explicitly advised its philosophy teachers to adhere to the decree of 1513 by defending the pious position of the Church whenever a philosophical conclusion appeared to contradict the faith.11 While it is abundantly clear that in the aftermath of the Lateran Council the immortality of the soul was an urgent topic for Catholic authors, very few studies have focused on how the Jesuits approached the human body within the framework of Christianized Aristotelian philosophy.12 But did the Jesuits investigate the human and animal body? Jesuits neither ran medical faculties nor taught medicine.13 They did not comment on any of Aristotle’s zoological works.14 And in contrast to several secular Italian universities, where the study of philosophy was considered a preparation for medicine, Jesuit universities taught philosophy to prepare their students for the study of theology.15 Hence, anatomical and physiological

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 57 questions seemed to have very little to do with Christian goals. In fact, though, this is only half the story. The Jesuits cared about the functions of the human body with regard to healthcare and exercise.16 Jesuit philosophy courses are full of quotations from a wide variety of contemporary anatomical and physiological literature and show considerable interest in Aristotle’s zoological works.17 And, as I will show below, the nature of the human and animal body was very relevant to certain theological issues. This chapter will begin with the first official case of philosophical censorship in the SJ. In 1565, the so-called Decretum Borgianum (DB) prescribed that certain doctrines about the human/animal body and soul had to be taught in Jesuit schools. I shall focus particularly on the obligatory tenet that blood should be called “part of the body.” The two questions I would like to answer are: Why did such a proposition trouble the Jesuits with regard to piety and orthodoxy? And how did the motives behind this tenet shape the philosophical understanding of the human and animal body in works written by members of the SJ? In order to answer these questions, I will proceed in four steps. First, I shall introduce the propositions of the DB and shed light on their compilation against the background of the early pedagogical culture of the Collegio Romano. Then I will briefly explain the Aristotelian physiology and the Christian theology involved. Third, I shall outline how the prescriptions were put into practice by Franciscus Toletus (SJ, 1534–1596), a teacher at the Collegio, focusing on his commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima and on Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Fourth, I shall give a rough overview of how the Jesuits maintained an orthodox yet philosophical understanding of the human and animal body over the next 100 years. Finally, in an epilogue, I will tell how the Catholic notion of blood informed the inquisitional trial of the Belgian physician Jan Baptist Van Helmont. Ledesma vs. Perera: Christ’s Blood at the Collegio Romano In November 1565, the Superior General of the SJ, Franciscus Borgia (SJ, 1510–1572), issued a brief decree (DB) to be sent to all Jesuit colleges.18 The decree consisted of two lists. The first list covered five general points outlining what Jesuit teachers at the colleges must not do in general; for example, they should not teach anything either in philosophy or in theology that is not in agreement with faith. The second list enumerates seventeen propositions that the teachers should defend and teach with regard to topics such as God, the angels, and the soul. The following four

58 | CHRISTOPH SANDER propositions from this list may be considered a unit and are particularly relevant for the purpose of this chapter (nos. 8–11 in the decree): (a) There are—according to Aristotle, true philosophy, and natural reason—neither several souls in man, namely, an intellective, a sensitive, and a vegetative soul, nor a vegetative and sensitive soul in beasts (Non sunt plures animae in homine, intellectiva, sensitiva, vegetativa; nec in bruto sensitiva et vegetativa, secundum Aristotelem, veram philosophiam et rationem naturalem).19 (b) The soul in man or in beasts is not in hair of the body or of the head (Anima in homine aut in brutis non est in pilis aut capillis). (c) The sensitive and vegetative faculty in man or in beasts is not immediately based in the prime matter (Potentiae sensitivae et vegetativae in homine aut in bruto non subiectantur in materia prima immediate). (d) The humors are somehow parts of man and animals (Humores aliquo modo sunt partes hominis seu animalis).

First, I shall briefly reconstruct why these propositions were put on this list. The most likely scenario is the following: the Prefect of Studies of the Roman College, Diego de Ledesma (SJ, 1524–1575), considered the censorship of instruction a crucial part of his pedagogical reform plan to ensure the soundness and unity of doctrine in philosophy.20 According to Ledesma, philosophy should be taught in such a way that it supported theology (sic doceatur philosophia, ut serviat theologiae).21 Most of Ledesma’s measures were probably prompted by a colleague named Benito Perera (SJ, 1535–1610), whose philosophical teachings were suspected of “Averroism”; Perera had also been accused of skepticism for claiming that some philosophical matters crucial to the faith could not be known by natural reason.22 In 1564, Ledesma compiled a list of incriminating propositions that Perera’s pupils had supposedly adopted.23 According to this list, Perera’s pupils almost literally rejected the propositions (a) and (d) that were prescribed shortly thereafter in the DB. Additionally, Ledesma compiled two more lists at the same time, covering a total of thirty-five philosophical propositions that he wanted all teachers to defend and to teach as “according to true philosophy and according to Aristotle.”24 Not only are propositions (a) and (d) spelled out at greater length in these two lists, but most of the remaining propositions of the DB also appear in Ledesma’s preliminary work of 1564. Hence, it is most likely that Ledesma was the ghostwriter of the DB.25 At least with regard to propositions (a) and (d), it seems likely that

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 59 Perera was responsible for their inclusion in the DB. Although I was unable to find these positions in Perera’s own writings, Ledesma mentions that Perera’s pupils indeed defended them:26 (*a) There are three distinct souls (animae totales) in man (vegetativa, sensitiva et rationalis). (*d) Blood and the humors are not part of the human body (partes corporis humani).27 In Ledesma’s preliminary lists, we read under the heading “On the soul” that man has only one rational soul.28 Under the heading “On the human body,” he writes that blood and the humors are part of the integrity of nature and its truth (de integritate naturae ac de veritate eius), that they should somehow be called “part of the body” (sint dicendi aliquo saltem modo pars corporis), and finally that everything that follows from this must be admitted and everything contrary to it must be refuted.29 Moreover, when collecting Perera’s errors, Ledesma explains that (*d) seems to contradict the hypostatic union of Christ’s blood and humors, the integrity and truth of the body in Christ’s resurrection (veritas ac integritas resurgentis Xpi. corporis), and the consecration of his blood in the Eucharist.30 While some of the DB’s propositions concern the nature of the human and animal body and soul, the case of (d) in particular shows that it was the nature of Christ’s body that was at stake. As a result, the body in general became a relevant theological issue and hence the subject of censorship. I shall explain how this came about by briefly summarizing a commentary Ledesma had written on the DB probably in 1574.31 Ledesma primarily aimed to accomplish two things with this commentary. First, he wanted to determine which propositions should still be subject to Jesuit philosophical censorship. Second, he justified his selection by describing the particular heresy a proposition targeted and which authorities, both philosophical and theological, supported the soundness of the prescribed tenet. In the case of (a), Ledesma first refers to the condemned error of the Manicheans, who mistakenly assumed an intellective and a sensitive soul in every man.32 He then quotes the Fourth Council of Constantinople (octavus Synodus generalis, 869–870), which declared that “the Old and New Testament teach that a man or woman has one rational and intellectual soul.”33 Ledesma immediately points out that the error of assuming two separate souls leads to problems in Christology: did the hypothetical sensitive soul remain united with or separate from Christ’s body in the grave during the triduum mortis, that is, the time between his death on the cross and his resurrection three days later?34 Was the sensitive soul resurrected simultaneously with the rational soul? A teacher might not be able to answer these

60 | CHRISTOPH SANDER questions without slipping into heresy (non facile quis ad haec respondere poterit absque aliqua impietate), and Scripture frequently mentions the soul as a unit.35 After these strictly theological considerations, Ledesma proceeds to give philosophical reasons—an approach that is important to Ledesma’s whole idea of the DB, since he explicitly intended to defend the proposition secundum Aristotelem et veram philosophiam. He first makes an argument ad absurdum: “The sensitive soul, when informing the body, would form an irrational, not a rational unit together with matter. Thus, man would be composed of a brute part and a rational soul, as if someone were to say that man is composed of a goat (ex capra) and a rational soul.”36 Ledesma next lists some supporters of his hylomorphic account of the soul, above all Thomas Aquinas, whose opponents William of Ockham, John of Jandun, and Paul of Venice, according to Ledesma, explicitly contradicted the saints and the church decrees by assuming several souls in man.37 Unfortunately, Ledesma does not comment on propositions (b) and (c) but merely remarks that they may be omitted at present, not because they are wrong or should not be held, but rather because it seems that they should not be included with the other propositions.38 Ledesma in fact dedicates a very extensive commentary to proposition (d) in order to prove that the humors are part of man and animal. He first narrows down the question: blood is one of the four humors. He then attempts to prove that blood is truly part of the body and pertains to the “truth of nature.”39 Ledesma’s first ecclesiastical proof comes from the rather recent thirteenth session of the Council of Trent (1551), which defined the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Eucharist: “the body of Christ is present in the Sacrament in the form of wine, and the blood in the form of bread, and the soul in both, by the natural force of that connection and concomitancy whereby the parts of Christ (partes Christi) our Lord, who has now risen from the dead, to die no more, are joined together.”40 To make a long story short: when laypeople do not receive the chalice containing the wine, this does not prevent them from partaking of Christ’s blood, because his blood is part of his body which is given as host. The theological concept of the Catholic Counterreformation that justified this view was called concomitantia and had its roots in the writings of Aquinas.41 Ledesma turns next to the issue of the incarnation and quotes the Council of Ephesus (431), which specifies that God became a real man composed of the parts of real blood and a real body.42 The hypostatic union of the Logos (Verbum) and the human nature of Christ included his blood, and deviating from this doctrine had also been condemned. Ledesma cites

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 61 papal decrees connected to Pope Clemens VI, namely a council at Barcelona (1350) and the bull Unigenitus dei filius (1343).43 Finally, he cites several passages from Aristotle’s zoological writings (De partibus animalium, De historia animalium) and a relevant article of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae.44 Ledesma explains, anticipating a potential objection, that when Aristotle does not consider blood part of the body in a particular passage, because blood lacks feeling, he is attributing a different meaning to the word “part.” In this rather narrow meaning, Aristotle is referring only to body parts like the hands that have organs of touch.45 The fact that Aquinas considers blood only a part in potency (pars in potentia) in a particular passage is likewise no counterargument, because Aquinas also acknowledges that blood is the seat of life (sedes vitae) and provides heat to all parts of an animal.46 By “part in potency” Aquinas simply meant that another part of the body can be generated from blood, just as cartilage is formed from flesh. Even the brief and superficial outline of Ledesma’s commentary on the DB given above shows that the nature of the human body was theologically relevant to the sacrament of the Eucharist and to Christology. Furthermore, it also proves that these orthodox doctrines were integrated into the philosophical curriculum. Hence, Ledesma was intent on finding philosophical support for the prescriptions of the DB, since the bull of 1513 had decreed that natural reason could not contradict the truth of faith. I now shall give an overview of the theological and philosophical presuppositions that were at stake in the doctrines tackled thus far. Splitting Hairs: How Scholastics Tackled the Question of Essential Parts in Human Beings Already the earliest church fathers struggled with the question of how to understand Christ’s incarnation and bodily resurrection in physiological terms.47 Which parts of the human body are essential, so that the divine nature was united with them in the hypostatic union? When Christ rose from the dead, did he leave behind any parts of his body? Is the food he had eaten included in the resurrection? What about fingernails and hair? Although a great number of scriptural passages partially answer these questions, Christian theologians attempted to give a more systematic and general account of the physiological nature of the resurrection. The technical notion of the very core of the human body was called the “truth of human nature” (veritas humanae naturae), an expression that had become popular in medieval scholasticism from Peter Lombard’s Sentences. But as soon as

62 | CHRISTOPH SANDER Aristotelian natural philosophy arrived in the Latin west, this concept was contested by peripatetic biology and subsequently reformulated in peripatetic biological terms, thus giving rise to a “scientific account”: “Scholastic theology is distinctive in its readiness to dispute or incorporate doctrines from the natural sciences.”48 Given the physical presence of God on earth and the promise of individual bodily resurrection, it is abundantly clear why Ledesma paid so much attention to the philosophical account of the body and soul. Christ’s resurrection was the “example of our resurrection” (resurrectio Christi est exemplar nostrae resurrectionis) and hence constituted a model and a goal for philosophical inquiries into the body and soul.49 The unity of Christ’s soul and his blood as part of his body were crucial issues in this respect. Yet, the question of Christ’s blood in particular led to difficulties and controversy. Although most scholastics agreed that Christ’s blood was hypostatically united with the Logos, there was considerable debate about certain difficult cases. For instance:50 Was the Logos united with the blood that Christ had shed during his martyrdom? What happened to the blood during his stay in the grave (triduum mortis)? If all of Christ’s blood was resurrected with him, what is actually contained in the many blood relics? Controversy over such questions was fought out especially between the two mendicant orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans—and was still raging when Ledesma taught at the College in Rome. Lecturing on scholastic theology at a Jesuit college meant reading the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, and teachers were guided by questions posed by scholastics like Jean Capreolus, Duns Scotus, Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, Gabriel Biel, and Thomas de Vio “Cajetan.”51 Some fifteenth-century authors, such as Biel or Alfonso Ribera “Tostado,” denied that Christ’s blood was part of his body.52 Durandus, Capreolus, and Scotus maintained that blood was not informed by the rational soul. Moreover, the view that Christ’s blood was not directly assumed by the Logos and that not all of Christ’s blood was resurrected was pinned particularly on Durandus.53 These cases surely played a part in triggering Ledesma’s censorship, which favored the contrary position taken by Aquinas. However, regarding Christ’s blood, the authority of two rival Dominican theologians seems to have been especially important to early Jesuit authors. The Dominican Inquisitor Silvestro Mazzolini “Prierias” compiled an influential ecclesiastical collection (Rosa aurea, 1503) of papal decisions and inner-Thomistic debates on the question of whether Christ’s blood was part of his body.54 Not only did Ledesma use this collection, it also proves

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 63 that the topic remained a delicate subject of discussion in early sixteenthcentury Italy. The Dominican Cardinal Cajetan, who was attacked by Prierias, had offered an interpretation in the last part of his commentary on Aquinas’s Summa (1522) as to how and how much of Christ’s blood was actually resurrected.55 As a member of the Lateran Council in 1513, Cajetan did not completely agree with the bull and was attacked by other Catholics for his commentary on De anima, in which he expressed sympathy for the view that natural reason and faith do not always agree with one another.56 Cajetan had already claimed in his commentary on De anima (1510) that Aristotle did not regard blood as an animal part. Hence, in his commentary on the Summa, he questioned whether it could be proven by the principles of Aristotelian biology that blood is part of the body, yet Cajetan considered an affirmative answer strictly a matter of faith.57 He mentions the point that Aristotle considered blood the last link in the chain of nutrition and thus concluded that it could not be part of an animal.58 Cajetan therefore attempts to draw a distinction between strictly nutrimental blood, which was not part of Christ’s body, and a type of blood more thoroughly integrated into the body. Documents from the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Sanctum Officium, Censura Librorum) reveal that attempts had already been made to “expunge” this view during preparations for Pope Pius V’s ambitious project of a new edition of Aquinas’s Summa printed together with Cajetan’s commentary (Editio Piana, 1570).59 Ledesma was not involved in this project and does not explicitly mention Cajetan in this context. His censorship, as argued above, was probably triggered rather by the local scandal surrounding his colleague Perera. Still, Ledesma criticizes Cajetan in his commentary regarding other doctrines, and Cajetan surely can be considered one of the most important exponents of early sixteenth-century Thomism, whose influence on the early Jesuits has yet to be explored.60 For the purpose of this chapter, it is neither necessary to give a fulllength account of the theological subtleties or the biological account involved: what matters is precisely the point that both domains were fully intertwined. The effort to ensure agreement between doctrines of faith and a semi-medical understanding of blood was the background against which details of the human—and by extension the animal—body were relevant to Christian believers. However, one major reason why early sixteenthcentury Catholics put so much effort into reconciling both accounts appears in the bull of 1513 that condemned the possibility of two separate “camps of truth” (natural vs. theological).

64 | CHRISTOPH SANDER Bloodline: How Toletus Implemented Ledesma’s Censorship Let me sum up some provisional results: for certain theological reasons, Ledesma censored specific philosophical doctrines of the animal and human body. Ledesma was compelled to act, because philosophy was considered a preparation for the study of theology in Jesuit colleges; in other words, mistaken views in philosophy might ultimately result in heresy in theology. Ledesma’s agenda, however, does not necessarily imply that it was put into practice by philosophy teachers when lecturing in class. We moreover must clarify how the prescribed doctrines specifically influenced the understanding of the human/animal body in natural philosophy itself. I shall address these two points below by presenting a case study, while leaving more extensive comparative studies to be conducted in subsequent research. Franciscus Toletus taught philosophy and theology at the Jesuit college in Rome at the same time as Ledesma was active there. His commentary on De anima, printed in 1575, is the first Jesuit commentary published on this particular work.61 Ledesma himself served as one of the official censors of the work.62 Toletus and Ledesma even lectured on scholastic theology together (1563–1564), and Toletus commented on the Summa, including the part dedicated to Christ’s incarnation (1565–1566).63 As we shall see, Toletus gives us outstanding insight into the relationship between philosophy and theology of the body, as well as the impact of Ledesma’s censorship on Toletus’s lectures. In fact Toletus’s commentary on De anima begins with an extensive chapter of ten propositions that ought to be defended according to faith.64 Although tenets (a)–(d) of the DB are not included, the syllabus covers several other propositions from it and explains them in almost the very words Ledesma used in his commentary on the DB. It is thus not surprising that Toletus defends doctrines (a)–(d) elsewhere. He argues for the unity of the soul (a’), attacking Ockham, and emphasizes the heretical implications of divergent views for the doctrine of resurrection.65 He frames an argument against a (Scotist) commonplace by maintaining that the vegetative, sensitive, and appetitive potencies of the soul are not immediately inherent in prime matter (c’), but only the will and intellect.66 Although (a’) and (c’) deserve closer analysis, my intention here is merely to underline the basic agreement between Ledesma and Toletus on a superficial level. Toletus defends doctrines (b, “hair”) and (d, “humors”) in the context of the question of whether the soul is in each part of the body.67 He opens the section by elucidating the Aristotelian account of the nature of a living

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 65 body.68 Animal bodies are divided into heterogeneous (e.g., hands) and homogenous parts. The latter include solid (e.g., bones) and fluid parts (e.g., humors). The soul is in all these parts with its whole substance, but not with all its potencies. Although there is only a single soul in a single animal, different faculties in this single soul perform different functions. Hence, for example, animal parts like bones lack feeling, because they lack the sensitive potency of the soul. Toletus seems to have been particularly interested in determining the nature of blood and hair. Blood, Toletus affirms, must be part of the body and to argue otherwise is improvident (temerarius), since it has been officially approved by the Councils of Trent and Ephesus, that is to say, with regard to the concomitantia of Christ’s blood and body in the Eucharist and with regard to the incarnation (d’).69 Nonetheless, Toletus admits that blood can be considered a part in potency only. The fact that blood has no sense perception does not affect its status as an animal part. I will omit Toletus’s reasons here and only refer to the fact that Ledesma had already conceded both these points. Thus far, Toletus is completely in line with Ledesma. Toletus, however, takes on one pressing question that Ledesma did not tackle: is blood alive? The urgency of this question derives from the philosophical quandary of whether every part of a living body can itself be considered a living part. Addressing this problem, Toletus quotes a passage from Aristotle’s Historia animalium, where Aristotle seemingly admits that blood is animated (sanguis animatur).70 Although Toletus grants this view some probability, he ultimately answers in the negative. According to Toletus, blood receives its being from the soul but cannot properly be called “alive” (licet non diceretur vivens, tamen dicetur Esse accipere ab anima).71 Not even the vegetative soul informs blood; rather, Toletus conceives of it merely as a mixture of elements (esse simpliciter mixti). Likewise he understands the passage of Aristotle to mean that blood is converted into the living body by virtue of its function as a nutriment but is not alive itself. The reader will look in vain for an argument in support of this interpretation: obviously, Toletus does not question the role of blood as a nutriment for the body and thus is reluctant to call blood “alive.” Moreover, he firmly rejects fingernails and hair as parts of the body, since they are not informed by the soul (b’).72 They exhibit none of the operations of living substances, and their growth is merely the accumulation of excrement and not the result of an internal force that attracts nutriment. If we now turn to Toletus’s theological discussion of the incarnation in his commentary on the Summa, we get a full picture of the interdependency of philosophy and theology.73 Toletus again repeats that blood is not

66 | CHRISTOPH SANDER alive. Commenting on the same passage of the Historia animalium, he draws an illustrative analogy for the nutrition argument: blood is “animated” (animatur), because it is converted into the animated body, just as oil is “fired” (ignitur), because it is converted into fire.74 He explicitly discusses Cajetan, who—according to Toletus—considered blood to be animated: an idea contrary to the fundamental principles of philosophy (imaginatio contra fundamenta philosophiae).75 Blood and the remaining three humors, however, are necessary for life, as confirmed by the simple experiment of complete exsanguination. For this reason, all humors are hypostatically united with the Logos. Hair, in contrast, is not immediately assumed by the divine nature, for the very reason that it is not part of the body at all.76 At first glance, Toletus appears to have closely followed the instructions of the DB concerning the doctrines that must be defended in philosophy classes. His commentary on De anima clearly laid the groundwork for the theological integration of philosophical doctrines concerning the animal body. Approaching the nature of the human body within the framework of the Aristotelian science of the soul, Toletus not only took interest in whether blood and hair were parts of the human body, but also inquired whether they were informed by the soul, whether they were alive. Toletus can deny that blood is alive, because he does not consider it inconsistent with the theological requirement that blood is an essential part of Christ’s body. The DB had urged philosophy teachers to deny that the soul is in the hair; Toletus does not even consider hair part of the human body, and consequently Christ’s hair is not immediately united with the Logos. To a modern reader, the questions of whether hair pertains to the body or whether it is a superfluous part might appear to be superfluous or even literally splitting hairs. But the scholastics had indeed disputed these problems. Toletus’s teacher, for instance, the Dominican Domingo de Soto, had affirmed that hair (and fingernails) were directly united with the Logos, not despite the point that they were ornaments of the body, but precisely because they were.77 The issue was often raised again in the debate over the sacrament of baptism:78 is it sufficient to sprinkle only the hair with the baptismal water? The answer depends on whether one accepts that hair is an integral part of the body. Bloody Business: How Christ’s Blood Informed Jesuit Natural Philosophy In Toletus’s two works, both questions of natural philosophy arise in a theological context and theological questions in the context of natural

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 67 philosophy. In order to make their teaching more efficient by avoiding unnecessary overlap between philosophy and theology, Jesuit educational planners enumerated several questions that should not be discussed when reading the Summa, but rather receive adequate attention in the philosophy curriculum. The question about the living nature of hair was one such case. The first draft of the Ratio studiorum (1586) stated that theologians should leave the hair question to the philosophers (relinquatur philosopho).79 This was stipulated with regard to the article in the Summa where Aquinas outlines the difference between procreation and generation, alluding to the growth of hair as a clear case of generation.80 The first book of De generatione et corruptione is a key passage in the Corpus Aristotelicum in which the notion of generation is discussed. In chapter 4 of this book, however, Aristotle does not mention hair, but rather blood generated from seed.81 Against this complex background of the relationship between certain topics and mention of them in Aristotle’s works, the Jesuits of Coimbra dedicated extensive chapters of their commentary on De generatione I, 4 (1597) to questions such as the following: Are hair and fingernails animated? Are blood, the humors, and the vital spirits suited for life? Are semen and milk alive?82 The Coimbra Jesuits undertook a detailed analysis of philosophical, philological, medical, and theological investigations into the nature of blood and hair by quoting about fifty authors over a space of more than ten pages. In their refutation of the argument that blood is alive, they remark, for example, that the relevant passage of Aristotle’s Historia animalium (cited by Toletus) in the Greek manuscripts lacks the addition that the Latin translation of Theodorus Gaza renders as “only blood is animated” (sanguis unus animatur).83 A biblical passage in Leviticus 17.11, where the soul of flesh is said to be in the blood (anima carnis in sanguine est), is interpreted, following Augustine, to mean that blood is only a necessary condition for life. Cornelius a Lapide (SJ), for example, endorses this interpretation by referring to the particular reading of the text in the Hebrew language.84 The Conimbricenses cite the empirical fact that the hair/fingernails grow in all three dimensions during young boys’ growth spurts—which allegedly proves that their growth is not simply the one-dimensional accumulation of excrement.85 They also consider the opinions of ancient and contemporary medical authors, such as Galen, Girolamo Fracastoro, Jean Fernel, and Thomas a Veiga, on the matter.86 These few examples suffice to show that the topic of blood and hair by no means fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of theology, but rather received substantial attention

68 | CHRISTOPH SANDER Table 3.1. A brief survey of selected major Jesuit works from the period that consider blood and hair as alive. Author

Commentary on

Is hair

Is blood

alive?

alive?

Diego de Ledesma (1524–1574)

DB (1565/1572)

no

n/a

Franciscus Toletus (1534–1596)

DA/ST (1575/?)

no

no

Franciscus Suárez (1548–1617)

DA/ST (1575/1592)

no

no

Collegium Conimbricense

DGC (1597)

yes

no

Gregorio de Valentia (1550–1603)

ST (1597)

yes

yes

Alfonso Salmerón (1515–1585)

SS (1601)

yes

yes

Girolamo Dandino (1554–1634)

DA (1610)

n/a

no

Antonio Rubio (1548–1615)

DA (1613)

yes

no

Cornelius a Lapide (1567–1637)

SS (1616)

n/a

no

Gabriel Vázquez (1549–1604)

ST (1621)

no

no

P. H. de Mendoza (1578–1641)

DA (1617/1624)

no

yes

Rodrigo de Arriaga (1592–1667)

DA/ST (1632/1643)

yes

yes

Francisco de Oviedo (1602–1651)

DA (1640)

no

yes

T. Compton Carleton (1591–1666)

DA (1649)

yes

no

Richard Lynch (1610–1667)

DA (1654)

yes

yes

in its own right. We can easily corroborate this fact by casting a glance at later Jesuit commentaries, such as those of Antonio Rubio (SJ) and Girolamo Dandino (SJ).87 The latter even dedicated three whole books to the humors and parts of animals as integral parts of his commentary on De anima. After Borgia issued his decree in 1565, the topic of blood and hair was treated in all Jesuit philosophical and theological cursus I could find until the 1650s.88 In 1668, a frontispiece drawn by the Jesuit artist Johann Christoph Storer (SJ, 1620–1671) even shows thirty “Tablets of Law” arranged below Mount Sinai, two of them engraved with the doctrines that blood is not alive but hair is.89 While virtually all Jesuits agreed that blood was part of the body, the question of whether blood and hair were alive remained controversial, even within the order.90 This can be illustrated by a brief survey of selected major Jesuit works from the period.91 Even without taking a closer look at the individual texts, we may nonetheless conclude that either opinion on both questions was almost equally

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 69 defensible.92 In my opinion, it was for theological reasons, or at least because of theological needs, that the topic of blood in particular received so much attention.93 Aquinas’s doctrine of the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, together with the recent urgency of the Tridentine doctrine of concomitancy in the Eucharist, may have brought the issue of blood to prominence in theological contexts.94 Admittedly, from a modern point of view, one could argue that all three cases concern the miraculous nature of Christ’s body and therefore are strictly matters of faith. The Jesuits, however, like most medieval and early modern scholars, approached the issue from a different perspective. Since doctrine stipulated that Christ’s nature was entirely human during his time on earth, it was the nature of the ordinary human body that was at stake. It was generally agreed and had been sanctioned in 1513 that true philosophical conclusions cannot contradict true theological doctrines; accordingly, it was the task of philosophy to determine the nature of the body. Within the framework of Aristotelian philosophy, the human body “as body” was treated no differently from animal bodies in general.95 Moreover, in the Galenic-Aristotelian tradition, a living body included fluid parts, namely the four humors, of which blood was one. Censorship may have been primarily intended to promote a pious notion of Christ’s individual body/blood, but it incidentally also proclaimed a general account of the animal body and the four humors. Yet, in the Jesuit curriculum, these doctrines were taught in reverse order: natural philosophy investigated the animal body and the four humors; later, theology applied this natural knowledge to Christ’s human body and blood. The implicit argument may be reduced to a simplified form as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The four humors are a part of all animal bodies Blood is a humor Therefore, blood is a part of the animal body (1+2) All men are animals Therefore, blood is a part of all human bodies (3+4) Christ had a human body Therefore, the four humors are a part of Christ’s body (5+6) Therefore, blood is a part of Christ’s body (2+7)

While the natural philosopher, following Aristotle, starts at (1–4), the theologian is particularly interested in (8) and believes in (6) as the miracle of the incarnation. Hence, if the theologian is intent on making a valid

70 | CHRISTOPH SANDER deduction, he will want to control the doctrines of natural philosophy (1, 2, 4). Therefore, (1) is prescribed verbatim as (d) in the DB, and (2, 4) were undisputed anyway. As a side effect of this argument, it is no wonder, that, for example, Tomas Compton Carleton (SJ)—mutatis mutandis—not only considered hair and fingernails alive, but also hooves, feathers, and fish scales.96 As the exception that proves the rule, Richard Lynch (SJ) argued that only human blood is animated, not the blood of beasts—according to the hypothesis that the souls of beasts are divisible.97 And for most of the authors mentioned above, not only Christ’s blood was united with the Logos, but also his black and yellow bile and phlegm. Although one might not have expected it, the Jesuits investigated the nature of the animal body in some detail as part of their philosophical and theological education. Also outside the Jesuit realm, not only was the physio-theological investigation in the nature of Christ’s blood taken up in strictly theological works, such as Franciscus Collius’s 912-page book De sanguine Christi (1617), but the topic of blood also received considerable interest in the context of Physica sacra, that is, the attempt to base knowledge about the natural world on biblical sources.98 For example, in his De sacra philosophia (1587), Franciscus Vallesius discusses the question of whether blood is part of the animal body at length, as does Vicentius Moles in his Philosophia naturalis sacrosancti corporis Iesu Christi (1639).99 This evidence and the scholastic arguments of the Jesuits discussed above demonstrate that some scholarly views on the scope of the Catholic research program should be formulated in a more balanced manner. This is true, for instance, in the case of Eckhard Kessler’s claim that “as a consequence of the Pomponazzi affair, we can observe not only a divorce of natural philosophy from Christian philosophy, but also a rebirth of Christian philosophy in its own right.”100 If there was a divorce, then there also was a second marriage. Finally, medical works, such as the first monograph on hair (1609) by the French physician Jean Tardin and William Harvey’s entire project on blood, appear in a different light when viewed against this theological background. Tardin himself discusses the opinions of Aquinas and other scholastics on whether hair is alive.101 In sketching the scholarly background of Harvey’s blood-centrism, Roger French states that “many [of Harvey’s contemporaries] denied that the blood was part of the body at all.”102 I do not want to question precisely how “many,” but virtually no Catholic denied this. In his Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651), Harvey subsequently quotes both the passage of Aristotle’s Historia animalium and the verse from Leviticus 17 to promote his view that life consists in blood

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 71 itself.103 However, in contrast to some of his Jesuit colleagues, he did not realize that his translation of Aristotle was erroneous and that the true meaning of the passage from Moses was potentially blurred by his “smattering of Hebrew.”104 Van Helmont’s Fantastic Blood Already the fictitious trial against Pomponazzi, like the actual investigation against Perera’s teaching, and the posthumous expurgation of Cajetan’s works clearly attest how earnestly especially Catholic theologians had tried to reconcile the notions of the animal body and soul in natural philosophy and in Christian belief. It was the Flemish physician Jan Baptist Van Helmont, however, who would experience the dark side of this Catholic preoccupation. Van Helmont had dealt with the magnetic healing of wounds in a treatise directed primarily against the Jesuit theologian Jean Roberti (SJ, 1569–1651), who had condemned this miraculous cure as superstitious and demonic.105 The so-called “weapon salve” promised no less than to heal a wound by applying the patient’s blood merely to the weapon that had inflicted the wound, while the wound itself was dressed but not treated with medicine. Van Helmont understood this cure as a natural, magnetic process, because animal and human blood is endowed with imagination.106 This property allows blood to “communicate,” so to speak, with the body in which it originated, even when the blood had been shed and was outside the veins. Moreover, Van Helmont underpins his quasi-vitalist account of blood with biblical support, citing the Old Testament prohibition of consuming animals with blood in their bodies, for the very reason that the soul (anima) is in the blood.107 Although Van Helmont’s treatise had been published in 1621 without his knowledge—as he claimed—and although it contained a statement that placed the entire work under Catholic authority, it resulted in a lengthy inquisitional trial against him, involving at least three interrogations, four days in prison, and a long period under house arrest.108 When in 1623 the Spanish Inquisition collected twenty-seven heretical propositions from Van Helmont’s work and local theologians in the southern Netherlands opened an investigation against the physician, his account of living blood was among the statements singled out for condemnation.109 For these Flemish theologians, the very idea that any life or imaginative faculty remained in extravenous blood amounted to a heresy condemned

72 | CHRISTOPH SANDER 1,200 years before, a ridiculous belief of country bumpkins, and moreover something contrary to common experience.110 In his first interrogation (1627), Van Helmont still dares to defend his views on blood, informing the jury about its biblical proofs.111 Already in his second interrogation (1630), under threat of punishment, he admits to falsely attributing a soul to blood (animam male attributam esse sanguini) and states that he will submit his answer to the judgment of the theologians (responsionem suam submittere judicio theologorum).112 However, as he explains in his third interrogation (1634), it was common sense among physicians that even extravenous blood was still endowed with a vital spirit (consensu medicorum inhabitare spiritum vitalem sanguini etiam extravenato). He thereby simply avoids the concept of anima by expressing the argument in purely medical terminology.113 His enemies, however, were especially concerned about the Christological consequences of Van Helmont’s notion of blood. They repeatedly emphasize how Van Helmont’s quasi-medical tenets result in indisputably heretical statements when applied to Christ’s bodily nature or his blood.114 Although I could not find any explicit criticism of Van Helmont in his enemies’ theological works, they discuss both the question of the living nature of blood, as usual, in the context of the incarnation and the question as to whether Christ’s soul informed all parts of his body, including his blood. For example, in his commentary on the Summa (1631), Johannes Wiggers (1571–1639), a catholic theologian and a participant in Van Helmont’s trial, argues that even if one supposed that blood was not informed by the soul, it still would not follow that blood is not an integral part of the animal body (quia esto quod sanguis non informetur anima, poterit tamen dici pars animalis).115 He cites both the medical and scriptural account that the soul (i.e., life) is said to be in the blood, because it is necessary for life (nam anima, id est vita non tantum secundum medicos, verum etiam secundum Scripturam, dicitur esse in sanguine).116 Even though the question of whether blood is informed by the soul remained open for discussion even among Catholics, Van Helmont’s claim that extravenous blood was endowed with phantasia or a sensitive faculty clearly went beyond any opinio probabilis. This was not even considered a matter for scholastic discussion. Van Helmont, however, had learned his lesson, and whenever he revisited the question of whether blood was informed by the soul in his later writings, he did so in an almost submissive manner.117 He not only openly denies that blood is informed by the soul in at least three later works, he even explicitly describes his encounter with the adamant accusations of the theologians:118

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE | 73 Finally, neither [venous] blood nor even arterial blood is endowed with animal sense and touch, although they [i.e., the two types of blood] sense by sympathy, even when extra-venous. . . . In this respect I was asked by theologians whether blood is informed by the soul. I hold, subject to correction by better judgment, that nothing is informed by the soul of an animated being that does not participate in the sensitive soul. . . . Therefore, for something to be informed by the soul, it is necessary that it is alive and senses in the same manner as the subject of its own life.119

As already at his final interrogation, Van Helmont shrewdly gives himself considerable leeway—and perhaps merely pays lip service—by explicitly admitting the quasi-pious position the theologians had dictated to him, while, at the same time, still maintaining that blood is endowed with a sympathetic type of sensation.120 On at least a superficial level, both Van Helmont’s and Wiggers’s accounts of blood attempt to harmonize medical and theological approaches, yet their arguments emerge from two very different contexts. While Wiggers addresses the question in a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa dealing with the incarnation, Van Helmont tackles the question in a discussion of human and animal physiology. Admittedly, Van Helmont’s trial was motivated by many more ideological and confessional reasons than simply his account of blood.121 However, his notion of “fantastic blood” afforded his enemies an opportunity to attack him on theological grounds. The prosecution and eventual condemnation of precisely this point was premised, as I have argued in the course of this paper, on a specific mind-set that developed during the sixteenth century. According to this mind-set, questions of natural philosophy and medicine regarding the ordinary animal body had to meet the theological demands of Christian doctrine, such as the incarnation, the resurrection, and the sacraments.

Chapter 4 Renaissance Psychology Franciscus Vallesius (1524–1592) & Otto Casmann (1562–1607) on Animal & Human Souls

Davide Cellamare

R enaissance natur a l philosophers a nd ph ysicians devoted much attention to the study of the soul. In some cases, this study led them to devise novel solutions to the philosophical problems they inherited from the medieval tradition of natural philosophy and medicine.1 In other cases, the originality of their work lies in the formulation of entirely new questions or the revival of problems that originated in the ancient philosophical and medical tradition but had been almost completely neglected in the Middle Ages.2 One example of this is the philosophical debate about the reason of animals. In this chapter, I will address the increased attention that sixteenthcentury works in psychology paid to the comparative study of animal and human souls. Specifically, I will examine the question of “whether bruta possess reason” as discussed in two influential sixteenth-century works: Franciscus Vallesius’s Sacra Philosophia (1582), which defends the view that animals are endowed with some form of reason; and Otto Casmann’s Psychologia Anthropologica (1594), which adopts the rival position in a direct attack on Vallesius’s arguments.3 The debate between Casmann and Vallesius nicely illustrates the different directions in which the debate about animal souls was taken by two Renaissance authors with a strong interest in medicine and anatomy. Analysis of the two texts clearly shows 74

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 75 that Renaissance discussions of animal reason were occasioned to a significant extent by the growing use of ancient and modern anatomical sources in the study of psychology. Yet this chapter also shows that sixteenth-century comparative studies of animal and human reason were influenced by new theological issues that emerged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Francisco Vallesius Vallesius’s discussion of human and animal reason is found in his Sacra Philosophia, which was first published in 1582. It is not surprising that Vallesius dedicated the book to the then king of Spain, Philip II. At the time Vallesius composed the work, he had already been working as the personal physician of the Royal House of Spain for ten years. Vallesius was born in Covarrubias in 1524. He received a distinctly humanist education during his years as a student at Alcalá University, where he obtained a bachelor of arts in 1544. He then moved to the Madre de Dios College, where he studied medicine and languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). After receiving his doctoral degree and the title of “master of medicine and arts” in 1554, he was appointed chair of “first medicine” as early as 1557. Vallesius’s years as an academic proved to be quite prolific; he published widely in the fields of natural philosophy, medicine, and anatomy. His academic output consists primarily of commentaries on medical texts by Hippocrates and Galen; for this reason, scholars have regarded his work as an example of “Galenist Hippocratism.”4 While it is not my purpose to investigate the historical accuracy of this label in Vallesius’s case, it is quite clear that ancient medical knowledge was his primary intellectual source. As I will show, part of Vallesius’s arguments in favor of lower animals’ possession of reason demonstrates the Spanish physician’s reliance on the work of Hippocrates. Aside from his medical commentaries, Vallesius also worked on Aristotle’s natural philosophy, producing commentaries on the Physics and on the fourth book of the Meteorologica, as well as an unpublished commentary on De anima.5 Vallesius did not develop original medical and philosophical conceptions until 1572, when he abandoned his academic career to serve as the personal physician of Philip II. During his years at the royal court, he also supervised the construction of the Biblioteca de El Escorial, where he set up medicinal laboratories, and wrote the Sacra Philosophia to advance his own medical and philosophical ideas. In this

76 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE work, Vallesius presents his arguments for the reason of animals, to which we turn now. Vallesius’s comparative study of animal and human souls is one part of the broader project that lies at the heart of the Sacra Philosophia; to conduct a rational study of the teachings of Holy Scripture that are relevant to physics. The ninety-one chapters composing the text consist of the author’s commentary on an equal number of passages taken from the Bible. Instead of proceeding by themes, Vallesius’s Sacra Philosophia follows the order of the books in the Old and New Testaments. His discussion hence goes from the Book of Genesis to Maccabees, and then from Matthew to the Book of Revelation. Vallesius’s discussion of the souls of animals and men stems from several passages in the Sacra Philosophia that take their start from Job 38.36 (according to the Latin text of the Vulgate): “who placed wisdom into the inward parts of man, and who gave the intelligence to roosters?” (Quis posuit in visceribus hominis sapientiam, vel quis dedit gallo intelligentiam?). Vallesius understands this passage quite literally as expressing the two following ideas. On the one hand, he explains, the verse hints at the metaphysical dependence of all creatures on God. On the other hand, it seems to suggest that roosters, and hence all animals, are endowed with some form of reason. On the basis of this interpretation of Scripture, Vallesius develops a philosophical argumentation in favor of lower animals’ reason and to show exactly what form of reason they possess. The discussion of animal reason in the Sacra Philosophia can be divided into two parts. The first is largely based on the authority of an alleged Hippocratic conception of the relationship between animal sensation and reason; the second is grounded in the observation of animal behavior. The strategy adopted by Vallesius for his first argument consists in recasting the question on the reason of animals into one concerning its relation with sensation in general. Seemingly drawing on Plutarch’s De sollertia animalium, Vallesius writes that ancient philosophers who recognized that all animals partake in reason relied on an idea proposed by Strato of Lampsacus in one of his works (libellum quendam). According to Strato, all sensations involve reason.6 In light of this ancient debate, Vallesius argues that the relationship between sensation and reason is what is really at stake in the question of the soul of brute animals. Therefore, in order to establish whether animals also have a share in reason, we have to ascertain whether the absence of reason might prevent sensation from occurring at all.7 According to Vallesius, sensation cannot exist without the joint action of reason, on the following grounds:

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 77 Now, it seems that the mind cannot be separated from sense; for, as Hippocrates states, those who do not feel pain when some part of the body aches, in them the mind becomes ill. Therefore, given that when the mind becomes ill and insane, so that it is not attentive to the organs of sensation, and although the cause of pain approaches, it is not sensed, then even less any other thing can be sensed of those which stimulate the senses less vigorously, unless mind is present. We also experience this in ourselves. In fact, when we are more intent on thinking of something, many things occur to the eyes and ears that we do not see or hear. Therefore, if those animated beings that are provided with the mind do not sense when the mind does not attend, much less can those that lack the mind altogether. For this reason, if those that lack the mind cannot sense, they cannot have sensation either. Therefore, sensation cannot be without the mind.8

The first claim made in the quotation above—that the mens, or reason, is inseparable from the sensitive operations of the soul—resembles the view found in Aristotle’s De anima, according to which higher vital functions necessarily involve lower ones.9 But what Vallesius proposes is in fact a reversal of the pattern of vital functions described by Aristotle. In Aristotle’s opinion, the mind cannot operate without sensation, whereas in Vallesius’s opinion the vector of the relationship between these two powers of the soul goes also in the inverse direction: sensation occurs only in the presence of reason. Vallesius argues in this manner by endorsing a conception that he attributes to Hippocrates (although he unfortunately does not give a specific reference to Hippocrates’s works, I was able to trace the passage back to Hippocrates’s Aphorisms).10 In his view, some form of “rational” attention is needed for sensation in general to come about. According to Vallesius, Hippocrates makes this point by looking at the dysfunctional behavior of animals that feel no pain, even though a part of their body hurts. The ancient physician, Vallesius explains, attributes this anomaly to a disease of the mens (mens aegrotat); more exactly, to the fact that an ill mens is incapable of attending to the operations of the sense organs. Therefore, some animals may fail to feel pain, even though something painful affects their body; this is because their mens—on account of some form of illness—fails to be attentive to the information communicated by the sensory organs. Vallesius cites this Hippocratic view so as to propose his own solution to the sense-reason problem. If Hippocrates is right in saying that even animals endowed with mens, or reason, fail to have sensation in the absence

78 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE of “rational” attention, how could animals lacking reason altogether have sensation at all? This analysis leaves us with only two scenarios: either we deny that animals have sensation, or we grant their soul some form of higher activity. Vallesius rules out the first possibility on observational grounds: as a matter of fact, we observe animals reacting to images and sounds (e.g., a flock of sheep running away when frightened by a noise); therefore, they must possess sensation. On this basis, Vallesius explains, animals are endowed with some minimal level of reason, consisting of the necessary mental attention for the sensory operations to function. Interestingly, attending to sense operations is not the only “rational” feature that Vallesius attributes to animals, as he makes clear in the second part of his argument for the rationality of bruta: Moreover, to do something well or badly pertains to one and the same faculty. In fact, it is not the case that one sees badly through his ears, or hears badly through his eyes. Instead, seeing is howsoever of the eyes, and hearing of the ears. Therefore, becoming crazy or going insane are of the same [faculty] that knows and that reasons properly. Now, it seems that animals are sometimes deceived, which in fact makes hunting very enjoyable, for although it is inflicted on them in several different ways, they use many strategems to avoid the traps. Sometimes they also seem to become insane, for instance monkeys that are seized by intoxication, and many other diseases, such as rabies or hydrophobia, which especially dogs—but also horses, oxen, donkeys, and camels—usually suffer from, and which physicians attribute to some types of madness. Thus, if animals can be delirious, they can also reason. In fact, delirium is a damage of reason.11

Not only does the observed behavior of animals show that they can feel pain, see colors, and hear sounds; it also shows us cases of animals suffering from diseases that physicians regard as a form of madness. This is the case, for instance, of intoxicated monkeys and of dogs, horses, and camels suffering from rabies. According to Vallesius, such dysfunctional behavior (and generally any inappropriate way of operating) must be explained in terms of the malfunctioning of an underlying faculty. In effect, the operation of seeing might or might not be performed properly; but, whether it functions well or not, it pertains to one and the same faculty (sight, in this case, embodied in the eyes). Therefore, madness, which amounts to an improper way

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 79 of reasoning, can occur only in animals endowed with reason. On this basis, one’s ability to reason, whether sanely or insanely, must be grounded in the same underlying faculty, namely, reason. Incidentally, it should be pointed out that Vallesius is not entirely consistent in his explanation of madness and sanity in the Sacra Philosophia. As I will show later when discussing Otto Casmann’s counterarguments to Vallesius, the former cites passages from the latter’s text, in which Vallesius attributes phenomena of insanity to the internal senses and not to the higher power of reason. For the moment, it suffices to know that Vallesius, who is convinced that insanity generally occurs only in animals endowed with a mens, concludes that animals must have some form of reason.12 Although Vallesius openly attributes the power of reason to animals, he never pushes his argument so far as to assimilate this power to the human mens. This seems to emerge from the following passage of the Sacra Philosophia: “Yet, it results from many arguments that this reason of the animals is largely different from the human mind; and it does not merely differ in terms of more and less, but in terms of the very being of reason. This is why the terms ‘reason’ and ‘rational’ are to be predicated of both [animals and men] not univocally but analogically.”13 Vallesius appears to soften his initial claim that all animals have reason. In fact, he notes that reason in humans and animals is fundamentally different; thus, he contends that the terms “reason” and “rational” should be understood analogically, and only in this way may they be predicated for both men and animals. Vallesius does not elaborate further on the nature of the analogy he proposes, nor does he provide us with a definition of animal reason. Instead, he offers a comparative sketch of the operations that men and animals can perform. First of all, animals and men differ in the objects and modes of their reasoning: “First, in fact, because the human mind is by nature and per se made to think in an absolute sense and of anything. . . . On the contrary, none of the brutes has been made to reason unless with respect to certain specific things, namely, by virtue of some natural instinct. Therefore, man is rational in an absolute sense, animals always with respect to something, hence not in an absolute sense, but in some way and by virtue of some analogy.”14 Strictly speaking, only men possess the faculty of reasoning; that is, human beings alone are capable of freely thinking of everything and freely (e.g., a given man is equally capable of becoming a mathematician or a theologian as he pleases). Animals also appear able to form ideas, but only a very limited set of ideas, mostly related to essential life functions (e.g., foreseeing dangerous situations or supplying the means necessary to

80 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE realise their happiness).15 The performance of these functions in the case of animals does not issue from acts of deliberate thought; instead it is the product of their instincts. To that effect, Vallesius argues that animals are like men deprived of free will.16 Another relevant feature of the reason of bruta is its corruptibility. Eternal and incorporeal concepts do not fall within the scope of what animals are capable of dealing with. Accordingly, their reason cannot reach the level of separation needed to attain immortality.17 Because they cannot form concepts of incorporeal things, and because they lack free will (on which moral virtue in general depends), they are incapable of wisdom (sapientia). Thus, in agreement with the scriptural verse (Job 38:36) that launches Vallesius’s discussion in the Sacra Philosophia, roosters may possess reason, but only men have wisdom. It is indeed the possession of sapientia, not of reason, that distinguishes men from animals: Man’s specific difference is to be capable of wisdom [sapientia]; and since it is necessary that wisdom be combined with real virtue, and this (real virtue) with the fear of God, Ecclesiastes, in the conclusive words of its discourse, most rightly defines man by saying: “fear God and observe His commandments, for the whole man is this”; which is to say the same as: this is man. Therefore man is the animal capable of true wisdom, which consists in the fear of God and His commandments and in the meditation of Him. How much closer this difference “being capable of wisdom” comes to the essence of man than the difference “rational,” and likewise “understanding,” about which we indicated elsewhere that all animals are rational in some way and about certain things, and that they have some kind of understanding, whereas they are in no way capable of wisdom. Therefore, man is called the “animal capable of wisdom” with much less ambiguity than the “rational animal.”18

To sum up, Vallesius relies on the claim he attributes to Hippocrates that a well-functioning mens, or reason, is necessary for sensation to occur in animate beings. On this basis, he claims that animals that experience sensations must also possess some form of reason. More precisely, they must be endowed with the necessary attention for sensation to come about. Animals other than men might suffer from diseases affecting the faculty of reason (e.g., rabies), but they normally can use their rational faculty to

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 81 provide the means necessary for their own survival, as well as for the protection of their offspring. The reason of animals differs from men’s in that it is incapable of free will and of considering immaterial concepts. As a result, animals are not immortal or capable of sapientia—which human beings alone can attain. These features suggest a significant difference between humans and other animals. Nonetheless, Vallesius prefers to emphasise their similarities and to endorse an analogical conception of reason. The Sacra Philosophia was published in several editions and provoked criticism from within the Catholic Church. In fact, the book was even prohibited in Rome in 1603.19 Although the book has received little scholarly attention in recent times, it was very popular among Vallesius’s contemporaries. Otto Casmann’s question “an ratio sit brutis communis ac propterea non propria hominis forma” is an example of a contemporary response to the Sacra Philosophia. Casmann’s discussion—which is found in his Psychologia Anthropologica—is a direct attack on Vallesius’s views. But while the latter’s arguments appear to be indebted to (his particular interpretation of) ancient medical knowledge, the discussion of the soul of bruta receives an interesting theological or, better still, Christological twist in Casmann’s Psychologia. Otto Casmann Otto Casmann was a Calvinist author who studied in 1581 under the influential Rudolph Goclenius in Marburg. The following year, Casmann moved to Helmstedt to study theology and philosophy. After completing his university education, he moved to Heidelberg in 1591, where he taught logic. He then taught natural philosophy at Stade, where he was appointed rector in 1594, the year his major work, the Psychologia Anthropologica, was published. The Psychologia draws on Melanchthon’s influential Commentarius de anima (1540) for the view that the subject matter of the science of the soul is neither the soul itself nor the ensouled body (the two most important views that had been held throughout the medieval De anima commentary tradition), but rather man’s complete nature as such. Melanchthon had in fact argued in his Commentarius that psychology should be limited to the human soul and complemented by anatomical study of man’s body.20 In this way Melanchthon’s psychology considers human nature as its proper subject matter. As Melanchthon puts it, “therefore, this part [of Physics] has to encompass not only the soul, but also the whole nature of man.”21 Otto Casmann subscribes to this view and suggests the term “anthropologia” for

82 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE the inquiry into what he depicts as the essential union of the two natures of man: the spiritual nature, which is the subject of the part of anthropology called psychologia; and the corporeal one, which is the subject of anatomy, and which Casmann addresses in a separate book: the Secunda pars anthropologiae, hoc est fabrica humani corporis (published in 1596).22 Casmann prefers Melanchthon’s definition of the human soul as spiritus intelligens (intelligent spirit) over Aristotle’s hylomorphic characterization of the soul because he deems the former more in keeping with Christian theology.23 The spiritus intelligens, or anima logica as Casmann also calls it, is neither the form of the body (which has its own corporeal form) nor that of man, taken as a hylomorphic compound. Instead, the human soul is a substance of its own, which is immortal and accounts for man’s intellect, will, and language.24 I will return to this point later, when I will also show that Otto Casmann’s comparative analysis of humans and animals is shaped to a significant extent by his rejection of the Aristotelian-hylomorphic explanation of man, as well as by his particular conception of the relationship between man’s essence and the double nature of Christ. Casmann’s discussion “an ratio sit brutis communis” has a fairly scholastic structure. It is divided into two parts: the first part presents the arguments in favor of animals’ ability to reason, and the second part presents the opposing arguments, which express Casmann’s own view. Like Vallesius, Casmann traces the debate over the soul of animals back to Plutarch’s De sollertia animalium and suggests that only Cicero among the ancient authors had held that animals were endowed with reason. As for the discussion among his contemporaries, Casmann states: “Nowadays, Franciscus Vallesius, in his Sacra Philosophia, denies that the difference between animals and man consists in the difference between rational and irrational. All animals, he states, are rational beings and are provided with intelligence.”25 Therefore, in order to refute the claim that bruta are rational beings, Casmann develops counterarguments against the views proposed in Vallesius’s Sacra Philosophia. To begin, Casmann argues that Vallesius’s interpretation of Job 38:36 is erroneous. For, contrary to what Vallesius claims, the Hebrew version of the verse makes no mention of roosters (or of any other animal) and mentions reason and wisdom only insofar as men are concerned.26 What is more, not only does Vallesius fail to read the Bible correctly, but he makes similar mistakes in reading his ancient medical sources. According to Casmann, Vallesius’s reading of Hippocrates is incorrect and philosophically unsound. As I have explained above, according to Vallesius,

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 83 Hippocrates thinks that a fully functional mind (mens) is necessary for sensation to occur. In order for an animal to have sensation, some form of attention on the part of reason is needed. Now, in Casmann’s opinion, this is not the genuine view of Hippocrates: “I consider that Hippocrates in the quoted passage spoke of men, so that it [the mens] is not of all animals, but of men alone. Goclenius says that, in the relevant passage, the Greek does not read νοῦς but γνώμη, with which term Hippocrates does not mean reason but common sense, or the judgment concerning sensation, which belongs to the interior sense that is called ‘common sense,’ which opinion is very plausible.”27 According to Casmann, the view of the relationship between attention and sensation that Vallesius ascribes to Hippocrates has certainly nothing to do with animals. Moreover, there are good reasons to doubt that Vallesius’s interpretation of Hippocrates’s view can also be applied to human beings. Casmann appears to espouse the interpretation of the Hippocratic text proposed by his teacher Rudolph Goclenius. On his reading, Hippocrates indeed claims that some form of attention is generally necessary for sensation to occur. But Goclenius—followed by Casmann—shows that the Greek text mentions the common sense and not mens (νοῦς), or reason, as the soul’s item supposed to attend the operations of the sense organs in the process of sensing.28 In a nutshell, Casmann argues that Vallesius’s interpretation of Hippocrates is mistaken. According to Casmann, a correct reading of Hippocrates’s Greek text suggests the following two conclusions. First, the ancient physician makes no mention of the souls of animals in the passage cited by Vallesius. Second, Casmann explains, Hippocrates claims that only the internal senses (more precisely, the common sense) and not any operation of the mens, are necessary for sensation to occur in the human soul. Furthermore, Casmann disputes the logical validity of Vallesius’s argument based on attention. Casmann argues that Vallesius implies that animals have reason because he assumes that some rational attention is necessary for sensation to occur. But this is a petitio principii, because the very idea that the form of attention at issue should be ascribed to rational operations (instead of sensitive operations) is precisely what needs to be proven.29 Therefore, Casmann apparently does not attack Vallesius’s idea that sensation is accompanied by some level of attention in both men and animals. He only shows that the power of the soul carrying out this task is not reason but the common sense. Very close to this point comes Casmann’s criticism of Vallesius’s argu-

84 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE ment about madness. As we have seen, according to Vallesius, it suffices to observe animal life to see that animals, as much as men, suffer from various forms of dysfunctional behaviour, such as rabies—phenomena that medical authors explained in terms of insanity. Vallesius believes that the very fact that animals can go insane implies that they can reason, since insanity is the opposite of reason and occurs only in rational beings. In this case, it is not too difficult for Casmann to refute Vallesius. He does so by quoting verbatim a passage from the Sacra Philosophia in which Vallesius explains madness in terms of internal senses: To this argument of Vallesius I reply with Vallesius’s own words, from the Sacra Philosophia, p. 433: “it is far from being the case that, since these beasts can become insane, they must have a mind similar to the human one. In fact, not even men become insane according to that mind that distinguishes them from the animals; rather, according to the internal senses, which they [men] have in common with them [animals], the imagination and the sensitive capacity, which many call “cogitative” or “estimative.” Now, given that diseases of delirium and melancholy are corporeal affections, they cannot per se harm anything but the corporeal faculties. The lesion only affects the mind accidentally [per accidens], because the ἐνέργειας are hindered, and because insofar as [the mind] is in the body, it uses the senses.30

According to Casmann, Vallesius makes contradictory statements. On the one hand Vallesius claims that animals suffering from madness must also have reason. On the other, he admits that phenomena of insanity (such as delirium and depression) are corporeal dysfunctions; hence, they cannot affect reason, which is immaterial. Vallesius himself affirms that these pathologies must be explained in terms of internal senses (more specifically, cogitation and estimation). Casmann is happy to agree on this point, which also proves that Vallesius is inconsistent. Here too, Casmann acknowledges that animals behave in the manner observed by Vallesius, but he disputes the explanation for their behaviour proposed by the Spanish physician. According to Casmann, animals can indeed go insane, but dysfunctions in the internal senses suffice to explain these biological phenomena. To sum up, Casmann disagrees with Vallesius on two points. First, he rejects the interpretation of the scriptural and medical sources used by the Spanish physician to argue for the rationality of animals. Second, he

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 85 doubts the philosophical legitimacy of Vallesius’s choice to ascribe forms of rationality to animals: to Casmann’s mind, even the most complex forms of animal life (except man) can be explained in terms of external and internal senses and without any need for rational operations. But if we look more closely at Casmann’s text, we find that his rejection of animal reason depends on more than his disagreement with Vallesius’s argumentation. In fact, the very foundation of Casmann’s psychology already posits an irreconcilable gap between human beings and other animals. Casmann’s Psychologia puts forward a conception of the soul according to which reason is part and parcel of what Casmann calls the “logical soul” (anima logica). This anima logica is as different as it can get from the soul of brute animals. The latter is a corporeal form that gives animals life and performs basic vital operations; the former is neither a corporeal form nor the form of the human body. In fact, because the logical soul is immaterial, it cannot be the formal principle of the body, which has a (corporeal) form of its own. Accordingly, human beings are composed of two natures: a corporeal and a spiritual nature, namely the logical soul. These two forms composing human nature are not in a hylomorphic relationship with one another, but rather in a hypostatic relationship. The key to understanding this view is what I would call Casmann’s “Christologizing” of anthropology. This point should become clear by reading the following passage from the Psychologia: If the rational soul is the form that gives man his being, then the omnipotent divine nature in Christ will also be the complete form that gives Christ his being. The same relation obtains between peers. But both Christ and man equally consist in two natures and in the union of those in one hypostasis. However, one cannot safely dare to state that God’s omnipotent nature be the complete form of Christ Immanuel. For both the nature of humanity and that of divinity, in a personal union, combine to bring about the theandric (so to say) form of Christ. Establish therefore that according to my opinion man’s form is placed in that union of the soul with man’s body in one hypostasis.31

The compound substance that we call “man” mirrors the nature of Christ, composed of a corporeal and a spiritual nature. Therefore, human nature cannot be viewed simply in terms of rationality. In fact, man’s possession of rationality does not reflect the complexity of human beings, just as

86 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE Christ’s divine nature does not account for the entire nature of Christ. The very notion of God’s Incarnation implies that Christ possesses two natures: a divine nature and a human, corporeal nature, which are fused in a hypostatic union. Casmann appears to interpret God’s Incarnation in the sense that Christ’s nature must somehow reflect the nature of man (and vice versa). Accordingly, man’s nature (which is the subject of anthropology) must be explained in the same way as Christ’s; that is, in terms of a hypostatic union of two natures: a corporeal nature (the subject matter of anatomy) and a spiritual nature (the anima logica studied in psychology).32 Casmann’s Christologizing anthropology ensures that the soul-body relationship is interpreted in a hypostatic—and not in a hylomorphic—fashion. But, given that the same cannot be said when it comes to explaining forms of life lower than man, the very problem of animal rationality is to be dismissed a priori. In fact, to Casmann’s way of thinking there is little difference between asking whether animals have reason and the absurd question whether animals reflect the nature of Christ. This point is supported by the two following passages from Casmann’s text: We accord that animals have a soul, but not a spirit, that is, the logical and eternal spiritual essence, that subsists per se. Neither is there a proper hypostatic union between the body and the soul of animals, for it [the hypostatic union] obtains between the different natures, corporeal and spiritual. But the soul of animals, springing from the body, is immersed in the body. It is not a spirit properly speaking, but something corporeal, springing from the body and not per se subsisting, but perishing in and with the body.33 The mind or intelligence is of those who are created in God’s image and likeness. But intellect and reason are in the soul by virtue of the divine image. From which it is also understood why only those [things] that consist in a spiritual essence, per se subsisting and immortal, are provided with it [the mind]. Now, as the Holy Scripture affirms, men are made in God’s image and likeness, not any animals.34

In conclusion, Casmann’s comparative analysis of human and animal souls denies that animals are endowed with reason. On the one hand, this conclusion follows from Casmann’s criticism of Vallesius’s interpretation of observable animal behavior. On the other hand, the view espoused by Casmann depends on the Christologizing of anthropology presented in his Psychologia. Rationality cannot be separated from the unity of the logical

RENAISSANCE PSYCHOLOGY | 87 soul. Therefore, were animals granted rationality, two absurd conclusions would follow: first, the nature of bruta would be similar to the nature of Christ in that it would consist of a hypostatic union; second, if animals were endowed with reason, they would be created in God’s image and likeness as much as man. Conclusions The debate between Casmann and Vallesius concerning human and animal reason appears to be triggered, at least in part, by their rediscovery of ancient philosophical and medical knowledge. In fact, both scholars seem to base their discussion on an existing debate, found in Plutarch’s De sollertia animalium, as well as on an aphorism by Hippocrates. Besides their interest in ancient sources, the analyses proposed by Vallesius and Casmann show how both the observation (and interpretation) of animal behavior and concerns related to a Christian understanding of the human nature played an important role in sixteenth-century conceptions of animal and human reason. The observation of human and animal behavior reflects the fact that the external senses alone are not a sufficient explanatory tool to understand animal and human sensation. Casmann and Vallesius agree on this. But Vallesius claims that some form of rational attention and at least a minimum of rationality must accompany sensation and insanity in animals. Casmann, in contrast, concludes that it is sufficient to examine the operations of the internal senses (especially, the cogitative and estimative powers of the soul) to account for animal sensation and insanity. Therefore, on the one hand, Casmann’s counterargument that man alone possesses rationality is based on a rejection of Vallesius’s explanation of observable animal life. On the other hand, Casmann’s view is almost entirely predetermined by his endorsement of Melanchthon’s definition of the human soul as spiritus intelligens. According to Melanchthon, Holy Scripture (not rational arguments) shows that the human soul is a spiritual and immortal substance. Casmann espouses this view and interprets the relationship between the human spirit and the body against the background of his Christological views. According to Casmann, humanity itself must reflect the ontological structure of Christ, that is, the hypostatic union of two different natures (each having a form of its own). As a consequence of this conception, the very comparison between men and animals is bound to reveal an immense ontological distance between men and lower animate beings. To Casmann’s way of thinking, the fact

88 | DAVIDE CELLAMARE that man possesses reason necessarily implies that he was created in God’s image—a feature that, a priori, cannot be attributed to bruta. As it is the case with so many other psychological disputes in Renaissance northern Europe, the sixteenth-century debate over the rationality of men and animals was heavily influenced by the attempt to put forward a Christian explanation of man. Casmann sought to do this by merging Christology with philosophy and by identifying the difference between brute animals and human beings with the latter’s relationship of likeness with Christ.

Chapter 5 Human & Animal Generation in Renaissance Medical Debates Hiro Hirai

I n medieval uni v ersit y teachings based on the philosophy of Aristotle, the prominent position of human beings, as compared to animals and plants, was firmly assured by their intellectual capacities. According to the Aristotelians, these capacities were governed by the rational or intellective soul occupying the highest rank above two other kinds: the nutritive or vegetative soul and the sensitive soul. As the principle of those intellectual capacities, the “intellect” (nous in Greek and intellectus in Latin) and the rational soul were often used synonymously and interchangeably, although the former could be conceived only as a main faculty of the latter. Thus thought and other intellectual acts such as reasoning and judgment were described in terms of the rational soul or intellect before the appearance of a modern conception of mind and intelligence.1 As for the origin of the intellect in human beings at birth, there is a remarkable passage in Aristotle’s embryological treatise, Generation of Animals, 2.3: “The intellect alone comes from the outside.”2 This passage might suggest the intellect’s separated status from the body, which is hard to reconcile with Aristotle’s definition of the organic soul, as established from a hylomorphic perspective in his treatise On the Soul, 2.1.3 Although its real meaning is still debated by modern scholars, this passage was often used in the Renaissance to confirm the intellect’s external origin and its 89

90 | HIRO HIRAI insertion into the organic body of the human being. It also offered an aid in defending the privileged ontological status of the rational soul in line with the Christian doctrine of the human soul’s immortality.4 In this chapter I would like to address the question of the origin of the soul and the intellect in human and animal generation, as it appeared in medical debates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. How did this issue affect the traditional boundary firmly established between human beings and animals? How was Aristotle’s passage used in this context? To answer these questions, I will focus on the embryological discussion of three representative figures of diverse geographical, intellectual, and confessional backgrounds: Jean Fernel of Paris, Jacob Schegk of Tübingen, and Daniel Sennert of Wittenberg. Jean Fernel French physician Jean Fernel (1497­­­–1558) was one of the most influential medical authors of the Renaissance. His teachings exerted a considerable impact on his contemporaries and later generations at least until the mid-seventeenth century.5 As for the nature of the soul, Fernel disagreed with the “naturalistic” or “physicalistic” interpretation of Galen’s idea advanced especially by Italian medical humanists such as Nicolò Leoniceno (1428–1524). According to this interpretation, the soul and the body are destructible at death. Calling upon Renaissance Platonism, Fernel tried to present another image of Galen that could easily be harmonized with Christianity. The chief fruit of his endeavor was the dialogue On the Hidden Causes of Things (De abditis rerum causis) (Paris, 1548).6 In this work he advocated the quest for the “divine” (to theion) by which he signified something superelemental, that is, something lying beyond the order of the four traditional elements (fire, air, water, and earth) and their forces.7 To demonstrate that the soul’s substance is simple, incorporeal, and immortal not only according to Galen but also according to Hippocrates, Fernel argues that the latter proposed a “divine opinion” on the soul’s origin at the beginning of the treatise, called On Fleshes: “I should say nothing about heavenly and sublime things, unless to the extent that human beings and other animals that live and are begotten on earth have their principle and origin there; and that the soul comes from heaven.”8 Fernel relies on a Renaissance translation that differs from the modern reading at a crucial point by emphasizing that the soul comes from heaven. Using this

HUMAN & ANIMAL GENERATION IN RENAISSANCE MEDICAL DEBATES | 91 lesser-known passage with a cosmological dimension, he tries to advance that Hippocrates advocated the celestial origin of the soul. To reinforce this argument, Fernel appeals to a passage of Galen’s work, which seems particularly Platonizing: To remove all chance of uncertainty, please listen to what [Galen] states divinely in the book On Uterine Conception: “A soul is a downflow of the universal soul, descending from the heavenly region and capable of knowledge; . . . abandoning earthly things, it always aims at the highest points of all; having a share of heavenly divinity and gazing quite often over the heavenly place, it takes its stand beside the governor of all things.” This clearly shows that Galen’s opinion does not differ from that of Plato and Aristotle at all; they have spoken with one voice in confirming that our soul is simple, incorporeal, and immortal.9

Fernel defends the celestial origin of the soul in this way. For him something celestial lies beyond the realm of the elements and must be indestructible. So the soul must be immortal. This immediately begs the question: How can the immortal soul reside in a perishable body? According to Fernel, the soul cannot be destroyed despite its attachment to the body by a certain union called “the chain of bonds” (vinculorum nexus). It is not the soul itself but only this chain that can be damaged at death. Fernel identifies these bonds with the spirit and its heat. When an extreme defect of the body causes them to perish, the soul, being set free, abandons the body.10 Once the celestial origin of the soul is confirmed both for human beings and other animals, Fernel’s next step is to show the divine nature of spirits in living beings.11 To this end, he classifies spirits into three categories: 1) the spirit of God; 2) the spirit of nature; and 3) the spirits in natural beings. Having established the agreement of the ancients as to the superior kinds of spirit, he turns to the inferior one and tries to show that the spirit and its heat are celestial. Can anything celestial exist in bodies? Fernel answers that many people made an error precisely here by claiming that anything celestial is external to the body. Living beings at death must lose the cause of their life’s functions. According to Fernel, it is not the soul but only the spirit’s heat that is extinguished. Thus this heat must bear a super-elemental nature as the author of life’s functions or of life itself in the body of living beings.12

92 | HIRO HIRAI After all these discussions, Fernel explains what he understands by the term “divine.” Following Aristotle’s words in his Generation of Animals, 2.3, he defines it as “anything that corresponds to the element of the stars.”13 This special element must be the fifth element, the incorruptible and eternal aether. For Fernel anything divine, including the soul and the spirit, belongs to the celestial realm. What is important in this discussion is the following point. Even if human beings and other animals are clearly distinguished in their ontological hierarchy, Fernel did not impose a sharp boundary on their generation, unlike the traditional university teachings. He emphasized the soul’s celestial origin for all living beings on the basis of a cosmological passage from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. Paradoxically, this strategy diminished the importance of Aristotle’s other axiom, “the intellect alone comes from the outside,” from the same treatise, and perhaps explains why this axiom is not featured in Fernel’s work. Jacob Schegk An accomplished humanist and a moderate Lutheran, Jacob Degen alias Schegk (1511–1587) first taught philosophy and later medicine at the Protestant University of Tübingen for several decades.14 His lectures were popular and attracted many students coming from reformed lands. Even though Schegk is mainly remembered as a commentator of Aristotle, he was also deeply interested in medical issues. Among other writings he composed the embryological treatise On the Plastic Faculty of the Seed (De plastica seminis facultate) (Strasburg, 1580). This work mainly deals with the Galenic doctrine of formative power, which was believed to reside in the seed of living beings as an agent responsible for their formation.15 Schegk’s theory of the plastic faculty became widely known among Protestant natural philosophers such as Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) and Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670) in the early seventeenth century.16 Drawing on the same theory, William Harvey (1578–1678) developed his own idea of “plastic force” (vis plastica) in his epigenetic system. It is not only in the field of embryology but also in broad natural philosophy that the notion of plastic power came to play an important role. Applying it even to the formation of inorganic natural bodies such as minerals and fossils, Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) provoked lively debates in the Republic of Letters.17 More importantly, Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More (1614–1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) transformed this embryological idea into

HUMAN & ANIMAL GENERATION IN RENAISSANCE MEDICAL DEBATES | 93 their own doctrine of plastic nature. Aimed at explaining the whole organization of the created world, this doctrine held significant metaphysical and theological implications and attracted the keen attention of philosophers such as Leibniz.18 In this treatise Schegk also discussed the origin of souls at length. Contrary to Fernel, he retained a sharp boundary between human beings and other living beings. Let us examine the main line of his argument and try to extract the reason for his position. Schegk first argues that among admirable forces observed in nature the “formative and plastic faculty” (facultas formatrix et plastica) is the most remarkable. It fashions from the raw and formless matter of seeds an animate body with well-formed parts. Schegk regrets that unlike Aristotle Galen did not acknowledge the existence of this kind of power, which is rational yet devoid of intelligence, as the principle of action in natural things. For him the plastic power produces its works for the sake of definite ends because, created by God, it imitates the Creator as if it were His hand and instrument.19 Relying on Aristotle’s axiom “the intellect alone comes from the outside,” Schegk then clearly defends that only the human soul, which possesses the intellect, can be separated from the body. By contrast, the soul of other animals cannot exist independent of matter. In this connection, he notes, Plato recognized that eternal human souls come from the outside and are neither generated nor corrupted with the body because of the intellect’s nature.20 To explain the soul’s entry into the body, Schegk introduces the notion of the soul’s “vehicle” (vehiculum) and sums up the opinion of the ancients: Thanks to the soul’s vehicle, the human soul enters the body at birth and leaves it at death. Only the human soul’s vehicle is separable from matter, while the human soul itself is inseparably tied to this vehicle.21 Schegk adds that the plastic faculty first achieves the organic body; then the soul enters this body to inform its formed parts. The relation between the plastic faculty and the soul is not clear yet. So he posits the following questions: 1) Does the plastic faculty become a part of the soul? and 2) Does, by a total dissolution, anything of its parts remain in the produced body? Schegk answers that Aristotle proved the dissolution of the plastic faculty by using the example of a coagulant, which perishes after curdling milk to produce cheese.22 Thus when the soul enters the formed body to animate it, the plastic faculty, disappearing by itself, is replaced by the soul.23 What is important in Schegk’s discussion is that he perceives all nonhuman souls to be “generated,” that is, “drawn from the potentiality of matter” by the plastic faculty. This is the real meaning of the “generation” of nonhuman souls for him. By contrast, the case of the human soul is

94 | HIRO HIRAI different. He says: “For the human soul is not drawn from the potentiality of matter by the plastic reason-principle but is introduced into matter thanks to the intellect’s divine and immortal essence, which may be created but not generated.”24 According to Schegk, the ancients held the idea that the human soul exists before it enters the body and animates it after the introduction. He insists, however, that even if they postulated the preexisting, therefore noncreated, human soul, the doctrine of Creation must be defended by Christian philosophers. For this reason he affirms that the human soul does not receive its angelic and noble essence from the plastic faculty but directly from the Creator. To clarify his discussion, Schegk enumerates four possible positions: 1) Human souls are eternal; they enter the body at birth and leave it at death (this view is in agreement with the ancients). 2) All souls were created simultaneously during the Creation of the world, although each of them enters its specific body later at a precise moment. 3) As the products of nature souls are continuously drawn out from the potentiality of matter by the plastic faculty. 4) Each soul is created by God’s supernatural potency at the same time as the body is formed by the plastic faculty.

Schegk clearly chooses the last option by denying that the human soul is drawn out from the potentiality of matter. Under the authority of the Bible, he argues that God forms nonhuman creatures by using the plastic faculty assigned to the seed, while for human beings God simultaneously creates the soul by Himself and forms the organic body by means of this plastic power. According to Schegk, God is the Creator of angels, whereas the human soul, which shares the angelic essence, is created as the “breath” (spiraculum) of the Creator and is not “produced” by the plastic power of nature. For him the everyday creation of the human soul is the ultimate and supreme action of God. It is true that the Creator attributed the primary task of forming the bodies to the plastic power of nature. But God does not cease to create human souls every day so as to show that the human being is not a “product” (plasma) of nature but the direct offspring of God. This human-centered theology is really noteworthy. Schegk concludes: I believe that if philosophers had known the Creator God, they would have agreed with us and would not have said that [human] souls are contained in the seed and in the seminal liquid of the male [parent]

HUMAN & ANIMAL GENERATION IN RENAISSANCE MEDICAL DEBATES | 95 before they inform human bodies. In fact, denying the Creator God, or rather being ignorant of Him, they were forced to conclude that the human soul and its body are generated by the spermatic reason-principle at the same time, and that the human soul is not introduced from the outside but is drawn out from the potentiality of matter.25

For Schegk the plastic faculty generates all nonhuman souls, while the human soul, endowed with angelic essence, has only God as its author. Indeed the human soul, or more precisely, its angelic intellect, cannot be generated through seminal propagation since it is something “born before” (progenes) nature. It was necessarily created by the Creator God, who precedes it. That is why Aristotle’s axiom “the intellect alone comes from the outside” was fundamental to Schegk’s discussion. Daniel Sennert Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) was a professor of medicine at the University of Wittenberg, the cradle of Lutheranism.26 He has increasingly been drawing the keen attention of historians. Going beyond the traditional view of him as simply one of the first proponents of early modern atomism, a careful review of his entire work has begun. In the context of seventeenth-century “chymistry” (alchemy/chemistry) and corpuscular philosophy, his role as a major source for Robert Boyle (1627–1691) has been placed in a fresh light.27 Moreover, his theory of the soul, in which Aristotelian hylomorphism and Democritean atomism interact, has been the subject of recent studies. The relation between embryological preformationism and the idea of monads has made some specialists of Leibniz consider Sennert seriously as a key figure.28 Sennert’s masterpiece Physical Memories (Hypomnemata physica) (Frankfurt, 1636) encompasses the cluster of issues raised by the intersection of matter theories and the life sciences in the early seventeenth century.29 His discussion on the origin of souls is in the fourth book. Against the doctrine of “eduction” (eductio), according to which all forms, including souls, are drawn out from the potentiality of matter, Sennert affirms that souls are multiplied rather than produced. The defense of the “multiplication” (multiplicatio) theory, along with the rejection of the eduction doctrine, is the leitmotif of his discussion. Sennert first refers to a theory ascribed to Avicenna, which posits a superior celestial entity as the giver of forms, called “Colcodea.”30 According

96 | HIRO HIRAI to Sennert, this entity uses seeds as its instruments to produce the vegetative and sensitive soul, and when this soul informs the body appropriately, the rational soul is introduced from the outside without the aid of matter. Judging this theory metaphysical and unfounded, Sennert rejects it in his natural philosophy. For him although celestial causality promoted by this kind of theory is widespread, it should be taken as a remote cause. Even if this superior entity can be identified with the Creator God, the question here concerns generation and not the Creation, so the doctrine is false. After this preparation, Sennert turns to Fernel’s theory, according to which souls are introduced from heaven into matter once the latter is duly prepared. He estimates it unnecessary to draw souls out of heaven because God assigned the capacity of multiplication to living beings. He concludes that anyone who believes that souls come from heaven is both ridiculous as a philosopher and execrable as a Christian.31 Having thus rejected celestial causality in the generation of living beings, Sennert enumerates four major opinions. The first and second acknowledge the soul in the seed, while the third and fourth do not: 1) An external agent draws out the soul from the potentiality of matter, which is the seed. 2) A formative power is provided to the seed by the parent and produces the soul. 3) All seeds, including those of human beings, contain a soul from the beginning. 4) Only the human soul, also called “rational soul” or “intellect,” comes from the outside.

Sennert examines the first position linked to the eduction doctrine by placing Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) and the Jesuit writers in the group. Against this position he advances the idea that all forms can multiply just as is read in Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply.”32 According to Sennert, only the first soul of each species was created by God in the Creation of the world. After that, the multiplication of forms is sufficient for the souls of all individuals that have existed, exist, and will exist. Next Sennert addresses the second position, which is connected to Schegk’s theory of formative power. He estimates it unnecessary to posit the plastic faculty in the seed because this power is nothing but the soul. According to him, it is absurd that a certain formative power produces such a noble, divine, and superior substance as the soul.33 This power

HUMAN & ANIMAL GENERATION IN RENAISSANCE MEDICAL DEBATES | 97 cannot be the “faculty of the seed” but the soul itself or the “faculty of the soul in the seed.” The third position, according to which the seed possesses a soul within itself, is the real position that Sennert wants to defend. To this end, he first explains the meaning of the term “seed”: “It should, however, be noted here that the name of seed is sometimes used in a broader sense, sometimes more strictly. In the broader sense the seed is construed as all that body which serves the propagation and generation of a living being. Taken strictly, by contrast, it is a very simple substance, or a certain spirit, in which the soul and the plastic force immediately reside, and contains within itself the Idea of the organic body from which it has fallen.”34 From this argument it is clear that the seed in Sennert’s mind is understood in the latter meaning and is identified with a certain “spirit” (spiritus). Thus, according to him, the soul resides in this vaporlike, material substance.35 He makes it clear, however, that the seminal spirit is not the very principal cause of generation but just the instrument of the soul. As for the common, visible entity, which is usually called the seed, it is merely the seed’s material cover. In this connection Sennert criticizes Thomas Fienus (1567–1631), a professor of medicine at the University of Louvain.36 Fienus wrote several embryological treatises and expressed his doubt about the existence of such a material spirit in the seed. Sennert discards Fienus’s doubt by pointing out that chymical distillation can extract from the dry seeds of plants a material spirit that is highly flammable.37 In this way chymical explanations, rarely found in the embryological texts of the Renaissance, become important in Sennert. His idea of the spirit regarded as the “material cover” of the quintessential core of natural things was most probably influenced by the chymical tradition, which was developed under a strong influence of Paracelsianism.38 As for the fourth and most widely accepted position, according to which only the intellect or rational soul comes from the outside, Sennert rejects it by affirming simply that the soul, once separated from the body, ceases to communicate with the body. For him it is thus unnecessary to posit a separate state of the soul from matter in natural philosophy. According to Sennert, who adopts the Galenic doctrine of double seeds, the human soul emerges in the fetus right after conception when the male seed and the female seed unite and are retained in the womb.39 Unlike those who maintained the gradual replacement of the vegetative soul by the sensitive soul and then by the rational soul which comes from the outside (he assigns this idea to Thomas Aquinas and his followers), Sennert acknowledges only

98 | HIRO HIRAI a single soul endowed with diverse faculties. According to him, human beings from the beginning have only one rational soul, which has diverse faculties such as vegetative, sensitive, and intellective ones and those that are transmitted through the seed. Remarkably, Sennert makes a radical break from the traditional doctrine of the external origin of the human soul. Conclusion Against the naturalistic or physicalistic interpretation of Galen’s conception of the soul, which became popular among medical humanists in the first half of the sixteenth century, Fernel advocated the celestial origin of souls by making recourse to Renaissance Platonism in vogue in his time. His motivation was to defend the immortality of the human soul in line with Christianity. It is noteworthy that he emphasized the celestial origin not only for the human soul but also for all kinds of soul. Paradoxically, the gap between human beings and other animals became less evident in his embryological discussion, especially around the origin of the intellect. Aristotle’s axiom “the intellect alone comes from the outside” was consequently not featured in his discussion. By contrast, Schegk placed the immediate origin of human souls in the Creator and established his theory of the everyday creation of human souls by God. In this process Aristotle’s axiom “the intellect alone comes from the outside” was so fundamental to his reasoning that the traditional gap between human beings and animals was strictly maintained. Sennert, in turn, rejected both theories advanced by Fernel and Schegk, although they were popular in his time. To defend the doctrine of Creation from a Christian point of view, he advocated the theory of the creation of the first soul of each species and the consecutive “multiplication” (not creation or production) of souls. He clearly rejected Aristotle’s axiom “the intellect alone comes from the outside.” The traditional boundary established between human beings and animals no longer depended on this axiom in Sennert’s system. Each of these three divergent positions intimately reflected the author’s intellectual and confessional background and was influential during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century. The interpretation of Aristotle’s axiom “the intellect alone comes from the outside” as the intellect’s extrinsic origin seems very odd to the modern eyes. But it provided the fuel of lively debates on the kinship and difference between human beings and other animals during this period.

Chapter 6 “Rational Surgery” by Building on Tradition Ambroise Paré’s Conception of “Medical” Knowledge of the Human Body

Marie Gaille

A mbroise Paré was a m a n of the sixteenth century, probably born in 1510 near Laval, France. Several members of his family earned a living with skills related to medicine, at the lowest level of the hierarchy of medical professions. Paré’s father was (among other things) a barber, and his brother Jean was a barber-surgeon in Vitré. As a child, Paré received a basic education from a priest. In his early youth, he went to Paris as an apprenti-barbier, also taking anatomical courses for future surgeons. He learned the practice of surgery above all at the Hôtel-Dieu, a fivehundred-bed hospital in the heart of Paris, where he worked for three years. His primary “university,” however, was the battlefield, and this education lasted for more than thirty years, beginning in 1537. His writings attest that he took great pride in this unique experience. He became “maître barbier-chirurgien” in 1540 or 1541. In 1553, despite controversy over his lack of an academic education and command of Latin, he became “docteur en chirurgie,” thanks to the patronage of King Henry II. In 1562, he received the title “premier chirurgien du roi” under Francis II, which he retained under Charles IX. The latter seems to have protected Paré during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (24 August 1572). After this event, Paré dedicated himself above all to writing books and to gathering them in a single collection of Œuvres (the first edition was published in 1575 99

100 | MARIE GAILLE by Gabriel Buon). He died in 1590, a year after Henry IV became king of France.1 It is important to bear in mind both this historical and political context and Paré’s reputation as the “father” of modern surgery. Paré is famed for various innovations in the fields of diagnosis (firearms wounds), treatment (techniques for stopping hemorrhages, bandages), child delivery and artificial feeding, care, and medical instruments.2 In studies on Paré, scholars frequently refer to his intense life experiences in order to place him side by side with Vesalius, who participated in the Renaissance rebellion against outmoded and irrelevant “tradition.” Paré has personified the ideal surgeon who learned most of his craft on the battlefield and who took a stand against and wrote against a conception of medical knowledge based entirely on reading ancient texts. We must move away from this view in order to understand Paré’s importance for the history and philosophy of medicine. He was actually more a user of received anatomical knowledge than an important figure in its reform. From this point of view, we might regard him as a secondary character in the narrative of the rise of the “scientific” study of nature and anthropology. He is nonetheless a very important figure in this account, for two reasons. First, his use of anatomical knowledge implied a very specific way of both adhering to and breaking with the ancient medical tradition. As we will see, his apparently paradoxical relationship with tradition derives from his conviction that anatomical knowledge should satisfy the practical demands of what he calls “rational surgery.” Paré moreover held specific epistemological views on the proper order in which medical knowledge should be developed and expressed. This led him to reject what he called the “philosophical” approach to the human body and to promote a “medical” method and knowledge of the body. He thus helped to delineate a boundary between philosophy and medicine, which, in his day, remained indistinct and mutable. Taking this hypothesis as my starting point, in the present chapter I give a very different interpretation of Paré’s attitude toward the ancient medical tradition from the commonly held view. Relying on a textual analysis of his writings,3 I first survey the various reasons that Paré’s iconoclastic reputation seems deserved and why this should be questioned. In general terms, we may conclude that Paré had nothing against the ancient medical tradition per se. On account of epistemological arguments, however, he indeed considered it necessary to improve medical knowledge with additions and corrections. In the second part of the chapter, I examine the

“RATIONAL SURGERY” BY BUILDING ON TRADITION | 101 nature of what Paré calls “rational surgery.” Anatomy occupies a prominent position in this concept, alongside what Paré calls “experience.” It appears that the relationship of Paré’s medical conceptions to the ancient tradition was not foremost in his mind. He was not primarily waging an epistemological war against the tradition, but rather a practical one, focused on the urgent need to find efficient ways to treat the injured. In the third part of the chapter, I address the epistemological implications of this primary concern, which led Paré to stress the distinction between a “philosophical” and a “medical” approach to the human body. The Development of Medical Knowledge: Building on Tradition At first glance, Paré’s works seem to confirm his usual reputation: that of an experienced, undoubtedly competent, but slightly provocative surgeon who puts aside the medical knowledge of his time to set forth his own conceptions of pathologies and how to treat them. First, as mentioned above, Paré decided, like the Pléiade poets, to gather his various works in a single collection, which appeared in several editions that he continued to amend and revise from 1575 on. Besides this well-known collection, in his first work, La Méthode de traicter les playes faites tant par hacquebutes et aultres bastons à feu . . . (1545),4 Paré tackled the subject of firearms. By addressing this issue first, he associated the practice and art of medicine with “modernity” or what was considered modern in his era.5 Obviously, the treatment of wounds caused by firearms could not have been covered in ancient medical textbooks. Finally, Paré also decided to write his first treatise in ordinary French, like other contemporary authors in the arts, literature, and sciences. He abided by this decision throughout his works. It may not have been an original gesture—nor was it original in the specific field of surgery, in which translations in vernacular European languages began to appear in the early fourteenth century6 —but Paré had specific reasons for his decision. In particular, he had two concerns in mind: he not only opted for the vernacular instead of Latin, but also wrote in French in the simplest language so as to be easily understood. His emphasis on clarity is related to the somewhat delicate task of interpreting the writings of Hippocrates and Galen. According to Paré, these authors are often obscure, but reference should still be made to them on some points; also, they should be fully intelligible to contemporary medical practitioners. Paré’s decision to write in vernacular French also satisfies his desire to address young future

102 | MARIE GAILLE surgeons who need clearly formulated information to be able to treat their patients effectively: However, because it may be useful to young surgeons, I have been very careful to make it easy for them to understand me, which I do in all my writings. That is because these texts are addressed to them, and not to scholars, for whom I have nothing but reverence and honor. That is why I have used ordinary and plain language, knowing full well that their goal and intention is to learn the method of healing well rather than to speak elegantly. As Galen says, talking does not cure the sick, but rather manual labor.7

Do these statements point to the common image of Paré, whom we know by reputation as a fierce enemy of medical tradition? That is hardly the case. First of all, Paré is not merely concerned with tradition, but is at least as concerned with drawing a line between actual physicians and impostors. In several works, and particularly in De la mumie; De la licorne; Des venins (1582), he attacks what he considered to be charlatanism. In his field of competence, he criticized surgeons who had abandoned the art of surgery to people devoid of anatomical expertise.8 Paré’s relationship with tradition may be described more accurately as follows: he was not opposed to tradition, but rather endorsed it and built on it. In this sense, he follows a twofold strategy of correction and addition. Paré indisputably considers the knowledge transmitted by tradition insufficient to treat the pathologies of his times. However, he does not charge the ancients with ignorance and incompetence. He rather holds that the tradition must be enhanced and amended as new pathologies appear or manifest in new ways: “It seems that the advent of every century always adds some new kind of unknown disease and some new disguise and variety to the diseases that existed before. As the poet says, nature is fertile with evil. Hence, as new diseases appear, new remedies must also be found.”9 Paré applies this requirement that one advance the state of medicine to his own work: we thus cannot dismiss it merely as a rhetorical argument for rejecting the tradition, but rather must consider it as Paré’s actual epistemological view. For example, Paré’s Dix livres de la chirurgie . . . (1564) replaced his first published work La méthode de traicter les playes faites par hacquebutes (1545), because, with the passage of time, some difficulties had emerged and new treatments had been devised that had to be written down and disseminated.10 To Paré, constant learning was a normal and unique feature of the human

“RATIONAL SURGERY” BY BUILDING ON TRADITION | 103 condition: God had granted animals various abilities, but man must learn everything by himself through unending effort.11 Two complementary metaphors express Paré’s belief in building on tradition rather than opposing it. Paré uses these metaphors in various places to convince the reader of the legitimacy of distinguishing what should be adopted from tradition and what should be set aside. The first metaphor is that of a child sitting on the shoulders of a giant. It stresses the necessity of increasing and improving existing human knowledge. Paré reverses the meaning of the formula attributed to Bernard de Chartres, nani gigantum humeris insidentes, which emphasized the latter’s humility and encouraged others to rely on past “giants.” On the contrary, as Francis Bacon would also do in 1620,12 Paré opens the door to the acquisition of new knowledge and argues for the legitimacy of this approach. The second metaphor is that of a candle faintly shining in the sun, implying that the modern physician (the candle) may legitimately formulate new medical theories, since his light does not diminish that of his predecessors.13 Paré’s use of these two metaphors mark him as belonging to a “modern era” in which the Aristotelian concept of man’s “natural” desire for knowledge was interpreted in such a way as to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of curiosity.14 In the editions of his complete works published since 1575, Paré consistently presents himself as a follower of the ancients and of previous authors generally—“in whose footsteps I have followed (“la trace desquels j’ai suivi pas à pas”)—and he is eager to add to their work when it appears necessary.15 The Practice of “Rational Surgery” and Its Epistemological Conditions This ambition led Paré to develop the idea—and ideal—of “rational surgery.” Paré was not the first person to mention it. As M. McVaugh notes, medieval surgeons had already made clear calls for rational surgery, especially in opposition to what they considered as ignorant and deceitful empiric practitioners.16 However, the concept was not clearly defined in this era: I use the phrases “rational surgery” and “rational surgeons” here loosely and therefore with some diffidence. My surgeon-writers were certainly not pursuing a systematic philosophical program; most had not even thought very carefully or deeply about what it was that, ideally, should characterize surgery as an intellectual rather than a

104 | MARIE GAILLE purely practical activity; and their remarks on the subject were not always consistent. Yet they were all convinced that surgery needed to be recognized, at its highest level, as a scientific enterprise.17

A century later, Paré helped to endow this view with specific content. He has a very precise conception of the appropriate knowledge for practicing what he called “rational surgery,” the only viable way to treat patients, from his point of view. Paré’s idea is based on a combination of “experience” and anatomical knowledge—the latter already illuminated by medieval surgeons.18 Studying this combination allows us to understand more concretely the reasons behind Paré’s support for tradition and his commitment to build on this tradition. We also gain insight into the medical practice associated with Paré’s approach and how this approach gave rise to a specific anatomical discourse. At first glance, one might think that Paré paradoxically sidesteps tradition by privileging experience, yet aligns himself with it by acknowledging the importance of anatomy. This impression ultimately proves incorrect. In order to understand what Paré meant by combining experience and anatomical knowledge, let us turn first to what he calls “experience.” “Experience,” in the first place, refers to Paré’s status as the direct and bewildered witness of wounds caused by firearms. His intense testimony on this subject may be read in various works, for example, in the second edition of his first published work, La manière de traicter les playes (1552).19 It is certainly important to take into account the surgeon’s astonishment and feeling of powerlessness: the novelty of the wounds engendered a debate over their specific cause, which surgeons sought to identify in order to devise an appropriate way to treat them. Quarrels over these causes were not fought out for the sheer pleasure of controversy. Surgeons tried different therapies, compared their respective efficiency, and learned from each other when possible on the battlefield.20 However, something else about “experience” is also at stake in Paré’s works, in which he compares himself to an old war captain or sailor.21 He stresses the time he has dedicated to practicing surgery: “God is my witness, sire, and no one is ignorant of the fact that, for more than forty years, I have worked and striven to illuminate and perfect the art of surgery.”22 Paré does not mention his experience in order to discard the information contained in books, whether ancient or contemporary. It serves rather as the basis of Paré’s claim, noted above, that it is sometimes necessary to add new elements to the tradition or to correct it in a specific way: Paré’s

“RATIONAL SURGERY” BY BUILDING ON TRADITION | 105 experience allows him to engage in “conjecture méthodique,” that is, in reflection based on the observation and study of as many cases as possible. This “conjecture méthodique” eliminates false medical inferences. If we cannot consider this reflection as a first step toward a theory of experimentation, we may at least affirm that Paré is proposing an inferential conception of medical knowledge and attempting to define a method to improve and increase it. He uses various phrases in his complete works to describe such knowledge: “raison expérimentée” (first edition)23 or a combination of reason and experience (fifth edition).24 Consequently, it is wrong to include Paré among early modern writers who boldly affirmed the superiority of experience to tradition, of art and technique to established knowledge, of practice to theory. The matter is more complicated. Paré’s conception of knowledge is actually quite close to the conception of political knowledge developed by Machiavelli a few years before: that is, an inherently incomplete science, nurtured by the interplay of reading and examining existing knowledge and drawing on one’s own repeated and reflective experience.25 According to Paré, the second element necessary to give rise to “rational surgery” is the anatomical knowledge that had already been available to medieval surgeons. Paré vehemently insists on the necessity of knowing anatomy to practice surgery. Possessing this knowledge is what distinguishes “rational surgery” from deceptive medical practices.26 In order to avoid dangerous treatments for sick patients and wounded soldiers and to choose sure methods of healing them, surgeons must acquire expert knowledge of the anatomy of the human body: “In addressing myself to you, friend reader, I suppose that you are not one of these shameless empiricists who meddle according to the fickle hand of fortune in the treatment of wounds, fractures, dislocations, and other such accidents to the human body. On the contrary, I suppose that you adhere to the school that teaches, through the precepts and disputations of good authorities, the skilled method of reliably curing such disorders as they occur.”27 Ten years later, Paré expresses the same idea that anatomy is the first subject a methodical surgeon should know, in his Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine.28 Let us now consider a specific example in order to understand the kind of anatomical knowledge Paré has in mind, which he cites in connection with skull and head surgery. This is the focus of the 1561 treatise Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine. In this treatise, Paré does not explain to the reader why he decided to dedicate an entire treatise to the

106 | MARIE GAILLE medical knowledge and treatment of the “head” rather than other parts of the body. Readers are led to infer that this focus is justified by the fact that the head is the most essential body part for the senses, reason, and wisdom. This is explicit in his Anatomie universelle du corps humain, published in the same year, one part of which is dedicated to what Paré calls the noblest of the “animal elements” of the human body: that is, the head.29 In the third book of this set of four, Paré describes the various parts of the head and skull, the former surrounding the latter and protecting it from external injuries. He insists on the importance of the brain, which he describes as the “principle” of the nerves and deliberate movement and as the seat of the main faculty of the “soul”: reason.30 Paré also describes the other faculties of the soul: the five senses, common sense (“sens commun”), the imagination (“sens imaginatif, estimatif ou fantaisie”), and memory. Paré uses the word “soul” to indicate a power of life. It is disembodied but circulates within the body and gives life to it. In this description Paré follows the Aristotelian distinction between vegetative, animal, and human life forms.31 The soul nurtures and permeates every aspect of the body.32 Now, if we look again at the 1561 work Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine, we find that the anatomical analysis, L’anatomie de la tête humaine, precedes a second part bearing the title of the whole work. This arrangement clearly reveals how anatomy serves as the foundation of the surgeon’s art. The most interesting characteristic of Paré’s writings, however, is that he does not separate his anatomical and his surgical discourses. On the contrary, he constantly intertwines the “anatomical” description of the head and skull with surgical considerations, in such a way that anatomical knowledge about the body becomes practical knowledge that is orientated toward medical praxis from the very start. In other words, Paré strives to “translate” anatomical analysis into instructions for treatment. He regularly interrupts the description of human body parts and organs to comment on surgical practices. This occurs in his Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine. The same practice may be observed in his Anatomie universelle du corps humain, although this work is supposed to be merely a description of the human body and not a treatise about surgical treatment.33 These “interludes” in anatomical descriptions indicate that the practice of surgery, on account of its particular demands, was Paré’s main concern in conceiving his books for disseminating anatomical knowledge: in other words, he approached anatomy with a surgeon’s eye. We may see

“RATIONAL SURGERY” BY BUILDING ON TRADITION | 107 this specific approach to anatomical knowledge also reflected in the drawings he includes in his works. Although he informs the reader that he has borrowed most of his anatomical illustrations from Vesalius,34 he supplements these with many drawings of surgical tools. Although surgical books from the Middle Ages, including treatises translated from Arabic, already contained such drawings,35 those presented by Paré are distinct both for their accuracy and for his clear effort to help the reader understand how each tool is adapted to the anatomy of the body and to a specific method of treating disease. Both the drawings and text guide the reader to an understanding of Paré’s practical approach to anatomy. These findings help us to understand how two apparently contradictory ways of relating to the ancient medical tradition coexist in Paré’s works. On the one hand, Paré frequently refers to Aristotelian, Hippocratic, and Galenic thought36 and personally subscribes to the common discourse of anatomy as a way to observe and glorify the perfection of the divine creation.37 On the other hand, he explicitly bases his surgical methodology on Vesalian anatomical knowledge, whose controversial stance against the custom of taking the medical tradition for granted he could not ignore.38 What is interesting is that Paré does not consider this to be an issue. As a result, in his works, the critical side of Vesalius’s anatomy is simply neglected. The controversy, which is so central to Vesalius’s writings, is obviously of secondary importance in Paré’s works. Why? In my opinion, it is because Paré is interested in his relationship to the medical tradition only insofar as it contributes to the accuracy of his diagnostic, prognostic, and treatment practice. He sees no point in criticizing it as such. He concentrates rather on assessing how the state of the anatomical knowledge of his times may benefit his practice as a surgeon. That is why, without contradiction, he cites both Vesalius and the ancient medical tradition. Toward a Specific “Medical” Knowledge of the Human Body Paré’s conception of “rational surgery” led him to reflect on the appropriate order in which one should explain what is known about the human body. As E. Berriot-Salvadore has observed, Paré has in mind several criteria for presenting anatomical knowledge and justifying its importance—a problem raised by many anatomists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.39 Here, I would like to focus on a specific aspect of this problem— Paré’s distinction between the philosophical and medical approach to the human body and his argument for the distinct character (and dignity) of

108 | MARIE GAILLE medical knowledge. At first, the question of the appropriate order may appear to be a simple question of the “presentation” of medical knowledge, related to Paré’s concern for clarity and pedagogy, as mentioned earlier with regard to his decision to use vernacular language. The arrangement of his work, however, has deep epistemological implications for him. Paré declares, as noted above, that knowledge of anatomy opens a “window” on divine creation. But he justifies the search for this knowledge primarily with its immediate utility for medical practice. He stresses that this is true of all medical areas—“médecine,” “chirurgie,” “pharmaceutique,” later introduced as “diététique,” “chirurgie” and “pharmaceutique.”40 But surgery is the practice on which Paré focuses: the knowledge of healing wounds and curing diseases according to method and active manual skill,41 which does not only rely on speculation. As expressed in his Cinq livres de chirurgie and again in the first edition of his complete work in 1575, Paré considers surgery the most prominent subject.42 As we have seen, this entails that anatomical knowledge be expounded from a surgeon’s perspective. From this conception of medicine and surgery, Paré derives a specific order in which to present anatomical knowledge. In his Anatomie universelle, published in 1561, he explains the order in which he has decided to present the anatomical knowledge he has collected. He first reminds the reader that there are several ways to become acquainted with a topic. He mentions three available models: the first is that of the demonstrative sciences, illustrated by Aristotle’s argumentation in his works on logic and physics. This method proceeds from the simplest elements to the most complex composites. The second model, practiced by Galen in some works, takes the opposite approach, proceeding from complex composites to the simplest elements. This method is based on division. Finally, the third path to knowledge is that of definition, which investigates the essence and nature of things, which Galen also used in some of his works. Paré declares his preference for the second method, which presents anatomical knowledge from the most complex composites to the simplest elements. He defends this choice with the argument that surgeons’ goals differ from philosophers’ ambitions. While philosophers search for the essence and nature of things, surgeons are “opérateurs sensuels.” In consequence, they do not require the same kind of definitions as philosophers do. The essence of things remains hidden to surgeons, but they need not be concerned with it. What they need is the anatomical knowledge that will enable them to operate with a sure hand. The definition appropriate to their practices thus proves to be rather a “description” intended for

“RATIONAL SURGERY” BY BUILDING ON TRADITION | 109 medical practice. It does not tell us about the essence of things but rather indicates the various parts of the human body and its characteristics insofar as this knowledge is useful to surgeons.43 By declaring that there are several different ways to approach the human body, and that the medical approach has specific advantages over the philosophical, Paré thus contributes to the reform of medical knowledge in the early modern age. He accomplishes this without breaking with tradition and without making an actual contribution to anatomical knowledge. In his own way, however, he proves to be far more than an experienced “practitioner”: he is aware that the surgeon’s eye has epistemological implications, and he clearly formulates these. Conclusion It is interesting to note that Paré’s contribution to the understanding of human intelligence and animal perception could have been related to his strong concern for human pain. If he had developed his ideas on this topic, he would perhaps have anticipated the crucial debates on sensitivity and sensation in the eighteenth century. Paré’s attention to pain is well known,44 as also is his complex relationship to human suffering.45 However, he chose not to pursue this path, and consequently it is not a topic that could be explored here. I have argued that Paré significantly participated in the reform of the medical knowledge of his time. His contribution may be fully appreciated, first of all, if we abandon the idea that this reform of medical knowledge was only, at least primarily, due to the development of new anatomical practices and implied a clear-cut break with the ancient medical tradition. The reform of medical knowledge in the Renaissance is a more complex phenomenon. It may be described as a medical, philosophical, and anthropological discourse. In addition, it may be better understood if one takes into account the way some Renaissance writers, among them Paré, refer to the tradition in both positive and negative terms, in a free manner. This way of elaborating one’s thought may be observed, for example, both in Montaigne’s Essais and in Machiavelli’s style in the Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livy, in which he developed his political thought by studying the rise of the Roman Republic on the basis of his interpretation of Livy. From the beginning to the end of the sixteenth century, as illustrates this series Machiavelli– Paré–Montaigne, various fields of thought and science display this specific

110 | MARIE GAILLE way to renew the understanding of the world and of the course of events through a critical use of the tradition. Considering these elements, and despite frequent assessments,46 we may say that Paré is a key figure to give an account of this discourse and of its evolution. First, as we have seen, Paré’s use of anatomical knowledge as the basis of his conception of “rational surgery” is a very specific and consistent way of both upholding and breaking with the ancient medical tradition. Paré moreover identifies an approach to the human body that is specifically appropriate to the art of diagnosis, prognosis, and medical care; his approach relies on description and thus inherently differs from the philosophical quest for the essence of things. He thus proposes to draw a clear boundary between two types of thought that in his day were still very intertwined. Both these considerations invite us to shift the moment in which G. Canguilhem identifies the emergence of “rational medicine” from the seventeenth back to the sixteenth century and to revise our conception of it.47 Finally, the examination of his works gives us important insight into the necessity of qualifying even the most established history of medical discourse, at least in one part: that is, the conviction that scholars of early modern anatomy should focus exclusively on the reform of anatomical knowledge and the critical reception of the medical tradition.

PART II Humans, Animals, &

the Rise of Comparative Anatomy

Chapter 7 Diseases of the Brain Seen through Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s Eyes Domenico Bertoloni Meli

I n 1703 a butcher ca lled the Veuve Coart (Widow Coart), of the Boucherie du petit Châtelet, in Paris, purchased some oxen. She was about to fell one of them when the ox tried to escape; it did so four times, before she eventually succeeded. She severed the head of the animal, but when she tried to cut it, the head resisted the blow. The butcher believed she had hit the iron ring to which the head was attached, and therefore she tried a second, a third, and a fourth time, always in vain. Thus she smashed the skull to pieces with a hammer. She was surprised to find a large stone in place of the brain, as if the brain had become petrified.1 Veuve Coart brought her remarkable specimen to Christophle Du Verney (1661–1748), brother of the better-known Joseph-Guichard and, like him, a member of the Paris Académie des Sciences. Du Verney expressed his astonishment at this prodigy; he was especially surprised that the ox seemed in good health, escaping its executioners four times. He examined carefully both the petrified brain and the literature; Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680) had reported a case of a petrified ox brain, but that case was different, as the animal was very thin and went about with lowered head. Bartholin had argued that the brain should no longer be considered a noble part, in that its functions are not absolutely necessary to life. His strategy was similar to the one he had adopted in the aftermath of Jean Pecquet’s 113

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Figure 7.1. Christophle Du Verney, Petrified Brain of an Ox, Memoires de l’Académie Royale des Science, 1703, plate II. discovery that the liver did not receive chyle and therefore could not make blood: in both cases Bartholin dismissed the central role traditionally given to those organs. Du Verney disagreed: he noticed that some portions of the Paris brain were still soft and spongy, a key feature showing both that the specimen was not an artifact—or a deception—and that at least some portions were still functional in that they could provide animal spirits to the nerves.2 Nonetheless, Du Verney admitted that the petrified brain was a prodigy, since one experiences every day that light wounds to the brain or even to the membranes covering it cause disorders that deprive it of its functions, whereas in this case an overwhelmingly petrified brain appeared functional.3 Du Verney deemed the case to be sufficiently remarkable to warrant visual representation, which appeared in the form of three plates due for both drawing and engraving to Philippe Simonneau fils (1685– c. 1753), who worked for the Académie Royale des Sciences.

Figure 7.2. Antonio Vallisneri, bony brain of an ox. Considerazione, ed esperienze intorno al creduto cervello di bue impietrito, 1710, plate 1.

116 | DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI The petrified brain of Veuve Coart’s ox raises a number of issues on the relations between anatomy and pathology and also between animals and humans: what conclusions can we draw about human brains and brains in general from animal brains? What inferences about healthy states can we draw from diseased states, both for extraordinary and ordinary cases? What is the role of visual representation in these investigations at the intersection between anatomy and pathology? These are complex questions and I do not pretend to address them in general terms. Rather, I would like to explore these issues with the help of the most extensive and influential treatise of pathology of the eighteenth century, Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis (On the Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy, 1761). My choice may seem odd, for chronological reasons if nothing else, since over half a century separates Du Verney’s report from Morgagni’s magnum opus; however, Morgagni’s work appeared at the very end of his long life, when he was in his eightieth year, and included a large number of earlier observations by himself and by his teacher, the surgeon Antonio Maria Valsalva (1666–1723). Thus De sedibus relies on two generations of postmortem reports; the earliest I have found are from 1699 and 1700, dating from the same time as Du Verney’s study of the petrified brain. Moreover, Morgagni was familiar with the issues raised by Du Verney, which had also been discussed by his Padua colleague Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730) in a letter on this subject addressed to Du Verney; the letter was published just before Morgagni moved to Padua to replace Vallisneri in the second chair of the theory of medicine, since Vallisneri had moved to the first chair. Unlike the French anatomist, Vallisneri had argued that the brain in question was likely not petrified but rather bony, like the one he had found in Modena a few years earlier; he even carried out some chemical tests to confirm his views. The woodcut in Vallisneri’s treatise shows that he had the specimen sectioned in order to examine its interior.4 Morgagni and His Magnum Opus Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) was born in Forlì, in the Romagna region, and was educated at Bologna, where he was a student of the physician Ippolito Francesco Albertini (1662–1738) and Valsalva, both students and followers of Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694). Morgagni graduated in philosophy and medicine at Bologna in 1701, where he remained for a few

DISEASES OF THE BRAIN SEEN THROUGH MORGAGNI’S EYES | 117 years operating in Valsalva’s circle in the Accademia degli Inquieti and performing dissections at local hospitals.5 His first publication in the form of two Epistolae entailed a defense of Malpighi against the attacks of his Bologna rival Giovanni Girolamo Sbaraglia (1641–1710); although Morgagni first appeared in print—somewhat surreptitiously, since his Epistolae were anonymous—with a defense of his intellectual grandfather, establishing an intellectual connection between them without significant qualifications would be misleading. While Malpighi made the microscope the key tool of his research for each of his publications for more than thirty years, Morgagni did not trust either advanced microscopy or, for that matter, elaborate injections. Rather, he pursued anatomical investigations without relying on highly interventionist, comparatively novel, and profoundly problematic techniques. In one respect, however, Morgagni did follow Malpighi: both firmly believed in a rational approach to medicine and in the importance of anatomy in the investigation of disease. The seats and causes of disease—to echo the title of Morgagni’s great work—were key to understanding the nature of disease and devising an appropriate therapy. Indeed, Malpighi too had assembled a collection of postmortem reports—about three dozen—on which he frequently relied in his publications. Even in this regard, though, there is a detectable shift of emphasis between the two anatomists, as we shall see.6 In 1707 Morgagni moved to Venice, where he remained for two years. During this time he was involved in producing an amended edition of De subitaneis mortibus (Venice, 1708) by the pontifical archiater Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654–1720); the first edition had appeared in Rome the previous year under the auspices of Pope Clement XI. In his work Lancisi forcefully defended the crucial role of postmortems in the study of disease, a theme dear to Morgagni. This work testifies to his early interest in brain injuries. After a few years in Forlì, in 1711, Morgagni was called to the second chair of the theory of medicine at Padua; in 1715 he moved to the anatomy chair, which he held for the rest of his professional career.7 Although the main points of Morgagni’s life are well known, none of his works, starting from his Adversaria anatomica (1706–1719), has been thoroughly studied, and this is true even for his main treatise, De sedibus. Building on the work by the Swiss physician Théophile Bonet (1620– 1689), Sepulchretum, sive anatomia practica ex cadaveribus morbo denatis (Graveyard or Practical Anatomy of Cadavers That Died of a Disease, Geneva, 1679; second edition,

118 | DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI Lyon and Geneva, 1700), Morgagni discussed an imposing collection of cases assembled by Valsalva and by himself, and analyzed them in relation to those found in the literature.8 The idea of producing such a work stemmed from Bonet, as Morgagni himself stated, and the two works follow a similar organization from the head down; however, whereas the Sepulchretum is mostly a collection of reports found in the literature with some scholia or annotations, De sedibus relies on a more thoughtful collection of cases overwhelmingly based on Valsalva’s and Morgagni’s firsthand experiences. A thorough analysis of Morgagni’s magnum opus lies beyond the scope of my essay; however, there are a couple of introductory comments I wish to mention before moving to the study of brain disease. The first concerns the tension between extraordinary versus common cases. In much of the literature from the early modern period there was an emphasis on the former, which were worth discussing and occasionally reproducing in a woodcut or an engraving; such cases often belonged to teratology just as much as to pathology. By contrast, in both Bonet and Morgagni the emphasis subtly shifted from rare individual occurrences, to comparing large numbers of cases in order to draw some general conclusions. Thus their works are much more comprehensive and systematic. The second aspect concerns the attitude to the ancients. Several scholars in the seventeenth century, such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679), had a critical attitude to the ancients and especially Galen. In his correspondence with Malpighi, for example, Borelli frequently criticized traditional doctrines and saw a break with ancient tradition, much like Galileo had done with the science of motion. By contrast, one of the striking features of De sedibus is the implicit and at times explicit emphasis on continuity. The remarkably deep and malleable writings of the Hippocratic corpus have enjoyed a popularity going beyond the period covered in this essay. Morgagni’s allegiance to antiquity, however, extended to Galen and he also relies on and cites Avicenna and Vesalius, despite differences with their views. According to Galen, for example, apoplexy, or the condition of being struck suddenly in such a way as to impair or lose the power of sensation and motion, was often due to an excess of phlegm in the brain, whereas Morgagni followed the more modern doctrine advocated by Johann Jakob Wepfer (1620–1695) that most cases of apoplexy were due to extravasated blood.9 Paradoxically, Morgagni was more critical of his immediate predecessors, such as Bonet, for their sloppiness and inaccuracy—at times he is so

DISEASES OF THE BRAIN SEEN THROUGH MORGAGNI’S EYES | 119 pedantic as to correct Bonet for having given an incorrect page number. Morgagni acknowledges that doctrines have changed—even with regard to the role of the pineal gland as the site of the soul—but overall he presents a picture of anatomy and pathology as a much more continuous enterprise than some of his seventeenth-century predecessors. For example, in discussing serous apoplexy—the alleged condition resulting from the effusion of serum into the brain—he argued that some of those who questioned its existence had done so10 “because they wish’d to explode all the opinions of the ancients; and with them this dogma was perpetually inculcated, that apoplexies in general had their origin from too viscid a serum, in the ventricles of the brain. But doubtless the prejudices of the moderns against antient doctrines, have often carried them too far beyond proper bounds.” Last, despite their close association, we should not assume an identity of views between Valsalva and Morgagni. As Owsei Temkin reminded us in a now-classic paper, whereas Valsalva was a surgeon, Morgagni was an anatomist. Indeed, Morgagni himself pointed out in De sedibus that he was not by nature as inclined to cut living bodies as dead ones; therefore contributions to the study of ulcers, wounds, and tumors were more from his teacher than himself. But there were also differences between them with regard to specific beliefs, some of which are directly related to the theme of our workshop. For example, the first letter of the entire treatise reports a case of a boy of thirteen “of a ready wit,” who had died following pain in the head—possibly related to a tubercular affection in the right lung; in the cadaver Valsalva noticed “the unusual magnitude of the pineal gland.” In his comment, Morgagni distanced himself from the implications of Valsalva’s report by stating “This last article, which respects the ingenuity of the youth, you will understand was written when the pineal gland was believ’d to be the seat of the soul.” We notice here how, with the help of Morgagni’s commentary, a somewhat cryptic postmortem report sheds light on broader issues such as the acceptance of Cartesian views in Bolognese circles close to Malpighi at the turn of the century. The implication was that Valsalva was relying on a correlation between the boy’s wit and the unusual size of the pineal gland, as if his rational soul had a larger abode.11 Morgagni was skeptical also of the more recent proposal put forward by his friend and correspondent Lancisi that the site of the soul was the corpus callosum. Although on one instance Morgagni found a correlation between anomalies in the corpus callosum and insanity, he did not find a similar correlation in other cases, and therefore judged it to be accidental.12 Human and Animal Brains

120 | DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI Du Verney’s example, at the beginning of this chapter, concerns an animal, an ox to be precise. Careful readers may have noticed that the adjective “human” is lacking from Morgagni’s title as a qualification to “diseases.” I am not sure how widespread the view that human diseases are different from those of other animals is today, or was in the early modern period. A recent fascinating article in the New York Times by UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and writer Kathryn Bowers highlights that veterinary doctors today have a much broader perspective than those doctors who treat only one species, as they call physicians. From the peculiar pancreatic cancer that killed Steve Jobs to sexually transmitted diseases and from gout to anxiety disorders—such as feather picking—there seems to be a huge and surprising overlap in the animal kingdom.13 Going back to historical times, readers do not have to go beyond the sixth paragraph of the first letter in De sedibus to find a reference to brain disease in sheep—on the example of what Bonet had done in the Sepulchretum. The case reported by Morgagni was due to Valsalva, who purchased a sheep on noticing that it avoided herding with the flock, rolled on the earth, and sought to avoid its head being touched. Valsalva noticed a range of unusual features, from a very flaccid brain to a passage from the cranium to the nostrils.14 Sheep were referred to elsewhere in the treatise,15 though they were not privileged “model organisms” for the study of brain disease. De sedibus contains other references to dogs,16 goats,17 horses,18 pigs,19 and, as in the example from Du Verney, oxen.20 Indeed, Morgagni pointed out that relying on animals in order to study diseases of the human body, especially when the latter were not available for dissection, was an ancient tradition dating from Hippocrates and still alive with Thomas Willis. Even the brain, arguably the most distinctive organ in humans, was not immune to this practice.21 Reliance on animals offers the anatomist an opportunity that was almost invariably precluded while dealing with humans: experimentation. Probably the most famous cases of medical experimentation in the early modern period concern blood transfusion—on both animals and humans—but experiments were performed in the study of the brain as well, implicitly implying once again that at least in some respects humans and animals shared common features. As Morgagni put it, Valsalva22 had determin’d formerly, as I have learnt from his papers, to make many experiments about the cause of the apoplexy. For instance, whether it could be artificially brought on, by throwing into the

DISEASES OF THE BRAIN SEEN THROUGH MORGAGNI’S EYES | 121 carotid arteries of beasts this or that thing: whether these arteries being tied, the animal would nevertheless feel: whether the blood of apoplectic persons differs from that of others, and in what manner: finally, what is the fault or depravity of the serum so often effus’d within the skulls of apoplectic persons; and what is the difference betwixt this and that which is often found, in like manner, extravasated in the pain of the head.

These are just some of the experiments performed. Others involved injection of air into the veins of animals in order to determine its effect in the bloodstream—some anatomists thought air would collect in the heart and prevent its contraction. Other experiments investigated whether the blood serum was coagulable by heat.23 Thus, very much as in the Veuve Coart’s ox case, animals provided material for study and reflection relevant to humans. Pathology, Anatomy, and Localization The relationships between anatomy and pathology can be quite complex. On the one hand, anatomy is the foundation of pathology: it is through the study of normal states that pathological ones are identified in the first place. Postmortem reports often involved a discussion on variations among normal states as opposed to genuinely pathological ones. However, matters can also work the other way round, in that pathological states can be used to draw conclusions on healthy ones. There are different ways of using pathology in this way: one was used specifically for the brain by Morgagni’s intellectual grandfather, and Valsalva’s mentor, Marcello Malpighi. Although the existence of the rete mirabile in humans as the site where the animal spirits—a subtle fluid believed to flow through the nerves responsible for motion and for transmitting sensory perception—had been refuted in the sixteenth century first by Berengario and then by Vesalius, many seventeenth-century anatomists still believed in a surprisingly similar framework and argued that the animal spirits were produced or secreted in the brain from arterial blood. By means of a series of highly interventionist and elaborate procedures, involving boiling, removing the pia mater while still hot, staining, and using the microscope, Malpighi argued that the cerebral cortex consisted of glands filtering the animal spirits flowing through the nerves. In addition, he relied on a pathological state in the form of a stone found in the brain of a patient by Johannes

122 | DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI Pfeil and reported in 1565 by the German physician Johann Kentmann (1518–1574), to support his view, arguing that the stone, shaped like a blackberry, was a petrified gland that disease had enlarged and preserved for posterity. Malpighi was relying here on techniques I have called “the microscope of disease” and “mining for stones”: the former relies on disease as a magnification device, enabling the investigator better to see the minute structures of body parts; the latter exploits disease as a device to harden body parts and preserve them as witnesses to his views—Morgagni found both techniques questionable. Malpighi’s belief in the glands in the cerebral cortex is especially interesting methodologically, in that it relies on a combination of very different techniques of investigation, thus it appears to provide robust data. However, it is also problematic; in fact, his views were challenged by Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), who relied on just one technique; he managed to inject the cerebral blood vessels with a colored fluid and to show that there were no glands—he considered this as the most important result in his forty-year career as an anatomist.24 Malpighi’s strategy is pertinent to the themes of this volume in that it deals with neurological functions; although he developed it in an especially structural fashion, others too employed it in different forms. At the most elementary and immediate level, damage to an organ can highlight what the function of that organ is. More specifically, as in the case of the brain, one could provide the localization of specific cerebral functions through damage to portions of the brain. In such instances diseased cases are used not in order to magnify a structure, as Malpighi had done—since the structure of the brain is not elucidated in this way—but in a functional way, to establish a relation between localization and the corresponding function of that portion of the brain. In De sedibus Morgagni reported and discussed repeatedly with the help of many examples the claim he generously attributed to Valsalva that in the case of apoplexy, damage to the right hemisphere of the brain would result in paralysis of the left side, and vice versa. Actually, this notion was known since antiquity and had been recently restated by Rome physician Domenico Mistichelli (1675–1715).25 On the other hand, unlike Thomas Willis (1621–1675) in De cerebro, Morgagni was reluctant to speculate on more specific forms of localization of brain functions. Echoing a passage by Borelli in a letter to Malpighi in which he questioned the localization provided by Willis, Morgagni argued:26 If you should expect, that before I make an end of writing, I begin to

DISEASES OF THE BRAIN SEEN THROUGH MORGAGNI’S EYES | 123 point out in what part of the brain, and in what manner, the motions are made, or what kind of motions they are, when deliria are excited: you would seem not yet to be sufficiently acquainted with me. For all I could do would be only to give you some general hypotheses, which for that reason are known to you and to others; and even those I should give you very timorously and cautiously. The other considerations, I think, must be referr’d to that time, in which physicians thought it praise-worthy to enquire, in such a manner, not only into abstruse things, but even those which are plac’d beyond our capacity, that when they could not find the real causes of them, they made no scruple to invent others.

Here Morgagni seems to question our ability ever to attain knowledge of localization of brain functions in a way perhaps that may seem rather timid to the modern reader, used to sophisticated and powerful localization and visualization technologies—though not perhaps quite the “motions” Morgagni and his predecessors had envisaged. Yet in another passage, having reported a number of instances in which “the most grievous disorders,” such as palsy and loss of speech, resulted from injuries of the corpus striatum, Morgagni agreed with the Bern physician Daniel Langhans that this structure tucked right in the middle is “the most noble” part of the brain.27 Elsewhere, Morgagni infers the stupor and semiparalysis of a woman from the laxity of her cerebrum, since it would be impossible for it to secrete spirits in sufficient quantity and “to dispatch them to the limbs.”28 Here one finds a seemingly mechanistic doctrine resembling Descartes’s for the reference to the laxity of the cerebrum, and traditional doctrines for the reference to the secretion of the spirits. At one point Morgagni discusses why the cerebellum seems to be less affected by apoplexy than the cerebrum. Besides the simple fact that is it smaller, he lists two causes: the first is that the cerebellum has, in proportion, more cortical matter and therefore it would secrete a greater amount of animal spirits; the second is that the passages through which the cerebellum sends the animal spirits to the nerves are larger, as shown in the process of generation, in which the cerebellum develops before the cerebrum. Although Morgagni does not specifically mention glands in the cerebral cortex, he does not appear to have moved much beyond Malpighi’s mechanistic framework here; elsewhere Morgagni referred to the body as a “machine.” It is fair to say, however, that such speculations about the size

124 | DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI of the pores—which appear especially outlandish to us—occupy a relatively minor role in his sprawling work compared to the more strictly structural pathological reflections.29 In conclusion, Morgagni strongly supports the claim that in apoplexy paralysis occurs on the opposite side of the lesion in the brain; except for some occasional claims, such that the corpus striatum was a key portion of the brain, he was reluctant to provide a localization of brain function. Thus while he seems to have shared the mechanistic views of his predecessors, he was more cautious in endorsing them; moreover, he was also more cautious than Malpighi in drawing anatomical inferences from pathological cases, and this is another significant shift I had alluded to above between Malpighi and Morgagni. Morgagni’s pathological reflections belonged more to a field of their own rather than representing stepping stones or magnifying lenses to invisible microstructures. Visualization Readers interested in visual representations of morbid states will be disappointed by De sedibus: unlike Christophle Du Verney, who included three plates of the remarkable ox brain that was the focus of his contribution, and Vallisneri, who included ten plates in his rejoinder, the only illustration gracing the pages of Morgagni’s work was his portrait. Several anatomists, both before and after him, criticized the usage of illustrations and questioned their cognitive and pedagogical role on several grounds: in the sixteenth century Jacobus Sylvius (1478–1555), for example, argued that the sense of touch was key to anatomy and that it could not be captured by illustrations, which could not be a substitute for hands-on dissection; about a century later, in the mid-seventeenth century, William Harvey (1578–1657) questioned the accuracy of figures, arguing that if many representations of the same specimen were produced by an artist, they would all be slightly different and thus, at least in part, inaccurate; around 1800 Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) too questioned illustrations because, as a rule, they only offer flat representations, whereas the object to be described is three-dimensional. Of course, one could produce several plates from different perspectives, but that would multiply cost even further.30 Yet, to return to Morgagni, the lack of relevant illustrations does not mean that he was opposed to visual representation in general and of disease in particular. Several comments in De sedibus point to this conclusion, one that is reinforced by the point that he routinely relied on images in his

DISEASES OF THE BRAIN SEEN THROUGH MORGAGNI’S EYES | 125 anatomical—and at times pathological—works. In many instances Morgagni provided vivid verbal descriptions suggesting a strong visual emphasis. For example, in some instances he referred to bodies resembling millet seeds in the crura of the medulla oblongata, or among some calculi found in the pineal gland. Elsewhere he compared a liver to reddish marble variegated with white, or a kidney to a leaf of the plant as asarum [wild ginger].31 Elsewhere Morgagni actually referred to illustrations in the literature. For example, there are several references to stones found in several body parts—much like Malpighi had done with the stone in the brain reported by Johann Kentmann—though Morgagni did not draw mechanistic conclusions from such specimens. His references are not surprising, since stones formed inside the body were among the most commonly reproduced items.32 Elsewhere one finds references in the works by Nathaniel Highmore (1613–1685), Willis, and William Cowper (1666–1709), for example.33 Examples of vivid verbal descriptions and references to illustrations in the literature, however, can be found in William Harvey too; indeed, Harvey had no objection to using striking verbal images and—somewhat incongruously with his own views—he also referred to the plates on generation by Hieronymus Fabricius (1537–1619). Yet Morgagni went further; at one point in De sedibus he stated that during a dissection at the anatomy theater in Bologna in 1700 he made a “rough sketch” of a remarkable case—involving a diaphragm with three foramina—which he still preserved about sixty years later.34 Elsewhere Morgagni went further still and criticized Bonet for having failed to provide references to the plates included by other authors:35 For the figures, which are published by the authors themselves, together with their observations, although they are often useful, and sometimes necessary, in order to understand the descriptions entirely, are, however, never given in the Sepulchretum, where they might, or even where they ought to, have been given. Thus, if for no other reason than to criticize Bonet, Morgagni did argue that illustrations were often useful and sometimes necessary. Thus although De sedibus contains no illustrations, surprisingly it does list some of the illustrations published to that point and thus it provides a limited visual index of diseased states for those who wished to trace the illustration in the literature cited. Nonetheless, De sedibus differs dramatically from works published in the 1820s—approximately the same number of years separating it from Du Verney’s essay—providing detailed and arresting

126 | DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI visual representations of brain lesions in color.36 Concluding Reflections My brief contribution does no justice to the richness of themes in the letters on brain disease in Morgagni’s magnum opus, let alone the work as a whole. Nonetheless, I hope to have offered a flavor of some of the themes pertinent to the brain touched on in this epoch-making work. Recently Henry Schutta has provided a thorough analysis of Morgagni’s views on apoplexy, challenging the often rather empty rhetorical praises of De sedibus and questioning how innovative his views actually were. As he put it: “If Morgagni was as influential as is generally believed, he may actually have retarded the understanding of cerebrovascular disease and the nature of stupor and coma.” In particular, Morgagni would have failed to provide a precise localization of apoplexy and to distinguish among different types of intercranial bleedings, and would have perpetuated the myth of serous—as opposed to sanguineous—apoplexy. Schutta has argued that, much like his predecessors, Morgagni failed to recognize that the brain and spinal cord are normally bathed in a cerebrospinal fluid because traditional methods of dissection, proceeding from the abdomen to the thorax and the head, would have resulted in leakage of the fluid. In those cases when the brain was dissected first, anatomists would have found the fluid and attributed to it a pathological role that it did not have.37 For all its clinical shortcomings, however, De sedibus offers the historian extraordinarily rich material both in terms of the actual cases examined and of the literature over many centuries examined by Morgagni, who provides a critical digest or summa of the knowledge available at the time.

Chapter 8 Between Language, Music, & Sound Birdsong as a Philosophical Problem from Aristotle to Kant

Justin E. H. Smith

A ccording to Robert Berw ick a nd Noa m C homsky, “[f]rom an evolutionary standpoint, birds are particularly well placed to probe certain biolinguistic questions.”1 One such question may concern the relationship between linguistic ability and musicality. While the history of preDarwinian theories of birdsong cannot help to definitively resolve this question, it can at least reveal to us the question’s enduring interest. The philosophy of language and the history of music theory would not, of course, seem to have much in common. Theories of music principally concern harmony, and the way in which it mysteriously straddles the realms of aesthetics and mathematics. Theories of language concern, principally, meaning: how it is that things and states of affairs in the world can be captured, or denoted, in sounds generated by the vocal chords and articulated by the tongue, palate, lips, and teeth. Music is generally held to be nondenoting by definition, and thus, often, to be associated with the irrational or mysterious. Language is thought in parallel fashion to denote no matter what the pitch or tone, or other quasi-musical ornamentations, in which it is delivered. Yet the two fields of inquiry come together in one unlikely place in the history of natural philosophy: theories of avian vocalization, better known as “birdsong.” Are the birds talking? Are they singing? Are

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128 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH they doing both at once? And what can we learn about the relationship between language and music by listening to the birds? These are the questions that drove the ornithological inquiries of many natural philosophers beginning in antiquity, most notably Aristotle, Lucretius, and Pliny, and, as I will show, such inquiries reached a peak of intensity in the early modern period in Europe, as new philosophical stakes came to shape nearly every debate with implications for the question of the uniqueness of human language and human rationality. As we will also see, the role that birds played in speculation on the origins and nature of language tracked closely parallel developments in reflections on the origins and nature of language as such. This is most of all true in the eighteenth century, when “language” came to function as a sort of metonymy not just for human rationality, but also for nation and culture. Freedom and Mechanism Throughout the history of modern philosophy, the explanation of animal behavior in general, with birdsong often serving as an example par excellence, closely tracked a philosopher’s commitments concerning the possibility of a mechanistic explanation of natural processes in general and of animal motion and behavior in particular.2 Thus in an early fragment René Descartes, true to character, identifies the apparent absence of “random” or unpredictable turns in the motion of animals as evidence of their status as mere machines: “The high degree of perfection displayed in some of their actions makes us suspect that animals do not have free will.”3 Kant, by contrast, in his critique of the limits of mechanistic explanation of the living world, will focus specifically on birdsong as more expressive of freedom than human music that follows a preestablished sequence of notes. He writes in the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment: “Nature [is] subject to no constraint of artificial rules. . . . Even a bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it, and thus to be richer for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes; for we grow tired much sooner of the frequent and lengthy repetitions of the latter.”4 Yet whatever one’s philosophical commitments about animals, bird vocalization could not be so easily dismissed as other reported forms of imitativeness, often referred to, by a revealing metonymy, as “aping.” Part of the reason for its apparent exceptional character had to do not just with the fact that some species of birds could learn a limited number of words from human beings, but in addition that quite independently of

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 129 human beings most or perhaps all avian vocalization was understood to be the result of a process of learning. It had been well known since antiquity that vocalization, and notably the vocalization that is generally interpreted by human beings not as language but as “song,” was a result of a process of acquisition, generally from the parents while still in the nest. It was commonly inferred that this process required a high degree of mental plasticity in fledglings, which could not be easily explained in terms of the simple awakening of an innate capacity, as one might explain, say, the pawing of kittens or the butting of kids. In this respect, the singing of birds was often perceived as having something language-like about it. Since fledglings must be taught, it seemed reasonable to infer that they were learning something, and this something was often held to be a practical skill for communicating with other birds: again, something language-like if not language stricto sensu. Learning Birds In a well-known passage of the Historia animalium, Aristotle observes that “some of the small birds do not utter the same voice as their parents when they sing, if they are reared away from home and hear other birds singing. A nightingale has already been observed teaching its chick, suggesting that [birdsong] . . . is receptive to training.”5 The Greek philosopher distinguishes between the mere noise some animals make, the voice (phone¯) of certain animals that are capable of voluntarily emitting noises in contextappropriate ways, and, finally articulated voice or speech (dialektos) which is, for Aristotle, voluntarily emitted sound that is also modulated by the controlled motion of the tongue. There is thus both a mental and a physiological dimension to speech: it is not enough to have will and intellect without the appropriate organs, nor would a properly equipped mouth and throat be sufficient for possession of speech if these were not also capable of emitting freely chosen propositions. Some animals have the intelligence and the will to produce voice, but lack the requisite organs to articulate this voice into speech. Thus the dolphin can utter vocal sounds, “but its tongue is not loose, nor has it lips, so as to give utterance to an articulate sound (or a sound of vowel and consonant in combination).”6 Birds by contrast, though Aristotle does not dwell on it, are capable of dialektos, and some better than others: “[S]uch of them can articulate best as have the tongue moderately flat, and also such as have thin and delicate tongues.”7 An ambiguity follows Aristotle’s discussion of vocalization in the Historia animalium. He notes that viviparous quadrupeds “utter vocal sounds of

130 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH different kinds, but they have no power of converse.”8 He adds that “this power, or language, is peculiar to man.”9 But in the following paragraph, Aristotle returns to his idea of “articulate sound,” and says that this is, rather than the ability to converse, what “one might reasonably designate ‘language.’”10 And here, again, he explicitly includes birds alongside men as in possession of articulate sound, citing as evidence the fact that birdsong is “not equally congenital with mere voice,” but rather “something capable of modification and improvement.”11 So (1) having the proper organs and (2) being capable of learning appear to be Aristotle’s considered criteria for any given creature’s vocalizations to count as language, and only birds and human beings meet these criteria. There was not, in antiquity and in early modernity, a clear distinction between human language as issuing from an infinitely recursive syntax on the one hand, and on the other mere codes that transmit a finite number of preset signals with limited possibilities of combination between them.12 Yet there were other ways of expressing the implied moral and metaphysical distinction this appeal to syntax is often intended to carry (“They don’t have syntax, so we can eat them” is how Richard Sorabji sharply sums up the intended inference13). There were indeed many arguments that birdsong consists only in repetitions of stereotyped patterns. But many also suspected that if birdsong were nothing other than this, then there would be no need for a period of learning; rather, the calls could be produced simply by instinct, as appears to be the case for the barking of dogs or the neighing of horses. There are in fact a number of different criteria by which a theorist might seek to establish that birds have, or lack, that special capacity or internal experience that today we associate with syntax. One might focus on the apparently merely ritual function of vocalizations in order to establish that these could not have communicative content. Thus Pliny the Elder writes in the Natural History that “[t]he birds have several songs each, and not all the same but every bird songs of its own. They compete with one another, and there is clearly an animated rivalry between them; the loser often ends her life by dying, her breath gives out before her song.”14 They have, that is, a limited number of instinct-driven signals that are deployed in response to particular circumstances, a capacity that falls well short of language on both the historical as well as today’s scientific understanding. A related distinction can be made between the sort of vocalizations that are species-specific, or that occur in more or less the same way in all individual members of a species, and those in which each individual representative of a species has its own unique repertoire. Here Pliny seems to attribute at least to the nightingale

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 131 a share in the sort of individual creativity that we associate with human language: “In so little a throat (as a nightingale’s) there is as much variation of song as in all the refined instruments that the art of man has invented. The song of each nightingale is like that of no other; it is her own unique song.”15 Finally, another criterion for language-likeness can be found in the capacity of an individual member of a species to develop a different vocal repertoire under different circumstances, thus giving signs that vocalization is not simply a reflection of inborn natural abilities, but is also in a sense “artificial,” in that it can be shaped through education and practice. Thus Pliny writes of the nightingale that its “exquisite music gradually begins to leave off after fifteen days, and the color of the nightingale, just like her song, is altered little by little. There is not to be seen in the winter what existed in the spring, as both song and coloring have changed. But when reared in the refined surroundings of the palace, she renders her melodies not only in spring, but also in winter, and not just by day but also by night, as she is instructed equally by artifice and by nature.”16 There is remarkable continuity across the centuries. In his magisterial Musurgia universalis of 1650,17 the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, like Pliny before him, gives an account of birdsong as language-like to the extent that it is learned. He stops short however of giving birdsong a communicative function, and instead describes it in aesthetic terms, as an instance of the wonderful variety of nature: But where there are listeners nearby, it is as if it is revealing the riches of its voice, with admirable variety, it forms innumerable sounds, now producing them for a uniform length, now inflecting them, singing in short intervals and abruptly; now it twists its voice and creates a sort of quiver, now it stretches it out. . . . In addition the other, younger birds practice with them and try to imitate what they learn from the adults: the disciple listens with great attention, it grasps the improved formulation given by the instructor, in whom there is a certain reprehensiveness.18

The gratuitous character of birdsong identified by Kircher, its “innumerable” variety with no apparent function, will come to be an important feature of speculation in eighteenth-century aesthetics, notably in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. There is, however, a parallel tendency in the study of birdsong that reflects the well-known rift in philosophy, however exception-ridden, between the speculative rationalism characteristic of the Continent and the narrow empiricism more common in England.

132 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH Thus seventeen years before the publication of Kant’s third Critique, Daines Barrington publishes what is surely the most comprehensive and systematic pre-twentieth-century study of birdsong in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Here Barrington has no interest in striking an attitude of aesthetic wonder, nor in resting content with adjectives like “innumerable.” Instead, he enumerates and defines, like Aristotle before him, with a precise elaboration of the differences between sound, voice, and speech. For example, Barrington offers a clear, quantitative definition of “song” and limits it to only a small subset of all bird vocalizations: I would . . . define a bird’s song to be a succession of three or more different notes, which are continued without interruption during the same interval with a musical bar of four crotchets in an adagio movement, or whilst a pendulum swings four seconds. By the first requisite in this definition, I mean to exclude the call of a cuckow, or clucking of a hen, as they consist of only two notes; whilst the short bursts of singing birds, contending with each other (called jerks by the bird-catchers), are equally distinguished from what I term song, by their not continuing for four seconds.19

Like his predecessors, Barrington emphasizes the learned quality of bird song, observing that it is “no more innate, than language is in man,” and that its particular expression depends “entirely upon the master under which they are bred, as far as their organs will enable them to imitate the sounds which they have frequent opportunities of hearing.”20 Unlike his predecessors, Barrington subjects these claims to rigorous experimentation. Thus, for example, he describes one of numerous “adoption” experiments, where he places a fledgling of one species under the instruction of an adult of another: “I had some curiosity to find out whether an European nestling would equally learn the note of an African bird: I therefore educated a young linnet under a vengolina, which imitated its African master so exactly, without any mixture of the linnet song, that it was impossible to distinguish the one from the other.”21 Barrington worries considerably about the question why, if birdsong is learned and in this respect is “artificial,” there is nonetheless in the natural environment a widespread homogeneity in the way birdsong gets expressed within a given species: “birds have not any innate ideas of the notes which are supposed to be peculiar to each species. But it will possibly be asked, why in a wild state they adhere so steadily to the same song, in so much that it is well known, before

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 133 the bird is heard, what notes you are to expect from him. This, however, arises entirely from the nestling’s attending only to the instruction of the parent bird, whilst it disregards the notes of all others, which may be singing round him.”22 This account strengthens the view of birdsong as language-like, and also suggests a related analogy: that species of birds are very much like human linguistic communities, and that the homogeneity of song within a given species can be explained in the same way as the shared language of a given human nation. We will return to the significance of this analogy, particularly within the context of Enlightenment debates about the nature of human diversity, in further sections. For now, the lesson we wish to draw from the present section concerns the longevity of the idea, extending at least from Aristotle into the eighteenth century, that the learned aspect of avian vocalization was often seen as providing at least some evidence for its language-like character. But this evidence was not decisive, since it was also recognized that training is necessary in order to become a singer as well, at least to become a singer of a certain caliber. Again, it is generally supposed that to sing is not in the first instance to denote or to convey information, even if the lyrics of a song happen to be linguistically meaningful. However avian vocalization is heard, then, as speech or as song, it is different from the common groans and barks of other animals in that it must be taught, and thus it evidences the presence in birds of mental faculties that could not be explained as mere “instinct.”23 From Tongues to Tongues: The Organs of Language In large part as a result of the rise of what may be somewhat problematically called “mechanical philosophy,” as reflected for example in the citation from Descartes above, in the seventeenth century the most common view of bird vocalization was that it is empty, devoid of content, or, to use the standard phrase of the period, that it is “counterfeit.” Thus in Leibniz’s dialogue New Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1704, the character Philalèthe observes: “As the orang-outangs and other apes have the organs without being able to form the words, we can say that parrots and some other birds have the words without having language, for one can train these birds and many others to form quite distinct sounds; however they are in no way capable of language.”24 Théophile, the character in the dialogue who speaks for Leibniz, does not disagree. The reference to the vocal organs of the orang-outangs (a generic term used to describe all known great apes, and thus something quite distinct from the Indonesian Pongo

134 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH genus we today call “orangutan”) is a clear indication that Leibniz has read and fully absorbed the significant conclusions of Edward Tyson’s 1699 anatomical study of an infant chimpanzee, Orang-Outang, sive, Homo sylvestris.25 In this work Tyson had through minute observation determined that the anatomy of humans and apes, particularly the anatomy of the larynx, is simply too similar to permit any anatomical basis for any differences in behavioral capacities such as language. Tyson is worried about the particular physiological likeness of apes and humans in the region responsible, at least in humans, for the production of speech (the term “pygmie” here is being used as a synonym of “Orang-Outang,” which is to say the primate we classify today as Pan troglodytes, chimpanzee): As to the Larynx in our Pygmie . . . I found the whole Structure of this Part exactly as ’tis in Man. . . . And if there was any further advantage for the forming of Speech, I can’t but think our Pygmie had it. But upon the best Enquiry, I was never informed, that it attempted any thing that way. Tho’ Birds have been taught to imitate Humane Voice, and to pronounce Words and Sentences, yet Quadrupeds never; neither has this Quadru-manous Species of Animals, that so nearly approaches the Structure of Mankind, abating the Romances of Antiquity concerning them.

Here, Tyson explicitly accounts for all reported instances of teaching animals to speak as mere imitation, and not as indicative of any conscious activity. He goes on to write of the larynx that Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Galen have thought [it] to be the Organ which Nature has given to Man, as to the wisest of all Animals; for want perhaps of this Reflection: For the Ape is found provided by Nature of all those marvellous Organs of Speech with so much exactness . . . that there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto; for, according to these Philosophers, Apes should speak, seeing that they have the Instruments necessary for Speech.26

Then why aren’t they speaking? Tyson repeats his conviction, noted above, that the only explanation lies in the fact that anatomy is not, to borrow a phrase, destiny, that one cannot infer from the organs a creature has what it will be able to do:

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 135 From what is generally received, viz. That the Brain is reputed the more immediate Seat of the Soul it self; one would be apt to think, that since there is so great a disparity between the Soul of a Man, and a Brute, the Organ likewise in which ’tis placed should be very different too. Yet by comparing the Brain of our Pygmie with that of a Man; and with the greatest exactness, observing each Part in both; it was very surprising to me to find so great a resemblance of the one to the other, that nothing could be more. . . . Since therefore in all respects the Brain of our Pygmie does so exactly resemble a Man’s, I might here make the same Reflection the Parisians did upon the Organs of Speech, That there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such Actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto: for then our Pygmie might be really a Man.27

Tyson would thus take recourse to the immaterial, and thus nonanatomical, soul as the ultimate ground of human linguistic capacity. Now Philalèthe’s claim is that apes have language organs, but no words, while birds have both language organs and words, but no language. The words are “counterfeit,” even if by entering the realm of language-likeness birds achieve a more verisimilar counterfeiting of human faculties than any other creature in the animal kingdom. Tyson’s work comes at the culmination of a long interest among natural philosophers to anchor linguistic capability in a certain physiological conformation, even if the ultimate conclusion of his work is to decouple these two. For him, effectively, positing the existence of organs without functions in certain animals, in particular of speech organs without speech in apes, is the only way to preserve human uniqueness in the order of nature. This aporetic conclusion about apes casts the parallel history of birds in an interesting light. We have already seen, as early as Aristotle, a concern to ground linguistic capacity in physiology. Thus, again, dolphins have the cognitive capacities that would enable dialektos, but they lack the proper tongues in order to realize it. Reflection on the particular conformation of the vocal organs of birds, in a broadly Aristotelian natural-historical vein, remains one of the standard features of Renaissance ornithology. Thus for example Pierre Belon, in his Histoire de la nature des oyseaux of 1555, writes: “[A]s all birds have lungs and loose tongues, they are able to express their voices high or low, as do all animals, as well as man. There is no animal that is better able to produce articulate speech than the bird, and among other things those that have a tongue that is thin and large, are able to sing much

136 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH better.”28 Like Aristotle, too, Belon is concerned to emphasize the need for just the right combination of physiological prerequisites for speech, and thus the very delicate and even improbable balance from which birdsong results: [N]ot all animals that have lungs are able to sing, and to produce a voice. For serpents, of which there are more than thirty different species, do not know how to do anything other than to hiss. . . . [I]t is not only the lung in many animals that makes possible articulation of the voice. It is also the tongue, the lips, the palate, aided by the nerves that run to the sixth conjugation [of the brain], influencing the muscles that constrict, and open the throat or the gullet of animals, which, the healthier they are, the fuller is their voice. For birds that have a throat that is rather long, and that have a well-proportioned uvula, and are endowed with parts suited to this end, it is no wonder that they are able to sing, and that they have their particular songs that are different the ones from the others.29

Belon frequently repeats the phrase, “It is no wonder” (il n’est merveille), and generally does so in the course of expressing his own wonder at the apparent self-organization of nature, the well-proportionedness of uvulas and other things, to the production of beautiful and fitting ends. Such attention to “wonderful physiology” remains one of the central tropes of Kircher’s treatment of birdsong a century later. He emphasizes that no animal “is capable of inflection and speech, if you will except some birds (which delight the ears of listeners with sweet inflection, and which bring listeners into a stupor with their babbling that is similar to human speech).” The inability of the quadrupeds and serpents to provide such delight results from the fact that “their tongue lacks a larynx, nor do they have any [organ] for pronouncing vowels and consonants.”30 Thus to the imagined reader’s wonder at a parrot’s ability to pronounce the word “hello” in ancient Greek, Kircher gives a soberly physiological answer, not in order to dispel the wonder, but rather to convey his own sensitivity to the way in which the physiological basis of organic function in turn reveals the beauty and wisdom inherent in nature: It is thus asked how it comes about that this bird has the habit of forming words. How, I say, does the parrot acquire its khaire? Certainly it occurs in no other way than that the wonderful constitution of the animal and the affinity of its parts to the greatest parts of man, holds

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Figure 8.1. Athanasius Kircher’s singing menagerie, the first known example of transcribed birdsong (Image: Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis). this very conspicuous magnitude of the head, the large mouth that is imbued with a great concavity, the moveable upper beak, the swelling jaws like those of men; a tongue that is thick and wide and as if fleshy.31

However, Kircher also cautions against moving too quickly from organs to functions, or from the presence of what appears to be a conformation of the vocal organs propitious for the production of speech to the assumption of linguistic capability. He denies for example that the swan song, sung by the bird at the moment of its death after a life of graceful silence, has any basis in reality. “Nor indeed,” he continues, “does nature always ordain the vocal organs in animals for the beautiful fashioning of the voice. Otherwise the pig, which by the favor of nature ended up with the most beautiful larynx, would sing the most beautifully and sweetly of all, which would be ridiculous, not to mention stupid.”32 Kircher’s categories are resolutely aesthetic, unlike Tyson’s, but his cautionary conclusions anticipate in interesting ways those the English physician draws from his study of a chimpanzee. Kircher warns that,

138 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH while the study of physiology is wonderful to the extent that it reveals the underlying basis of nature’s beautiful productions, the beauty of physiology itself can be misleading, if we attempt to infer too quickly from organs to functions. For apes, it is possible, though still controversial at the time Tyson is writing, to simply deny that there is any capacity for speechlike vocalization. But such denial could not work for birds: it is obvious that they do vocalize. This difference is well summed up in Leibniz’s observation that apes have organs without words, while birds have words without language. One must address the question whether there is something more there than what can be studied by the anatomist, or experienced directly by the human ear, in order to account for birdsong. Whether this something is reason, or freedom, or something that merely resembles one of these in a “counterfeit” way, is precisely what was at stake in philosophical discussion of birdsong in the early modern period. Learning from Birds Learning enters into the philosophical discussion of avian vocalization in at least three distinct if interrelated ways: first, as we have already seen, the vocalizations learned by fledglings from their parents; second, as we have also seen with Kircher’s parrot, there is the humanlike speech that some species of birds learn, under the proper circumstance, from human beings; third, the music human beings are often purported to have learned from birds. Let us focus, for now, on the last of these. Many theorists, from Kircher himself to David Rothenberg in his 2005 popular book Why Birds Sing,33 have argued that bird vocalization does not just sound like music, but literally is music. Kircher uses the figure of the parrot (psittacus) to stand for the class of birds that imitate human speech, and that of the nightingale (luscinia) for those birds from which we may be speculatively have received, by way of imitation, the gift of music. If the parrot “parrots” us in speech, we parrot the nightingale in music. Thus with respect to the bird order as a whole in relation to human beings, there is a reciprocal imitativeness: they get speech from us, while we get music from them. A much more common view is that, while birds do not produce their sounds as music, nonetheless it was in imitation of birds that human beings first expressed their own musical creativity. This theory has often been formulated both in mythological terms, in numerous cultures dating back to deepest antiquity, as well as in very recent and at least nominally scientific accounts of the origins of music.34 In the history of European

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 139 philosophy the most influential statement of this view is certainly that offered by Lucretius in his poem, De rerum natura, of the first century BCE: To imitate the liquid notes of birds Was earlier far ’mongst men than power to make, By measured song, melodious verse and give Delight to ears.35

Elsewhere in the poem the Epicurean philosopher argues that not just music but also speech is learned from natural processes in just the same way animals “send forth divers sounds” in response to various changes in their environment: . . . to think That in those days some man apportioned round To things their names, and that from him men learned Their first nomenclature, is foolery. For why could he mark everything by words And utter the various sounds of tongue, what time The rest may be supposed powerless To do the same?36

Here Lucretius is marking out a position that contrasts sharply with the view according to which language is ultimately of divine origin. Instead, for him, it effectively amounts to an elaborate system of onomatopoeia. In the reception of Lucretius in the Christian era, the man who “apportioned round” the names of things would of course be imagined as Adam, and the answer to the question Lucretius poses would be that the power of naming becomes possible as a result of Adam’s share in divine reason. In this respect, to adhere to a broadly Lucretian view of the origins of language in the early modern period was effectively to open up the possibility of naturalistic origins of human reason, and to see this reason as in effect continuous with processes discernible throughout the rest of nature. But Lucretius, and his early modern followers, refrain from asserting that speech is directly learned from the animals; rather, speech is learned from nature in general in the same way that animal sounds are a response to the natural environment. Music, by contrast, is held to be learned directly from the birds. This difference in respective ontogenetic stories marks out an important difference, in turn, between the two faculties as

140 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH they have been understood throughout the history of philosophy. Musicality, unlike speech, has traditionally been held not to pertain to the human essence, and thus as something that could be borrowed or learned from animals without directly compromising the integrity and the exceptional character of humanity within nature. Language, by contrast, as a reflection of human reason, could not be learned from nature without making human reason itself a product of nature, and thus making human beings entirely natural beings, and so shattering any possibility of clinging to the idea of human uniqueness among created beings, to what Markus Wild has called “the anthropological difference.” 37 But the possibility of natural origins of music willy-nilly opens up the door to speculation about similar origins for language. This will be all the more clear in those intellectual traditions, notably the Pythagorean-Platonic, that tend to understand music as an expression of rationality, if of a different sort than language. There is a long mystical tradition, which we have been doing our best to skirt here, which makes birds into the principal speakers of the otherwise unvocalized language of nature, and which in turn imagines human comprehension of the language of the birds as one of the goals of mystical indoctrination. Birds become the vehicle through which nature explicitly states how it is. This tradition is not “merely” mystical, however, but also includes much reflection, however allegorical, on the nature of human rationality and, what is more, on the structure of human society. Thus Farı¯d al-Dı¯n ‘Atta¯r, in his twelfth-century Persian poem Mantiq-ut-Tayr, translat˙˙ ˙ ˙˙ ed variously as The Conference of the Birds or The Language of the Birds, imagines a meeting of the representatives of the different avian species, which are conceptualized on the model of nations. If the gap between the two common translations of this work appears immense, it will be useful to recall that in European languages as well one of the most common terms for a political assembly, a “parliament,” is derived directly from a French verb meaning “to speak.” The analogy between bird species and nations will continue even into eighteenth-century empirical studies of avian vocalization, and seems to be rooted in the insight that bird kinds, like human cultures, speak for themselves and in their own way, making their natures explicit through language or something like it. Harmonies Celestial and Avian The idea that birds speak the secret language of nature, which can be understood by a select few human beings, continues well into the early

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 141 modern period. Cyrano de Bergerac, whose 1655 Les empires et états de la Lune engages in subtle and subversive ways with many of the great philosophical debates of the era, features among other fantastical characters a talking bird that lives on the surface of the sun—a character perhaps inspired by Cyrano’s own evidently sincere belief in his own ability to understand the secret language of birds. The sun-bird expatiates in the presence of the novel’s mostly taciturn protagonist: I see your mind is straining to grasp how it is possible that I am explaining myself to you by a means of sustained discourse, seeing that, though the birds imitate your [human] speech, they do not conceive it [ils ne la conçoivent pas]; but it is also the case that when you imitate the bark of a dog or the song of a rooster, you do not conceive any the more what the dog or the rooster wished to say. You should thus conclude that neither birds nor men are any less reasonable for this.38

The philosophical point here is subtle: unlike Wittgenstein’s claim that if lions could speak, we would not understand them,39 Cyrano wishes to suggest that animals do speak, and when we attempt to reproduce the sounds they make we are failing to capture their linguistic content at least as much as an animal that imitates human speech misses its linguistic content. Whether human language or animal vocalization, it is all just so much noise, if we are not able to inhabit from the inside the world of the beings that produce it. Cyrano writes: Wherefore the man who wishes to know the harmony of celestial bodies as well as living ones, should not esteem these less, hearing the various tones of their throats, than the accord of the celestial bodies, and the concurrences of these with the terrestrial substances. For whoever will take note of the birds, and listen to them attentively, will experience a perfect sensation of the sweetness of their graceful songs, no less harmonious than the humming of the nerves of animals [i.e., strings] stretched upon various musical instruments.40

This is a remarkable passage, in that it evidently combines elements of both the Pythagorean and Aristotelian traditions. The defense of the study of terrestrial beings as being no less worthy than the celestial ones, and no less useful for coming to understand the workings of nature, echoes in unmistakable ways Aristotle’s well-known plaidoyer in On the Parts of Animals

142 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH for the study of zoology that concludes with an invocation of Heraclitus’s saying, “Here too dwell gods.”41 At the same time, what one learns when one pays attention to birds is precisely to discern another instance of the harmony that also characterizes, for the Pythagoreans, the rotation of the celestial spheres. Thus ornithology, like music in general and like astronomy, becomes a branch of mixed mathematics, the purpose of which is to discern perfect ratios, manifested acoustically as harmony. Thus for Kircher, as for Cyrano’s narrator, “[n]ature rightly exhibits a certain idea of all music in the nightingale or Philomela, in the way that a perfect ratio gives order to its songs.” 42 The mixed mathematics of ornithology is however best studied in the common Turdus merula, for “[t]he blackbird expresses harmonic differences best of all.”43 The Turn from Speculation In the Enlightenment a sharp rift would emerge between those who speculated on an avian origin of human music, and those who considered this sort of speculation either unfounded or an affront to human capabilities. A typical expression of the theory of music’s origin in birdsong is found in the German composer and theologian Wolfgang Caspar Printz’s 1690 treatise on the history of singing and harmony [“Sing- und KlingKunst”]: “The leading instigations for the invention of music,” Printz writes, “were: 1. The various accents of the human voice; 2. The singing of birds; 3. The whistling of the trees moved by the wind.”44 “As far as the singing of birds are concerned,” he continues, “it is plausible that men, in their leisure hours, wish[ed] to do the same by way of imitation. And while this caus[ed] pleasure for the hearing, it [could] easily have provided the opportunity for the invention of human song.”45 While this account and others like it are generally presented as a mere causal hypothesis, they often contain a further assumption that what is learned, precisely, is not just a technique for the use of the voice, but indeed a particular moral orientation and even a particular disposition to God. Thus Printz adds: “Indeed the unreasonable birds sing to the honor of their creator both evenings and mornings: why should a reasonable man, all the more, not do the same?”46 Singing is not something human beings do as rational beings, and thus, again, unlike language it can be cast as borrowed from nature or the animals without posing a threat to human uniqueness, to the anthropological difference. This general approach to the avian origins of human music—according to which it is borrowed

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 143 from nature, but nonetheless has a special significance for understanding humanity’s relationship to the divine—is little changed when, in some authors, song borrowed from nature is conceived not as an expression of praise, but rather of sin. Thus Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, in his Discours sur l’harmonie in 1737, speculates that Eve was the first person to be awakened to the beauty of music, and that this awakening was experienced a sort of rivalry with or jealousy of the birds, thus a sort of initial, prelapsarian temptation from a thing of nature surely more seductive than an apple.47 As Matthew Head observes, eighteenth-century histories of music often appear to us as “a realm of fiction, conjecture, and mysticism, peopled by gods and legendary beings.”48 Later musicology would eschew speculation on origins, in favor of a largely positivist approach focusing principally on musical aesthetics.49 But even in the Enlightenment there were already significant divisions, between those who imagined a primordial lesson taught by the birds to some mythological human being—Eve, for example, or some unnamed philosopher—and those, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had no patience for this sort of speculation. Thus in the fragment posthumously titled “L’origine de la mélodie,” first published in 1974, Rousseau writes: I will not examine, with Lucretius, whether the discovery of singing is due to the imitation of that of the birds, or, according to Diodorus, to the blowing of the wind through the reeds of the Nile, nor whether our very echo, after having long scared men, was able finally to amuse and instruct them. These uncertain conjectures could never contribute to the perfection of the art and I only value those investigations of antiquity from which the moderns can derive some benefit. It is moreover very unuseful to take recourse to external causes in the effects that one can deduce from the nature of things themselves, and such is certainly the case for the voice that we call singing, a modification that must have arisen naturally and formed together with language.50

This is a rich passage, and there is much going on in it. Rousseau wishes to distance himself from the speculations of thinkers such as Gresset, but his rejection of futile antiquarianism also carries with it a very significant claim about the unity of speech and music: both are modifications of voice, and both arise together as part of the same vocal “toolkit” of the human species. Both are natural, for Rousseau, in that they do not require any special moment of illumination in the distant past in order for

144 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH their development to be explained. But both are also, equally, constitutive of the anthropological difference, in that they arise entirely within the course of human development. In abjuring any need for appeal to external causes Rousseau is also rejecting the approach to both language and musicality that takes these capabilities as continuous with the behavior of other beings throughout nature. This had been a standard approach to language throughout history, as a reflection of human rationality and so as constitutive, uniquely, of human essence, but the assimilation of music to language here is quite original. It can also serve for us as a useful way back into the dual nature of avian vocalization throughout the history of philosophy—even if Rousseau himself denies that avian and human vocalization have a shared ontogenesis. Kircher similarly elides speech and singing, in a somewhat Aesopian survey of the distinctive characteristics of the various species of animals: “It is in birds that we find the greatest propensity for speaking and singing, indeed what prudence and memory are for the elephant, faithfulness for the deer, gesticulation for the ape, and crafty stratagem for the fox, so among animals speech and singing are most surpassing in the parrot and nightingale birds.”51 The German priest was hopeful that the greater part of avian vocalizations could be represented in musical notation (see figure 8.1). Indeed in the Musurgia he also attempts to provide the notation for the call of a South American sloth, a creature he had undoubtedly never encountered in the flesh.52 In the following century, the much more cautious Barrington acknowledges that “[s]ome passages of the song in a few kinds of birds correspond with the intervals of our musical scale (of which the cuckow is a striking and known instance),” but suspects that “much the greater part . . . of such song is not capable of musical notations.”53 For Barrington, there has been an evident progression in musical composition, or at least European musical composition, away from imitation of birds, so that the avian influence on composition is much less evident in eighteenth-century Europe than it had previously been, and than it still is in Asia: Another proof of our musical intervals being originally borrowed from the song of birds, arises from most compositions being in a flat third, where music is simple, and consists merely of melody. The oldest tune I happen to have heard is a Welsh one, called Morvar Rhydland, which is composed in a flat third; and if the music of the Turks and Chinese is examined in Du Halde and Dr. Shaw, half of the airs are

BETWEEN LANGUAGE, MUSIC, & SOUND | 145 also in a flat third. The music of two centuries ago is likewise often in a flat third, though ninety-nine compositions out of a hundred are now in a sharp third.54

Indeed, in Kircher’s notation of the cuckoo’s song (see figure 8.1), we find a descending minor third, though whether Barrington is correct that such an avian sound was less common in the high tradition of musical composition in late-eighteenth-century Europe than in folk traditions, extraEuropean composing traditions, or in previous centuries, remains to be investigated. Barrington ultimately shies away from the ontogenetic question, though in so doing he appeals to a significant analogy that returns us, once again, to the question of language and indeed of nation: “I am aware,” he writes, “that it may be asked, how birds originally came by the notes which are peculiar to each species. My answer, however, to this is, that the origin of the notes of birds, together with its gradual progress, is as difficult to be traced, as that of the different languages in nations.”55 Plumage Let us, by way of conclusion, focus briefly on the analogy, which has already appeared a number of times in the previous sections, between bird species and human societies. By the end of the eighteenth century, birds had been unwittingly (to the birds and largely also to the humans who philosophized about them) recruited into debates about human diversity and human progress. In his well-known treatment of so-called “free natural beauties” in the third Critique, that is, of productions of nature that seem to have aesthetic properties but that, unlike artworks, cannot be said to have been produced for the sake of aesthetic delectation, Kant draws on the plumage of exotic birds, alongside the shells of crustaceans, as a preferred example of the phenomenon at hand. Thus he writes that “many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise) . . . are beauties for themselves [sind für sich Schönheiten], which are not attached to a determinate object in accordance with concepts, but please freely and for themselves.”56 Kant draws from a certain Marsden the impression that, in Sumatra, “the free beauties of nature surround the spectator, . . . and so no long have much attraction for him.”57 There is a part of the world that is overabundant with plumage and other stunning instances of nature’s free aesthetic generativity, to such an extent that a traveler there, Kant imagines, quickly

146 | JUSTIN E. H. SMITH grows weary of all the beauty. As is all too well known, Kant also associates this part of the world, which we may imprecisely call “the tropics,” with a certain underdevelopment of the intellectual and moral faculties of the human being, the nature and limits of which Kant is aiming to spell out in his critical project. Thus, for example, Kant imagines in the third Critique that it is difficult to understand how the lives of New Hollanders (i.e., Aboriginal Australians) or Tierra del Fuegans could be worthwhile, given that they are not devoted to cultivating the highest human ends of reason and duty.58 We should not be too surprised to find that philosophical ornithology tracks these Enlightenment preoccupations. Thus Barrington in his 1773 study of birdcalls hypothesizes that there is an inverse relationship between a given region’s tendency to produce exotically feathered birds, and that region’s tendency to produce birds capable of complex vocalizations. In other words, ornate but ultimately superfluous bodies for the birds of Africa and Asia; complex language-like capabilities for the plain-colored birds of Europe: “As birds are now annually imported in great numbers from Asia, Africa, and America, I have frequently attended to their notes, both singly and in concert, which are certainly not to be compared to those of Europe. Thomson, the poet (whose observations in natural history are much to be depended upon) makes this superiority in European birds to be a sort of compensation for their great inferiority in point of gaudy plumage.”59 The question whether avian vocalization is language, or only language-like—the question, that is, that had guided the philosophical debate on birdsong since Aristotle—came in the Enlightenment to be secondary to the use of birds as a mirror of human society: the Persian Sufi’s poetic analogy transformed into a literal attempt to map human and avian diversity. Whatever the metaphysical or psychological bases of birdsong may be, the important thing now is to place the birds and the humans together within the same global and hierarchical order of nature in which both the project of natural science and the project of European global domination can advance.60 Thus the idea of imitation or reflection grows more complicated: while it had long been argued that much avian vocalization amounted to mere “parroting,” in the Enlightenment the science of birds comes to reflect or mirror, perhaps to ape, the desiderata of the emerging science of man.

Chapter 9 Boundary Crossings The Blurring of the Human/Animal Divide as Naturalization of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy

Charles T. Wolfe It is not enough for the libertin that Brutes resemble us in some ways—he wants them to equal us.

—David Boullier Introduction: From Animal Souls to the Materiality of the Mind In dealing with the diverse, not to say patchwork varieties of early modern materialism, it is helpful to distinguish between two broadly understood positions or constellations of positions: the world is in its essence material (cosmological materialism), and the mind is material, which often implies an identity or correspondence between brain and mind (psychological or cerebral materialism). The thesis of the materiality of the world can of course rest on diverse matter theories, including one sometimes termed “vital materialism,” in which all of matter is understood as active and self-organizing. For instance, John Toland asserted in his influential Letters to Serena (1704) that “Matter neither ever was nor ever can be a sluggish, dead and inactive Lump, or in a state of absolute repose”; “Activity ought to enter into the Definition of Matter, it ought likewise to express the Essence thereof.”1 Here, “action is essential to Matter”;2 such an attribution of properties to matter is further extended in Diderot’s yet more “top-heavy” conception of all of matter as active, self-organizing, and in addition sensing. For Diderot, “life and animation are not a metaphysical 147

148 | CHARLES T. WOLFE degree of beings but rather, a physical property of matter.”3 Obviously, some thinkers will seek to integrate “cosmological” and “psychological” materialism, notably by insisting that the mind belongs to the same material nature as the rest of the world, or that our ideas, which come to us through our senses, are themselves material. The heterodox Benedictine monk Dom Deschamps, author of a then-unpublished Spinozist treatise that he showed to Diderot in the 1760s, wrote that “sensation and the idea we have of objects are nothing other than these objects themselves, inasmuch as they compose us, and act on our parts, which are themselves always acting on one another.”4 But what does this distinction (sometimes emphasized, sometimes downplayed, sometimes ignored) between these two forms of materialism have to do with the problem of the human/animal relation? In fact, several instances of what may be termed the materialist blurring of the human/animal divide participate in the articulation of an ontology of living, sensing matter with an account of the materiality of cognition—precisely, an articulation of cosmological and psychological materialism. For instance, the early eighteenth-century radical Protestant physician from Niort, Abraham Gaultier, whose clandestine Réponse en forme de dissertation à un théologien of 1714 circulated under the charming title Parité de la vie et de la mort, reflected critically on Cartesian animal-machines, but instead of seeking to rebut Descartes by appealing to the “fact” that animals can feel, sense, and perhaps even think (a common reaction including from immaterialists, notably Henry More), he immediately connected the issue to the basic properties of matter: “Descartes also denies that animals feel, solely on the grounds that he does not conceive how the matter of which they are made could feel. However that may be, one must consult nature closely and listen to her language, which is always very real. If she says that matter, however insensible it is naturally, can after changes and certain constructions acquire feeling, one must believe her.”5 I shall return to the various rejections of the animal-machine hypothesis below, but for now simply wish to emphasize that a shift in our matter theory can effect a corresponding shift in our vision of the human/ animal boundary, as can be seen in Gaultier’s statement that when we deny that animals can feel, it is based on an underestimation of the matter they are made of. Conversely, a shift in our understanding of animal cognition and its limits can nourish an enhanced, vital materialism in which, as Diderot wrote, “brutes are not as brutish as we think.”6 That brutes are not as brutish as we think implies something more general about the corporeality of the human mind, given that it is not so strictly cordoned off from the animal.

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 149 It implies, in the words of the anonymous clandestine manuscript from the 1720s, L’Âme matérielle, that “the mind is subject to the law of all corporeal beings.” La Mettrie clearly saw the threat posed by such a continuum of corporeity, and wrote in (dubiously) reassuring tones: “that the mind possesses such a corporeal nature need not be feared as a blow to our self-esteem.”7 In that sense, the gradual blurring of the boundaries between animals and humans, with a focus on the complexity of animal minds at the expense of anthropocentrism or human uniqueness, participated in the emergence of a new materialist concept of mind, which could be the effect of an enhancement or augmentation of the perceived animal capacities (cognitive, linguistic, affective, etc.) or of a downgrading of human uniqueness, which some authors of the period saw as a “humiliation” of man.8 Sometimes, this means that humans can retain some of their core properties (in comparison with brute physical matter as a while)—animal properties. For instance, as Diderot wrote, “It is obvious that if man is not free, or if his instantaneous determinations or even oscillations stem from something material which is external to his mind, then his choice is not the pure act of an incorporeal substance or a simple faculty of this substance. There is, then, no rational goodness or wickedness, although there may be animal goodness or wickedness.”9 Such blurring was composed of a variety of different projects, reactions, sometimes tentative, sometimes bolder, which alternately reached back toward antiquity (naturalized Aristotelian conceptions of an “organic soul,” Epicurean conceptions of a “material soul” but also, less abstractly, accounts dating back to Chrysippus of the “animal syllogism”) or forward to various combinations of (a) comparative empirical accounts of animal and human cognition, including the capacity for language, and (b) anatomical investigations of ape/human similarities and differences. The further these were radicalized—as in Anthony Collins’s discussion of the volition of sheep, or La Mettrie’s suggestion that some day orang-outangs could be sent to school and acquire language, as I discuss in section 4—the more we are in explicit materialist territory. That is, animal reasoning need not entail materialism, but materialism—at least in the forms discussed here—implies the existence of animal reasoning. As the Jansenist critic of the Encyclopédie Abraham-Joseph Chaumeix argued, “it is a fundamental principle for this kind of philosophers [sc. materialists—CW] that animals are barely different from humans.”10 The comparative study of animal and human souls amounts to a comparative study of animal and human cognition; and the latter potentially

150 | CHARLES T. WOLFE implies that human cognition is located on a scale, spectrum, or continuum of other sorts of minds. A further implication is that this continuum is itself material, as can be seen in Gaultier’s observation that an expanded concept of matter completely does away with any absolute boundary between species (particularly human and animal). On a strictly conceptual level (i.e., not as an empirical claim about actual animal minds), Locke himself had observed in his discussion of thinking matter that the problem of the essential properties of matter (and thought), and the problem of human and animal minds could sometimes be one and the same, so that granting complexity to a peach, an elephant, or matter itself is the same act (of superaddition): God creates an extended solid substance, without superadding any thing else to it, and so we may consider it at rest: to some parts of it he superadds motion, but it still has the essence of matter: other parts of it he frames into plants, with all the excellencies of vegetation, life, and beauty, which are to be found in a rose or a peach tree, etc., above the essence of matter in general, but it is still but matter: to other parts he adds sense and spontaneous motion, and those other properties that are to be found in an elephant. Hitherto it is not doubted but the power of God may go, and that the properties of a rose, a peach, or an elephant, superadded to matter, change not the properties of matter. . . . But if one venture to go one step further, and say, God may give to matter thought, reason, and volition, as well as sense and spontaneous motion, there are men ready presently to limit the power of the omnipotent Creator, and tell us he cannot do it; because it destroys the essence, “changes the essential properties of matter.” To make good which assertion, they have no more to say, but that thought and reason are not included in the essence of matter. I grant it; but whatever excellency, not contained in its essence, be superadded to matter, it does not destroy the essence of matter if it leaves it an extended solid substance; . . . and if every thing of greater perfection, superadded to such a substance, destroys the essence of matter, what will become of the essence of matter in a plant, or an animal, whose properties far exceed those of a mere extended solid substance?11

The freethinker Boyer d’Argens extended this argument in his scandalous La philosophie du bon sens (1737), claiming again on the basis of superaddition that one could not deny God’s ability to elevate the faculties of an animal

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 151 soul to that of a human one,12 and also turning the point around: “if animals thus possess a material Soul, Feeling is then not incompatible with Matter: the latter allows of it” (383; the chapter [XIV] is titled quite revealingly, “That the Animal Soul is a Proof that Matter can acquire the Faculty of Thought”). Now, Locke’s implied agnostic attitude toward the existence of animal cognition—when his close friend and protégé, Anthony Collins, about whom we shall hear more below, wrote to him arguing that animals possess a degree of thought, Locke did not reply at length, except to grant that animals are not automata13—did not prevent him from denying such ideas in other contexts, when they were presented as empirical assertions. Thus when Pierre Coste, the French translator of the Essay, queried Locke regarding the fact that we can observe animals creating complex constructions as evidence for an innate instinct, Locke dismissed Coste’s question rather sharply, declaring “I did not write my book to explain the actions of animals.”14 But D’Argens’s example brings out a core point in this chapter, that there is an interaction between debates over the basic properties of matter (including more or less pronounced overdeterminations as in Cavendish or Diderot), and the various blurrings of the human/animal divide, in the way that these blurrings inscribe both animal and human minds in a living material universe. Differently put, there can be a connection, pace Locke, Gaultier, and d’Argens, between animal minds and whether we allow matter the capacity to think. Ultimately, the expansion of the scope of animal cognition effected by the blurring of the human/animal divide, and its consequent humiliation of human sovereignty and uniqueness, is part of a broader conceptual process of naturalization, whereby cognition is integrated into the materiality of the world. Naturalization here is really several quite distinct subprocesses, which some texts try to unify or synthesize, but often occur independently of one another. Broadly speaking, I shall distinguish between metaphysically/conceptually based and empirically based naturalizations of the soul (each being a case of human/animal blurring). These break down as follows: in sections 1 and 2, I examine the shift from more conceptual challenges to anthropocentrism or human uniqueness, including ones focusing on a “material soul” concept, to more empirical (yet not fully naturalistic) challenges; in sections 3 and 4 I turn to the gradual focus on animal reasoning, complex behavior, but also comparative anatomy, leading to a “humiliation of man” and an emphasis on the hyperplasticity of species; in section 5 I examine a final strategy of naturalization: the portrayal of the human mind as deterministically animal, in a harbinger

152 | CHARLES T. WOLFE of the cognitively oriented “New Unconscious”15 which is also a return of Leibnizian petites perceptions, building both on Bayle’s “Rorarius” and reflections on the “animal syllogism.” 1. The Materiality of (Animal and Human) Souls and the Fiery Soul There are various ancient and Renaissance elements used in early modern elaborations of what has been termed “the organic soul,”16 and then more Epicuro-Gassendist iterations of the “material soul.”17 The former appealed to Aristotle’s De anima, particularly in the way it was read as inscribed in a biological project,18 and seen as available for more heterodox, early modern projects of “naturalization,” as is patent in the opening lines of the treatise: the “study of the soul” contributes greatly to the “study of nature” (De anima, 402 a 5–6), because the soul is a “principle of life.” In a Renaissance Aristotelian context, Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae (published 1516), for instance, took Aristotle in the direction of a material soul concept, building on the notion of “the first actuality of a natural body which has organs” (De anima, 412 b 5–6), which allows a naturalistic interpretation.19 Already in the part of Avicenna’s Shifâ’ (published 1020–1027) which came to be viewed as a commentary on De anima during the later Middle Ages, a distinction was drawn between the study of the soul in itself, which belongs to metaphysics, and the study of the soul as the principle of animation, which belongs to natural philosophy.20 The ease with which Aristotle could be taken up in a naturalistic project malgré lui was noted early on by Pierre Bayle. In the entry “Pereira” of his Dictionnaire, Bayle remarked that “one might believe” that “Aristotle recognized a difference between the animal soul and the human soul only in terms of greater or lesser [capacities] of organs (une différence du plus au moins)”; this merely quantitative difference would entail that the human soul could carry out subtle reasoning, while the animal soul could only do so “in a confused manner.” And this, Bayle concludes, “confirms the claim of those who say he [Aristotle] did not believe in the immortality of the soul.”21 To be clear, Bayle is not agreeing with the view, but is noting the ease with which it can be proclaimed, and credited to Aristotle. The difference between human and animal “souls”—really, between different cognitive abilities—is again stated as merely a matter of “le plus et le moins,” that is, merely gradations, but still metaphysical rather than empirical gradations (without wanting to introduce too sharp a positivistic divide between the two), in the Epicurean notion of the material soul as “purest

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 153 fire” and “subtle wind,” found notably in the physician Guillaume Lamy’s seventeenth-century writings, and clandestine discussions in manuscripts such as the Treatise of the Three Impostors. Lamy, a philosopher and physician based in Paris, published his major works between the late 1660s and late 1670s. He was much appreciated by La Mettrie, and aroused some fierce reactions: Bayle described him as an “over-the-top Epicurean” (un épicurien outré).22 Lamy’s original, medical-materialist approach still verbally maintained a difference between the sensitive soul and the rational soul, but ultimately located all of these distinctions within a physiological frame. He described the soul in his Discours anatomiques as “a very subtle spirit or a very fine and always mobile matter, the greatest part of which and, so to speak the source, is in the sun. . . . It is the purest fire in the universe, which does not burn of itself but, by the different movements which it gives to the particles of the other bodies in which it is enclosed, it burns and gives off heat.”23 “Soul” here is simply part of the material world, rather than something materialism would directly eliminate. A longer version of this passage appears in the Treatise of the Three Impostors,24 with a more explicit reference to animals. The treatise speaks similarly of a “very subtle spirit, or a very delicate matter” “in the universe,” “the source of which is in the Sun, and the remainder is spread in all the other bodies, more or less, according to Nature or their consistency.” This is the “Soul of the Universe,” a “pure fire” which, “being enclosed in the body . . . is rendered capable of thought”; it “disperses at death” in humans “as in other animals.”25 These images of “subtle spirit,” “very fine matter,” or fire all convey the idea that the soul is composed of a special kind of matter. Yet to assert the materiality of the soul is not to overtly deny the soul’s existence but rather (recall La Mettrie’s remark on our corporeal existence) to affirm its corporeality, which allows it to interact with other entities populating the material world; it is not ontologically unique, yet it lives and acts, like a bodily organ. Again, an implication that was crucial at the time was that this unified and immanent material world implies the greater proximity of animal and human souls. This was precisely the danger Bayle saw: “the natural consequence of this dogma is to declare that the soul of animals is of the same nature as that of man.”26 Out of the myriad rather murky discussions of human and animal souls, their relative or fundamental differences, and the place of rationality, mortality, and other key properties therein, Bayle saw most sharply that when a Pomponazzi or a Lamy reduces possible functional variations in “animal souls” to the “variety of organs and humours alone,”27 the argument is in fact meant to apply to the human soul,

154 | CHARLES T. WOLFE which only differs from that of the animal in quantitative terms (only “une différence du plus au moins,” as Gassendi and later, Diderot and Priestley will also assert28). Indeed, the Treatise of the Three Impostors, after the above “chimiatric” discussion of “subtle spirits” and the materiality of the soul, simply states that “this soul [is] of the same nature in all animals.”29 One may speak in the above cases of “naturalizations” of the soul in a monistic sense, but they are not yet empirical engagements with the destabilizing or “humiliating” potential of an expansive understanding of the animal mind. Nor are these concepts of organic, material, or fiery soul “naturalizations of the soul” in the sense most familiar to post-Quinean readers; that is, they are not arguments for putting metaphysical concepts on the same level as the results of experimental science (with the more or less strongly implied idea that the latter should modify the former). Rather, they are naturalizations in a broadly Spinozist sense, an expression of monism wherein “soul” cannot be metaphysically separate from the extended natural world, with radical, deflationary, and sometimes destructive implications. But they are primarily conceptual arguments, either for the existence of animal souls, and/or for the greater proximity of these to human capacities—although in greater detail than in the above examples concerning the “material soul.” I shall mention three examples from the early to the mid-eighteenth century (the rest of the analysis is roughly chronological, although in seeking to provide a typology of these blurrings of the divide, I will sometimes present instances in a more analytic than chronological order): (a) the anonymous manuscript L’Âme Matérielle,30 which can be dated to approximately 1725–1730 based on some of its citations, and the writings of (b) David Boullier and (c) Georg Friedrich Meier. (a) Between the Montaignean focus on animals and the more explicitly naturalist moment in Collins, for example, a variety of libertine and/or clandestine manuscripts seek to connect earlier considerations on the materiality of the soul with reflections on animal minds. A characteristic, if late case is L’Âme Matérielle: a programmatic attempt at the naturalization of mental phenomena, in this case, locating mental phenomena within an integrated corporeal and cognitive scheme.31 Its argument for the materiality of the soul has four basic elements: (1) a predominantly Malebranchian account of animal spirits, blood and brain, turned into a materialist claim, including the additional determinist motif that “I am determined by the blood in my veins,” (2) the rejection of the difference between animal and human souls, (3) mortalism (the affirmation of the mortality of the soul)

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 155 and (4) Epicuro-Lucretian elements reminiscent of Lamy and the Treatise of the Three Impostors, which convey the idea of an emergent-materialist conception of the soul. The author of the treatise argues that there is no inherent or metaphysical difference between animal souls and human souls, with texts partly taken from Montaigne and Bayle (and Antoine Dilly to a larger extent).32 Similarly, a parallel is suggested between the fact that human cognitive abilities vary, as they are affected by early childhood development, language acquisition, and so on (examples discussed include some “wild children” from Poland and Borneo and the deaf and mute boy from Chartres), and the fact that animal cognitive abilities are also not uniform, especially in the absence of education (88–90); a point that will be made quite forcefully by La Mettrie and others with the “discovery” of the “orang-outang” (actually a chimpanzee), discussed below in section 4. The author insists here in a faintly Spinozist way that if our “soul” (or mind) were attached to a different body, whether a less sophisticated body such as that of an animal or a body with more potential than ours, its abilities would be correspondingly affected (94–96). The Cartesian conception of animal-machines—taken in its most literal sense, without taking into consideration the partly “skeptical” aspect of Descartes’s position—is challenged by appealing to various descriptions of animal emotions, loyalty, intelligence, and so forth.33 (b) David Boullier, who coauthored the Encyclopédie article “Âme des bêtes,” wanted to establish in his 1737 Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes that animals have immaterial souls, for they possess a unity of their needs and behavior that machines do not possess.34 Boullier critiqued the philosophical popularity of the automaton (including in Leibniz) and suggested that the fantasy of “human automata” is no worse or more fanciful than that of animal-machines.35 In fact, not only do human bodies reveal by their structure (including that of the nervous system) that they are made for a soul, so do animal bodies.36 (The exact opposite, incidentally, was argued by Kenelm Digby, for whom similar bodily structure and behavior patterns in animals and humans do not imply similar fundamental powers or principles: similar structure is not enough to postulate similar function, in contemporary parlance.37) As we will see in the next section, Willis argued precisely that comparable structures in animals and humans implied comparable function. (c) Georg Friedrich’s Meier’s writings on human and animal souls from the 1740s-1760s are considered to have initiated the debate on animal souls

156 | CHARLES T. WOLFE in Germany.38 Contrary to the Cartesian animal-machine concept, Meier argued with Leibnizian-inflected arguments that mechanical laws cannot explain animal actions and movements in animals; they are the proximate, not the ultimate reason thereof. Animals have souls (although only a lower cognitive and appetitive faculty, with the ability to produce confused concepts), as the world is made up of monads, thinking substances that have a representative power (cognitive and appetitive faculties), and their different place in the hierarchy of beings depends on the clearness of their representations (i.e., on their possession of a higher or lower cognitive and appetitive faculty). It is a Leibnizian gradation in which animals possess a species of incorporeal substance (soul) that is nevertheless not a rational spirit. Interestingly, Meier held that animals possess a kind of language, “eine Art der Sprache” (with reference to Aesop’s Fables).39 The case of animal language will become a central issue of its own, in a sense a kind of “modernized” descendent of the animal souls issue, as I discuss in section 4. The case to which I now turn, Thomas Willis’s comparative neuroanatomy of humans and animals and his “problematization” of the animal/ human divide in terms of types of souls, is still not an explicit or robust turn from a purely conceptual investigation to a material one, yet nevertheless, Willis performs a rather impressive displacement of the debate, from metaphysics to “neuroscience”—in fact, a shift especially toward a focus on abilities, languages, and reasoning. 2. Animal Neuroanatomy and the Corporeal Soul: Willis Thomas Willis, best known for his great work on the anatomy of the brain, the 1664 De cerebri anatome, interlinked anatomy, the brain, and the soul in various works; the one that primarily concerns us here is his later study of the “souls of brutes,” De anima brutorum (1672; English translation 1683), where he puts forth an extensive concept of “corporeal soul,” and, in what seems like an inadvertent series of moves or consequences, displaces consideration of the soul in a naturalistic direction. Willis endorsed a modified version of what he had read in Gassendi: humans all possess a tripartite nature:40 like all animals they possess bodies and sensitive souls, responsible for life functions,41 but they also possess a rational soul. (Boullier will criticize Willis—“such a great naturalist”—for denying substance dualism; he suggests that in consequence Willis has to unnecessarily multiply the types of souls.42) The interrelation between these is the topic of De anima brutorum.

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 157 In Willis’s analysis, the sensitive soul and the rational soul interact; the former supplies impressions and ideas to the latter by means of the animal spirits, and those ideas are in turn ordered and utilized by the rational soul. The sensitive soul, which governs both life and sensorimotor functions, is corporeal, while the rational soul is not: it is the immaterial, immortal human intellect. The former is sometimes governed by the latter, sometimes dependent on it, sometimes in conflict with it: “The Corporeal Soul does not so easily obey the Rational in all things, not so in things to be desired, as in things to be known: for indeed, she being nearer to the Body, and so bearing a more intimate Kindness or Affinity toward the Flesh, is tied wholly to look to its Profit and Conservation.”43 Thus Willis finds himself dealing with perennial problems of “communication” between levels of soul: “And so as our Intellect, in these kinds of Metaphysical Conceptions, makes things almost wholly naked of matter, or carrying it self beyond every sensible Species, consider or beholds them wholly immaterial.”44 One can distinguish three parts in Willis’s account of the soul: a chimiatric matter theory with particular focus on life functions, localized physiological explanations of cognitive processes, and, most relevant here, the derivation of an incorporeal human soul on the basis of comparative anatomical studies—at the same time a blurring of the divide between the corporeal and the incorporeal soul.45 The complexity here is both metaphysical, species-level (animals and humans), and neurophysiological (how the animal spirits produce sensations and motions: the motions of the spirits occasion sensations or natural instincts in animals, but they are also the corporeal basis for all human perception). Willis thereby emphasizes the physicality of the sensitive soul in humans and animals, and the physical motions of these animal spirits through the nerves and brain. Even before any comparison with the animal soul, the human soul is thus severely limited in its powers by the instruments of the brain, nerves, and animal spirits. In a way we might recognize as “modern Epicurean” (à la Gassendi and Lamy), Willis looks for types of soul in the context of functional anatomy, a more bottom-up approach. He found the human nervous system more refined and complex than that of any other animal, but so analogously constructed as to be indistinguishable in terms of cognitive function by any physiological principle—in contrast, say, to Kenelm Digby, as noted above. Structure and function are intimately linked; Willis could find no sufficient physiological difference between humans and animals to account for their differences in cognitive capacity. He definitely made distinctions between human and animal

158 | CHARLES T. WOLFE “souls,” including the role of instinct in self-preservation. But in providing a richer, more complex account of animal cognition, Willis contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between the two, granting animals a propositional ability: “Experience,” in addition to making them “more certain of simple things,” “teaches them to form certain Propositions, and from thence to draw certain Conclusions.”46 For instance, when discussing the cunning of foxes (“the Subtleties and Craft of the Fox, which is he wont to perform for the getting of his living”) or the ability of hunting dogs (a classic example, as I discuss below), he speaks of “a certain kind of Discourse or Ratiocination” there, “continued by a certain Series or Thread of Argumentation,”47 even if this is located within the “Sensitive Soul” (all these ratiocinations can be “explained and reduced into Competent notions of the Sensitive Soul” [38]). The question of whether animals had the ability to engage in “discourse or ratiocination” was an old one, usually traced back to Chrysippus’s tale of the hound and the hare. It has broad implications and repercussions (if animals have language, can they reason? and if they can reason, what should separate them from us?), which I discuss below. 3. Hounds, Hares, and Humans: The Animal Syllogism and the Rationality of Animal Action Sextus Empiricus described Chrysippus as having particular interest in “irrational animals.” The tale of the hound and the hare is essentially one of several variants of a hunting story that shows the canine intellect (or sensory apparatus, or reasoning ability) to be much closer to ours than that of a mere animal-machine. In pursuit of a hare, the hound pauses at a fork in the road, and—in one interpretation of the events—reasons syllogistically, as it “smells out the minor with its nose,” and “follows the conclusion.”48 The key claim is that the hound was not just relying on a kind of automatic behavior or instinct, but performed a type of deduction, specifically, the fifth complex disjunctive syllogism. Plutarch disagreed and felt that the “appearance of canine logic” was just that, an appearance; he was willing to grant that the hound identified the minor premise in the syllogism (the hare has not gone down this path), at the level of sensation. Montaigne defended Chrysippus but—skeptically—felt that it was also possible the hound was seeking to join its master (while nevertheless performing a kind of syllogistic reasoning).49 Interestingly, in 1615 at Cambridge University, this was put to debate—“whether Dogs could make syllogisms”—in the presence

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 159 of King James I, an avid hunter.50 It seems the King insisted on blurring the boundary between actual syllogistic reasoning and instinct, based on a case of one of his dogs that disagreed with the pack as to the route to take, and argued with them vocally, convincing them to go along with him.51 These appeals to the hound’s syllogistic reasoning sometimes read like they were deliberately written against the animal-machine concept, and indeed, post-Descartes, there were many such reactions, which usually emphasized (minimally) a dimension of feeling present in animals, or even a weak form of rationality, although the latter could then be interpreted as instinctive or not (but nevertheless not “mechanical,” as in Condillac’s analysis of animal instincts). Sometimes, these reactions appealed to our moral sensibility, for instance with regard to vivisection, as was notably the case in Henry More and especially Margaret Cavendish.52 Or, in a less direct but equally moral reaction, but also less concerned with the nature of human and animal cognition, there was a querying of the moral dimension of our relation to animals, and what happens to our sense of self if we cease to view them from our standpoint alone. Thus Montaigne famously asked, “when I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a game to her than she is to me?”53 Here the animal is seen, not as an object for use (as Spinoza, conversely, suggests: animals, even though they may feel, are there for us to do what we want with them) but as a subject in its own right, as Erica Fudge puts it.54 Sometimes, reactions to the animal-machine invoked the features of animal behavior that often were seen as having to imply a degree of agency. So, for instance, in a short essay on instinct written in the 1660s, Fontenelle reflected on automatic behavior in humans and animals, stating unequivocally that he found them identical on this point. Against the Cartesian animal-machine concept, Fontenelle held that “animals think, and are not machines.” In an elegant inversion of the ordinary animal-machine argument (i.e., that animal behavior is entirely mechanical or automatic, whereas ours is only such at the lower level), Fontenelle suggested that if we observe what is common in human and animal behavior, and focus on what is voluntary and nonmechanical, we see that here too there is commonality between species.55 Yet even within the defense of animal agency, positions differ: some will assert that animals literally think and perform complex mental operations based on descriptions like that of the hound above (or many others, of songbirds, foxes, and of course “orang-outangs”), while others, like Montaigne and also Sextus, will warn prudentially that we don’t actually know what is happening in

160 | CHARLES T. WOLFE the mental world of the animal—but the most likely case is that of genuine cognitive activity. In Sextus’s terms: “even if we do not understand the sounds of the so-called irrational animals, it is not unlikely that they converse and we do not understand them.”56 Montaigne’s version sounds more noncommittal but is actually quite similar: we do not know “what beasts are,” even if they possess several features “which relate to ours.”57 But it is more the former approach that I investigate here: neither a skeptical refusal of drawing boundaries between animals and humans, nor a usage of the “animal souls” trope as a form of anthropocentric selfinvestigation, but rather, an increasingly empirical consideration—and expansion—of the scope of animal abilities and behavior. Further, this consideration is then employed in the service of a materialist inscription of humanity on what I called above a “continuum of corporeity,” itself potentially resting on a metaphysics of “animalizing” matter (Diderot), or a less metaphysical consideration of the deterministic “animality” of the human mind, building on an account of animal agency (Collins). In contrast to Montaigne’s (and Charron’s) perspective, the more “realist” line can also be termed “Epicurean,” since this tradition has always portrayed a lack of sharpness in the human/animal divide, specifically with regard to animals and humans sharing agency, understood as “the ability to make different particular choices within the general constraints imposed by the animal’s or human’s atomic constitution,”58 such that we have differing degrees of rationality and thus of agency, but on a continuum. The modern Epicurean naturalist will hold that the difference between animals and us is merely a matter of degree (as Bayle worried). This is notably the case of Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi presented a strong challenge to Descartes’s depriving animals of reason, in the Fifth Objections to the Meditations. He conceded that they may not use “rational argument,” nor “reason as perfectly about so many as subjects as man does,” but maintained that “they still reason, and the difference seems merely to be one of degree (magis et minus)” (AT VI, 271), perhaps the source for Bayle’s “du plus au moins.” Like Gassendi, the academician Marin Cureau de la Chambre argued that the idea that humans needed to be distinguished from animals was itself specious.59 For Cureau, animals possessed a degree of reason because they possessed a “sensitive soul” that included a degree of memory. A bit like Willis and Locke in their respective contexts, Cureau nevertheless maintained a kind of “two-tier” distinction between two levels of reason, a lower level based on observation and particulars, possessed by animals, and a higher level

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 161 of reasoning based on universals, unique to humans. Both animals and humans reason, but animal reasoning is formed of particular notions, not universals.60 This two-tiered approach could nevertheless be used to defend an expanded vision of animal capacities. So Guillaume Bougeant’s 1739 Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes, while arguing that we should not treat the song of songbirds as a merely automatic, mechanical behavior (we are not capable of hearing all the nuances in their language, just as a foreigner has trouble hearing the nuances in our own language: 119, 121, 127), nevertheless acknowledges that they do not vary the meanings of their speech the way we do, for “Nature has so tightly bounded their knowledge, that they can only consider one object at a time” (105). The factors of this limitation are both the animal’s own self-preservation, and the fact that they have one expression per object (106). Bougeant thinks the language of the beast is essentially a language of the passions (131), which he intends as a restriction, but is of course allowing them language. Similarly, for Cureau, the rationality of animal actions, that is, the point that they do what is best for them in concrete circumstances, as Justin Smith puts it,61 is evidence that they themselves possess the faculty of reason: “We must conclude, [that there] is a faculty born with [animals], which ought to be of an order as elevated, as its effects are excellent, and which consequently acts with a great knowledge. If it be so, who will not have cause to believe, that actions whose successes are so well ordered, which have so well regulated a progress and a concatenation, which so justly ties together the means with their ends, must needs be enlightened by Reason.”62 Animals may not have been the equal of humans, but neither were they entirely unconscious, as evidenced by the fact that they could learn to perform certain actions: “Reason [is] no longer that difference which distinguisheth Man from other Animals.”63 Again, even though animals are being located at the lower cognitive level (just like Willis’s limitation of the animal soul), this level is in fact being considerably expanded. A problem that emerges here, and will become central with Condillac, is the specific status of instinct (also discussed in Cureau’s Le système de l’âme). In Cureau’s case, rather than expanding the concept of instinct, he insisted that animal action be attributed to reason, arguing that the former option results in the theological difficulty that God somehow left animals incomplete, requiring divine intervention to enable the functioning of instinct, whereas the existence of animals created with a degree of reason dispenses with such problems (Traité de la connoissance des animaux, 8).

162 | CHARLES T. WOLFE From an Epicurean perspective (including in the “modern Epicurean” sense of La Mettrie), the more one grants to animal instinct, the closer one is to dangerous Epicurean reductionism. Yet some authors defended the combination of physiological and instinctive “structure” found in animals as itself evidence of design. For instance, Hermann Samuel Reimarus argued that the innate perfection of drives or instincts in animals implied the existence of a Creator (following Swammerdam, Réaumur, and others), precisely in the context of a refusal of Epicurean chance and La Mettrian materialism.64 Condillac’s account of animals, their behavior, their instinct, their mental capacities, and what it means for them to “sense” tries to steer a median way in between what he views as the profoundly mistaken Cartesian position, and the unnecessary complications of both Buffon and Scholasticism. Condillac seemed to think that common sense, according to which animals can sense, remember, learn, and “think,” has it right, but needs some further distinctions and definitions, since ultimately, their mental capacities are not the same as ours. Animals are motivated primarily by self-preservation, which indeed cannot be purely mechanical.65 Their cognition is based on need, which entails that they do not learn beyond their immediate needs (beavers learn to build the best dams, birds to build the best nests: II, ii). Thus the passions of animals are also more restricted than ours (II, viii), and they have much more difficulty in getting rid of bad habits than we do (II, ix). The key difference, in line with Condillac’s general concern with philosophy of language, is language (II, iv). This enables us to imitate each other and to evolve in a way animals do not. Ultimately Condillac tries to maintain a category difference between human and animal minds, regardless of their empirical similarities. “Our soul is not of the same nature as that of beasts.”66 Like Cureau and Boullier, Condillac maintains a human/animal boundary, yet what animals do in the name of self-preservation is far from mechanical. As John Zammito puts it in a different context, animal cognitive capacities are being understood, gradually, as “natural and yet agential” (ms. 2014). What is so interesting, and powerful, about the story of the hound and the hare, or Condillac’s beavers, is how vernacular, how disconnected from traditional metaphysical disputation they are. And this is not an effect of a chronological shift: the hound’s ability to reason is being debated “empirically,” for example, in 1615 with King James I, and conversely, long considerations of animal souls, boundaries, and delimitations are still common in the eighteenth century (as in Meier and Reimarus).

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 163 4. Language and Anatomy: Orang-Outangs and the Humiliation of Man From considerations on types of “souls” to a more empirical stance adopted toward animal perception, cognition, behavior, and even rationality (building on the “animal syllogism” discussions), we turn now to the particularly anatomical focus, which will open onto the possibility of a “hyperplasticity” of species. That is, if Cureau, citing Montaigne and Charron (while also disagreeing with them), called attention to the “voices” of animals, and Bougeant stressed that the song of songbirds is not merely automatic behavior (while insisting that animal language, unlike our own, is restricted by the imperative of self-preservation, as a kind of “pointing” at basic objects with coded emotional responses), the anatomical turn is potentially much more dangerous. Late seventeenth-century anatomists such as Claude Perrault and Edward Tyson asserted that “the vocal equipment of monkeys and apes was identical to that of humans.”67 Curiously, Fontenelle, in the 1674 edition of the annual reports (Mémoires) he prepared for the Académie des sciences, conceded that “monkeys could speak if they wanted to,” which he presented as a proverb attributed to tribal peoples. Yet he then turns the issue around by distinguishing (unlike most other commentators) linguistic and cognitive ability: “It is not due to a defect in their organs that monkeys do not articulate sounds and establish a language amongst themselves; it is because they are deficient in intellect (esprit).”68 Tyson, who dissected what he called an orang-outang (chimpanzee), referring to it as a pygmy, worried about the anatomical and physiological similarities between apes and humans, as regards speech. As Justin Smith notes, in his anatomical study of the chimpanzee, Tyson was consistently surprised at the anatomical similarities between chimpanzee and human anatomy, but it is the particular physiological likeness of apes in the region responsible, at least in humans, for the production of speech, that worried Tyson most.69 For James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, writing in the later eighteenth century, the great apes are “a barbarous nation, which has not yet learned the use of speech.”70 It is important, though, that for Monboddo the orang-outang alone was human: “Though I hold the Orang Outang to be of our species, it must not be supposed that I think the monkey, or ape, with or without a tail, participates of our nature, on the contrary, I maintain, that, however much his form may resemble ours, yet he is, as Linnaous [sic] says of the Troglodyte, ‘nec nostri generis, nec sanguis.’”71 But while Monboddo saw the orang-outang as a kind of élite specimen, a

164 | CHARLES T. WOLFE “a natural gentleman emerging from the undifferentiated herd . . . naturally noble”72 (nonincidentally, Monboddo was also fascinated by feral children), the potential that thinkers like La Mettrie saw in this story of the malleability and even plasticity of species, was quite the opposite: it was the collapse of boundaries and élites into an immanent plane of living, transforming animal matter—closer to Tyson’s worries. These implications come out most strongly in La Mettrie’s plans for educating the orang-outang: I should choose a large ape, [one that] resembles us so strongly that naturalists have called it “wild man” or “man of the woods.” I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old; for apes that are brought to Europe are usually too old. I would choose the one with the most intelligent face, and the one that, in a thousand little ways, best lived up to its look of intelligence. . . . You know by Amman’s work, and by all those who have interpreted his method, all the wonders he has been able to accomplish for those born deaf. . . . Why then should the education of monkeys be impossible? Why might not the monkey, by dint of great pains, at last imitate after the manner of deaf mutes, the motions necessary for pronunciation? But, because of the great analogy between ape and man and because there is no known animal whose external and internal organs so strikingly resemble man’s, it would surprise me if speech were absolutely impossible to the ape. . . . Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art. Could not the device that opens the Eustachian canal of the deaf, open that of apes? . . . such is the likeness of the structure and functions of the ape to ours that I have very little doubt that if this animal were properly trained he might at last be taught to pronounce, and consequently to know, a language. Then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman, with as much matter or muscle as we have, for thinking and profiting by his education. The transition from animals to man is not violent.73

Benoit de Maillet, author of the “proto-evolutionary” text Telliamed composed during his years as French consul in Cairo (1692–1708), a phantasmagoric vision of fish being accidentally stranded on the earth and learning to fly through random attempts lasting one million years,74 similarly

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 165 remarked on the orang-outang’s similarity to humans and potential educational plasticity, in terms quite close to La Mettrie: “Even if one could not say that these creatures were human, they resembled humans so strongly, that it would be a bold assertion to say they were merely animals.”75 Maillet added that if one brought males and females of this species to our lands so that they would have reproduced there, their offspring could quite possibly have been brought up so as to acquire language and a more perfect form than what they had earlier.76 That the orang-outang could, if given the opportunities afforded humans, come perhaps to equal us, as a “perfect man” or “little gentleman,”77 was a position also taken by Diderot, now expressed as the claim that humanity is an “animal species”: “man is also an animal species, his reason is but a perfectible and perfected instinct; in the careers of sciences and the arts there are as many different instincts as there are dogs in a hunting party.”78 These are not wild or in any case unique speculations. Many authors appealed to examples from animal breeding (e.g., horses) to show, contra Descartes, that animals can be taught just as children can, whether they also look back to Chrysippus and Montaigne or strictly to their own contemporary experience. For instance, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle (and husband of Margaret Cavendish, herself a prolific writer on the topic of animals and the positions to which humans illegitimately confine them): If the horse does not think (as the famous philosopher Des Cartes affirms of all beasts) it would be impossible to teach him what he should do. But by the hope of reward, and fear of punishment; when he has been rewarded or punished, he thinks of it, and retains it in his memory (for memory is thought) and forms a judgment by what is past of what is to come (which again is thought;) insomuch that he obeys his rider not only for fear of correction, but also in hopes of being cherish’d.79

But of course, Cavendish is not extrapolating from the horse’s capacity to think, to “hyperplasticity,” presented speculatively, for example by Diderot as an articulation between the anatomico-physiological “fact” that “the entirety of a dog’s soul is at the tip of his nose. It’s a question of organization,”80 and the implication, “lengthen the nose of the Sorbonne doctor . . . he will hunt partridges.”81 Of the diverse kinds of “naturalizations” we have encountered, this is

166 | CHARLES T. WOLFE perhaps the first that has such an explicitly destabilizing intent. Somehow, we have come a long way from types of souls, the hound’s syllogism, or the song of the songbird. “Naked” anatomical revelations coupled with the potential plasticity of species put any barrier between humanity and animality, in a fragile situation. A consequence of the elimination of any firm boundary between animal and human minds and capacities, in addition to an increasing focus on the complexity of the former, is—quite symmetrically—a downgrading of the latter: to misuse a famous Freudian phrase, “man is no longer master in his own house.” Following an expression of Guillaume Bougeant’s, one can call this a “humiliation of man.” Bougeant’s thought is that beasts, who have a demon where we have a soul, have deliberately been degraded, precisely inasmuch as they do possess higherlevel cognitive faculties: “God wishes to humiliate them in and through their reason itself, by rendering them subject (we might say ‘dependent’) on such crude organs”; “the spirits animating them are punished by being subject to material senses.”82 Boullier also identifies such “humiliation” as a freethinking strategy: “it is not enough for the libertine that Brutes resemble us in some ways—he wants them to equal us” (Essai philosophique, Preface, xxix). With equal irony but sounding even less encumbered by traditional worries, Bernard Mandeville in his 1711 Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, in Three Dialogues (revised 1730), also expresses a strong naturalistic dismissal of the human/animal distinction in the mode of humiliation: “The Body of Man is thought to be of mean Descent; the animal Functions of it have a near resemblance to the same Functions in Brutes: it is generated and born like theirs.”83 In the same text, when the character Misomedon has insisted, following tradition, on the soul as that which separates man from the beasts, Philoprio replies by describing how the organs of generation generate mental images—a process that is necessary for the perpetuation of our species (164). In his 1707 Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, Collins appeared to grant that “a proper distinction between Men and Brutes [is] that the one is capable of Religion,” but quickly concluded that this “gives no advantage to Men.”84 This humiliation thus amounts to a loss of uniqueness—as described clearly by an unexpected source, Buffon: it is by our soul that we differ from each other; it is by our soul that we are ourselves (que nous sommes nous); from the soul that we get both the diversity of our characters and the variety of our actions. Animals,

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 167 on the contrary, who lack a soul, have no self that is the principle of this difference, the cause that constitutes the person: hence, when their organisation is similar or they belong to the same species, they necessarily copy each other, all act in the same way; in one word, they imitate each other much better than human beings do. . . . 85

If it is my soul that makes me myself or a self, and this is what animals lack, then the naturalistic weakening of this differentia specifica does not just open onto a project of scientific investigation of, for example, animal cognition; it also brings about a loss of selfhood. In this sense the problem of animal souls becomes “the problem of the human soul itself,” as Henri Busson once put it.86 Thus Condillac’s first thought, at the beginning of his Traité des animaux, is that it would be strange to inquire into animals if not to understand ourselves.87 But as I noted earlier, my analysis here is less concerned with this conceit (inquiry into animals as ultimately an aspect of self-inquiry) and more with an increasingly naturalized picture of human and animal capacities, on a continuum—even if there is an aspect of materialist reconstruction of our own self-knowledge in the insight that “brutes are not as brutish as we think”: Diderot adds after this reflection that “they may judge us as badly as we judge them.”88 5. The Agency of Sheep and/as the New Unconscious From reflection on animal minds to their instinctual and linguistic capacities, and ultimately anatomical analysis leading to the materialist assertion of the plasticity of species (La Mettrie’s twist on Tyson’s orang-outang/ chimpanzee) or the hyper-plasticity of species (Diderot’s syllogism-friendly Sorbonne doctor, his nose extended, transformed into a hunting hound), we have reached one possible terminus. It is one which fits quite well with what Gaultier and d’Argens asserted, and Locke intimated: that an “upward” revision of animal capacities goes hand in hand with a revision of our matter theory. But there is another possible outcome, which is both closer to Bayle’s “Rorarius” and considerations on the animal syllogism and equally materialist, but has a much stronger focus on the naturalization of the mind. My example of this, and it will be the final one, is Anthony Collins’s Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717). But, just as human sovereignty has been displaced and destabilized in the foregoing texts, here, the focus on the complexity of animal minds inscribes the human mind and its capacities in a broadly naturalistic outlook (although not

168 | CHARLES T. WOLFE one which leads in any linear fashion to a positive science of psychology, or more generally, to a project for a “scientific” treatment of the mind). Collins’s perspective is deflationary with regard to the purported uniqueness of human agency (and free will), and is original in its emphasis on unconscious cognitive processes, which is why I describe his perspective as conceptualizing a “new unconscious,” in the wake of Locke and Leibniz on uneasiness. Unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, Collins’s version of the “new unconscious” is cognitive (some psychologists have indeed spoken of a “cognitive unconscious”89). Collins’s discussion of animal agency occurs in what is perhaps the single most perfect primer of philosophical determinism ever written, one which, quite uniquely, focuses on the mind (rather than on the causal structure of the world), and in a more deflationary than reductionist way (or, to use a different explanatory pair, more reductionist than eliminativist). As Collins’s explanandum is action and mental processes, the types of deterministic causal relations that he described were specifically volitional. In Collins’s own terms, appropriated from Samuel Clarke: what he is defending is the existence of a specifically “moral necessity,” not just physical necessity.90 Moral necessity is not a “kingdom within a kingdom” (e.g., a form of agent causation); rather, it opens onto the forms of necessitation shared by all sentient beings, that can be shown to follow variously biological, psychological, and social regularities. Collins takes the examination of the purported difference between humans and animals as agents as a pretext for demystifying human faculties through a demonstration that these faculties exist in animals; we can see real continuity here with earlier discussions such as Bayle’s “Rorarius,”91 yet these are turned away from their skeptical intent, toward a more explicitly materialist descriptive project. Collins also sometimes suggests a different strategy, namely, an extension of the animal-machine thesis: if brutes are to be considered as purely necessary agents, let us accept this thesis and then ask how we differ from them.92 The former approach seeks to describe the complexity of animal minds, animal behavior, animal morals, etc., while the latter is a form of a reductio argument which challenges the opposing party to show how we are different from the animals.93 For instance, in an earlier text Collins had written, “If . . . Brutes are only mere Machines, the Difficulty of proving the Soul Immaterial will be increased. For if the Operations of Brutes are not sufficient to distinguish them from Clocks and Watches, the Operations of Men will not prove them to be superior to Machines.”94

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 169 Collins’s challenge to the purported transparency of human awareness of action takes an initially surprising first test case: sheep. Sheep for example are supposed to be necessary agents when they stand still, lie down, go slow or fast, turn to the right or left, skip, as they are differently affected in their minds; when they are doubtful or deliberate which way to take; when they eat and drink more or less according to their humour, or as they like the water or the pasture; when they chuse the sweetest and best pasture when they chuse among pastures that are indifferent or alike; when they copulate; when they are fickle or stedfast in their amours when they take more or less care of their young when they act in virtue of vain fears; when they apprehend danger and fly from it and sometimes defend themselves when they quarrel among themselves about love or other matters and terminate those quarrels by fighting; when they follow those leaders among themselves that presume to go first; and when they are either obedient to the shepherd and his dog or refractory. And why should man be deemed free in the performance of the same or like actions? [Man has many more powers, and also some weaknesses sheep lack.] . . . But these larger powers and larger weaknesses which are of the fame kind with the powers and weaknesses of sheep cannot contain liberty in them and plainly make no perceivable difference between them and men as to the general causes of action in finite intelligent and sensible beings no more than the different degrees of these powers and weaknesses among the various kinds of beasts birds fishes and reptiles do among them Wherefore I need not run through the actions of foxes or any of the more subtile animals nor the actions of children which are allowed by the advocates of liberty to be all necessary.95

He feigns to see the crucial difference between us and them: they are fearful animals, and so are we, but we fear objects and situations in the future, thanks to our capacity of abstraction, etc. But in fact, this is a merely quantitative rather than qualitative difference: “These larger powers and weaknesses, which are of the same kind with the powers and weaknesses of sheep, cannot contain liberty in them” (56). It makes no difference to the causes of action in finite beings. We can see now why he chose sheep rather than a more intelligent animal: “powers and weaknesses” are distributed along the chain of species, but the fundamental point does not change. This is why he adds that there is no need to pursue the demonstration with

170 | CHARLES T. WOLFE a more “subtle” animal such as the fox . . . or with the case of a child: here Collins asks, reiterating points Hobbes had made against Bishop Bramhall: if we declare children to be necessitated, when do they become free? If they are not free, do they have no soul? Do they only acquire rationality in the course of their “natural history”? 96 In contrast with Locke’s agnosticism (or the often tortuous attempts at differentiation we have encountered above, including Bougeant, Condillac, Meier, Reimarus . . . ), Collins seems closer to Hobbes’s position that “though men and beasts do differ in many things, yet they differ not in the nature of their deliberation,”97 or to Hume (a reader of Collins, but also of Bayle), for whom “no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men” (Treatise, I.iii.16). Indeed, in his first “letter to Dodwell” in response to Samuel Clarke, Collins had said of animals, in language reflecting discussion of the animal syllogism, that “Experience as much convinces us, that they perceive, think, etc. as Men do. They avoid Pain and seek Pleasure, and give as good marks of Uneasiness under the one, and Satisfaction under the other, as Men do. They avoid Pain and seek Pleasure, by the same Motives that Men do, viz., by reflecting on their past Actions, and the Actions of their fellows, with the Consequences of them; which is apparent from their acting more to their advantage, the more experience they have had.”98 Collins’s consideration of animal minds is naturalistic, not because he reasons based on experimental cases or insists on the subservience or at least immanence of philosophy with regard to the natural sciences, but because human and animal minds belong to one Nature. One should contrast Collins’s view with Clarke’s anti-naturalism (itself reminiscent of Cudworth’s attacks on Hobbes’s assimilation of human liberty and animal liberty). For Clarke, animal spontaneity is only one condition of human liberty: “In beasts, the same physical liberty or self-moving power, is wholly separate from a sense or consciousness or capacity of judging of moral Good and Evil, and is vulgarly called Spontaneity.”99 Further, animals for Clarke are qualitatively distinct from us because their wills are not determined by moral necessity, and their understandings are not determined by the absolute necessity of a demonstrated truth.100 For Collins, there is no difference between humans and animals, except one of complexity: our rational, computational, and symbolic capacities do not flow from a separate faculty, but are rather elaborations upon our sensitive abilities. Our reasoning abilities (and thus our capacity to be “moved” by factors such as honour or virtue; by absent objects; by future goals) “plainly make no perceivable difference

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS | 171 between them [sc. animals] and men, as to the general causes of action, in finite intelligent and sensible beings.”101 Collins also uses the example of sheep as a reductio case for the explanation of human group behavior: what we think of as the moral motives of our action are actually social motives, (groups of humans, like groups of sheep, displaying limitations on individual freedom that individual agents are not aware of).102 It would doubtless be a rather absurd or at least quixotic task to repertory all possible usages of animal examples in this literature, but one can draw a clear contrast between Willis’s foxes or Collins’s sheep—which have both an empirical and a deflationary implication—and Montaigne’s cat or Bougeant’s appeals to our sympathy at the sight of a whipped dog or horse. Conclusion Whether in early concepts of the material soul, or later Enlightenment references to the “humiliation of man,” there is no place here for a special concept of humanity, an imperium in imperio.103 Yet the inscription of humans on a continuum of corporeity with animals, itself potentially resting on a metaphysics of living matter in a process of “animalization,”104 is not a reduction of human action and necessitation to the action and necessitation of falling stones or clockwork (not a wholesale reduction of moral necessity to physical necessity, in Collins’s terms). It is a reduction to the animal, so to speak—as when Diderot, in his commentary on Franz Hemsterhuis’s 1772 Lettre sur l’homme, wrote “wherever I read soul I replace it with man or animal,” or, in the article “Droit naturel,” he stressed that in the absence of a “rational goodness or wickedness,” there is still an “animal goodness or wickedness.”105 In that sense, the expansion of animal cognitive abilities and indeed here, animal moral faculties (“animal goodness or wickedness”) is both a humiliation of man and at the same time a kind of residual humanism (what I have called elsewhere an embodied materialism): “That the mind possesses such a corporeal nature need not be feared as a blow to our self-esteem.”106 That is, it is not a kind of antihumanism where we disappear into a vast animal flux; our identity remains, yet it is also an animal identity (whether this be “animal goodness or wickedness,” in Diderot’s phrase, or the “corporeal nature” of our mind, in La Mettrie’s). But at the same time, there is a potential humiliation here, in a world of differences between humans, primates, dogs and even sheep which are of the order of “degree, not kind” (Priestley, and already, Gassendi, Bayle, and Diderot).

172 | CHARLES T. WOLFE This is perhaps best summed up by Voltaire, in a reflection on animals in his 1766 Le Philosophe ignorant: From men being supposed to continually have ideas, perceptions and conceptions, it naturally followed that brutes also did; for it is undeniable that a hunting dog has the idea of its master who it obeys, and of the game it brings him. It is obvious that the dog has memory, and combines some ideas. Thus if man’s thinking was the essence of his soul, the dog’s thinking was the essence of its soul; and if man always had ideas, animals must also have them always. To settle this difficulty, the inventor of vortices and channeled matter dared to assert that beasts were mere machines, which wished to eat without appetite, which possessed the organs of sensation without ever having any feeling, which cried out without pain, expressed pleasure without joy, possessed brains without ever receiving the slightest idea therein, and were thus a perpetual contradiction.107

Where is the materialism in all this? It is not just an isolated part of the theory, an optional supplement, as Gaultier and Boyer d’Argens indicated when they warned against underestimating the properties of matter itself. If La Mettrie’s tale of the orang-outang going to school is to make any sense other than as a utopian fantasy, it must already imply a vision of living, self-transforming matter, in addition to a radicalized version of an anti-innatist approach to the mind. As Diderot put it, “if the animal’s soul is matter, how much can matter do?” and “Grant me only one thing: Grant me that the animal can feel. I will take care of the rest.”108

Chapter 10 How Animals May Help Us Understand Men Thomas Willis’s ANATOMY OF THE BRAIN (1664) & Two Discourses Concerning the Soules of Brutes (1672)

Claire Crignon

I n a paper w ritten in 1973 about the use of comparative anatomy in the medical thought of Thomas Willis (1621–1675), William Bynum notes some “inconsistencies” in Willis’s work.1 Although Willis describes the human brain as physical proof of human preeminence over animals in his Anatomy of the brain (1664), he declares in his Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (1672) that comparative anatomy does not allow us to draw any distinction between outward physical appearance of men and that of beasts. Should we conclude from this apparent contradiction that the difference between men and animals is invisible and cannot be understood from an anatomical point of view? In this chapter, I will show that a close reading of the work of Thomas Willis does not justify this conclusion. I begin with a brief overview of Anatomy of the Brain (1664), illustrating how Willis presents anatomy as a subject that can demonstrate the superiority of man to other creatures. Then I turn to the Two Discourses (1672) and examine how Willis emphasizes the limitations of comparative anatomy. This will lead me to the “paradoxical doctrine of the corporeal soul” that Willis presents to his readership as a way to reconcile the ancients and moderns and to explain what animals and men have in common. In conclusion, I will highlight the epistemological

173

174 | CLAIRE CRIGNON and moral implications of Willis’s original answer to the classic question of the anthropological difference between men and beasts. Dissecting the “Living Chapel of the Deity” In the Anatomy of the Brain (1664), Willis asks the following question: how is it possible to observe, describe, and understand the human mind? Recalling his mission when he accepted the Sedleian Chair of Natural Philosophy in Oxford in 1660,2 he stresses the difficulty of his task: “unlock[ing] the secret places of Man’s Mind,” “look[ing] into the living and breathing chapel of the deity” seem fraught with risk.3 In his “Epistle dedicatory to the Archbishop of Canterbury” and in his “Preface to the Reader,” Willis seems to follow a trend that had become traditional since the Renaissance: he writes that describing the fabric of the human is the ideal way to celebrate the “prerogative” of man over all other living creatures and to pay tribute to the Divine Architect. In reality, however, Willis breaks with this tradition, violating the prohibition expressed, for example, by André Du Laurens in his Histoire anatomique (1600): according to Du Laurens, the soul is above all natural forms, distinct from all material things, indivisible and an image of the deity; consequently, its essence cannot be made visible by the anatomist, who must limit himself to the physical objects that he can perceive with the senses.4 As Willis acknowledges in the “Preface to the Reader,” “to explicate the uses of the Brain,” to inquire into its nature, and to describe the internal movement of Animal Spirits, “seems as difficult as to paint the Soul”; and in the “Epistle Dedicatory,” he describes the effort to do so as the best “School-house of Atheism.” These difficulties and objections, however, do not prevent Willis from viewing the spherical shape of the brain and the disposition of its various organs as signs or proof of man’s preeminent place in the Creation: The figure or the skull in four footed beasts is narrow and prest down, but in man, the substance of whose brain is large, there is required a more capacious and almost spherical figure. For as God gave him an upright countenance to behold the Heavens; therefore his face is erect or lifted up: so the Brain it self is placed in a more eminent place, to wit, above the Cerebel and all the sensories. But in Brutes, and such whose faces are prone towards the Earth, and have a brain unfit for Speculation, the Cerebel, however serving to the more noted action

HOW ANIMALS MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND MEN | 175 and office of the Praecordia, is placed in the highest seat to which the mole of the brain is subjected.5

If we paid attention exclusively to quotations such as this, we might wonder whether Willis’s position was original at all. Animals here are “unfit for speculation,” and their brains are designed merely to maintain lower vital functions. On account of this position, as Willis remarks in the “Epistle Dedicatory,” he had “slain so many Victims, whole Hecatombs almost of all Animals in the Anatomical Court.” If Willis wants to gain a “perfect knowledge of the Brain and its parts,” he must dissect the brains of “all sorts of living creatures” and especially those of “four-footed beasts,” like “dogs, calves, sheep.” As he explains in the first chapter of Anatomy of the Brain, where he presents the method of comparative anatomy, this is because, first, “humane Heads or Bodies are not so readily to be had.” Second, animal brains are simpler to study than “the immense bulk of an humane Head” and its “most intricate frame and various recesses.”6 Referring to Genesis, Willis justifies the analogy between men and four-footed beasts with reference to the point that they were created on the same day, just after “fishes and fowls” the day before: hence “there is in either twin species a like form of the brain,” and the difference between human and animal brains is only one of “magnitude.”7 Although the designation “anatomia comparata” had been used previously by Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning (1605), Willis was one of the first anatomists “who understood by this expression the comparison of specific parts in various species of brutes, and in man”8 (and not merely the investigation of many individuals of one species).9 This comparative method allowed him not only to study “animals in general” (as Descartes did 10), but also to observe commonalities and differences between the parts of various animals compared among themselves and with man. Comparative anatomy seems to be the best method to address the objections to Willis’s project. The field of medicine, which entails the anatomical investigation of the complexity of the human body and of the human brain, can demonstrate the superiority of man to all other creatures.11 Let us turn now to another important work by Thomas Willis, published in 1672: the De Anima Brutorum or Two Discourses Concerning the Soules of Brutes, a work that Willis announced in the Anatomy of the Brain as a necessary complement to his method of comparative anatomy.

176 | CLAIRE CRIGNON The Limits of Comparative Anatomy Let us begin with a quotation from the end of chapter 7 of Two Discourses (“The corporeal soul, or that of the Brutes, is Compared with the Rational Soul”), where Willis refers to his former treatise on the brain: As we have shewn, by comparing the Corporeal Soul of the Brute, with the Rational (Soul) of Man, what vast difference there is between them, perhaps it might be to the purpose, to compare the Brains of either, and to observe their differences. But this Anatomy being elsewhere made (Cerebri Anatome), we have noted little or no difference, in the Head of either, as to the Figures and Exterior Conformations of the Parts, the Bulk only excepted; that from hence we concluded, the Soul Common to Man with the Brutes, to be only Corporeal, and immediately to use these Organs.12

Reading this comparison of the “corporeal soul” of brutes and the “rational soul” of men, we might be tempted to see proof of “inconsistencies” in Willis’s thought. In Anatomy of the Brain, Willis had already underlined the similarity of human brains and those of quadrupeds, such as dogs, sheep, and monkeys. Comparative anatomy may help us to reveal the difference between the “fabrick of the brain in fowls and fishes” (inferior animals), on the one hand, and the fabric of the brain in “four footed beasts” (superior animals), on the other.13 But the limitations of this approach appear when Willis tries to draw distinctions between members of the category of superior animals, namely, between “four footed beasts,” such as dogs, foxes, and monkeys, and men: “We have already hinted, that the Brains of Men and of four footed Beasts, were alike in most things.”14 Here Willis clearly departs from Descartes’s argument in Passions of the Soul. According to Willis, the “pineal glandula” cannot be considered as the physiological seat of the soul and of superior functions, which belong exclusively to men: “This Glandula is found in all perfect Creatures; for Man, all four footed Beasts, yea Fowl and Fishes are provided or endued with it.”15 Paradoxically, advances in the field of comparative anatomy during the seventeenth century had made it even more difficult to draw a visible (anatomical) boundary between animals and men. In 1641, in the first edition of his Observationum Medicarum, the physician Nicolas Tulp published the first physical description of the great ape or sylvan man. Although a quadruped, the ape nonetheless resembled the human species

HOW ANIMALS MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND MEN | 177 and was called “orang-outang” or “man of the forest.”16 Later, in 1690, Edward Tyson gave further thought to the physiology of the orang-outan, describing its brain and nervous system and showing that it is closer to man than to other animals. Dedicating the text to Lord Sommers, president of the Royal Society, Tyson presented the orang-outan as “the Nexus of the Animal and Rational.”17 The anatomy and description of the great apes enabled Tyson to understand the gradual transition from plants to animals, and from animals to men. It may have helped him to approach “nearest to that kind of Beings which is next above us” and to “connect the Visible and Invisible World.”18 The progress of the field of comparative anatomy led to a reconsideration of man’s place in the “Great Chain of Being.”19 In consequence, it had to be acknowledged that medicine and anatomy could not specify the difference between animals and men. The Anatomy of the Brain had revealed “little or no difference” between the head of men and that of animals, Willis writes at the end of chapter 7 of the Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes. Does this statement contradict the point made in the Anatomy of the Brain, namely, that the spherical shape of the human brain and the complexity of its structure were proofs of the superiority of man to animals? I would like to focus on another passage in part 2 of Anatomy of the Brain (The Description and Use of the Nerves), in which Willis explains why the anatomy of the brain cannot provide clear criteria for identifying what it is to be human. In chapter 26 of this work, Willis refers to two dissection experiments: first, the dissection of “the Carcass of a man that was a Fool from his birth” and, second, the dissection of a “monkey”: When of late we had dissected the Carcass of a man that was a Fool from his birth, we could find no defect or fault in the Brain, unless that its substance or bulk was very Small. . . . Whilst we were writing these, we made an Anatomy of a Monkey, whose Brain differed little from that which is seen in a Dog or a Fox, unless that it was much more capacious in the proportion to the bulk of his Body, and the turnings and windings of it were larger.20

Here we find the same affirmation as before. The difference between a man and a fool and between a man and a monkey is one of degree, not one of nature. The example of the fool in particular is significant, because it leads us to question the legitimacy of reason as the defining characteristic of a human being. Indeed, in the case of the fool, we have a human body

178 | CLAIRE CRIGNON that possesses the organs that should have enabled him to speak and reason. We therefore cannot point to any meaningful anatomical difference between the brain of a fool and the brain of a man endowed with reason.21 The reader would conclude from Willis’s account of these experiments that the anatomy of the brain cannot give us an explanation of what makes humans rational beings—which, however, does not exclude the possibility that we might understand what makes the difference from another point of view. In fact, and as Willis reminds us in the passage preceding the text quoted above, “both the ancient Divines and Philosophers placed wisdom in the Heart.”22 As William Bynum notes, “Willis wrote in the aftermath of Harvey’s Aristotelian emphasis on the primacy of the heart.”23 Although the brain is beginning to rival the heart as the center and origin of vital functions, Willis still attributes morals and wisdom to the heart. This is perhaps an allusion to Francis Bacon, who quotes Proverbs 4:23 in book 2 of Advancement of Learning: “ante omnia, fili, custodi cor tuum; nam inde procedunt actiones vitae” (“Keep thy heart with all diligence, for thereout come the actions of thy life”).24 If we want to understand the difference between a “man of judgement” and a fool, or between a human being capable of “vertue and prudence” and a monkey, we must inquire into the “reciprocal affections of the Heart and Brain”; in other words, we must inquire into the dependence of our intellectual faculties on appetite, desire, affections, and passions (the dependence of the rational soul on the sensitive soul).25 It is true that the anatomy of nerves, and more specifically the description of the “infolding of the intercostal Nerve, which [Willis] call[s] the Internuncius of the Brain and Heart,” provides us with some elements that help us to understand “to what injuries of changes or Diseases . . . the Brain and nervous Stock may be obnoxious.”26 But ultimately, we must turn to another kind of “speculation.” The “anatomy” of the brain and nerves must be complemented by a “pathology or (the) Doctrine of the Passions of the Soul” or by what Willis also calls a “psycheology [sic] of the soul” or “discourse of the soul.”27 Yet turning from the brain, traditionally considered as the seat of thought, to the heart, that is, the seat of affections and passions,28 does not help us to understand what makes man superior to fools and animals. Instead, it helps us to grasp what they have in common. This in turn may enable us to better understand two things: first, why the monkey “is too crafty and mimical above other Beasts, and can so aptly shew and imitate not only the gestures but the passions and some manners of a man”;29 and,

HOW ANIMALS MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND MEN | 179 second, why we cannot find any visible or anatomical difference between a man of judgment and a fool. But for this to occur, Willis must abandon all attempts to describe the fabric of the human body as “a certain kingly Palace” with its “outward Courts and Porches.” He must enter the “intimate Recesses and private Chambers”30 of this palace. Here he will be able to observe the “various Metamorphoses or Changes” of the corporeal soul and to understand how these metamorphoses produce “strange species,”31 animals that seem to behave like men (or imitate them), and men who act sometimes foolishly or transform themselves into animals. From Comparative Anatomy to the Psychology of the Soul The Two Discourses were published in 1672, at the same time as the Discours de la connoissance des Bestes written by the Jesuit physician and mathematician Ignace Gaston Pardies. Pardies regarded animals as endowed with a lower form of intelligence that is particular to the sensitive soul.32 Willis, however, adopts a different standpoint in this debate. He presents the “paradoxical doctrine of the corporeal soul” in his “Preface to the Reader,” both as a way to gain access to what remains invisible to the eye and as a way to redefine man as a “two soul’d animal”33 or, as Willis writes later in chapter 7 of part 1, as an “amphibious animal . . . of a middle Nature and Order, between Angels and Brutes,” which communicates with brutes “by the corporeal Soul” and with Angels by the “intelligent, immaterial and immortal soul.”34 It is striking that Willis presents this doctrine as a way to reconcile ancients and moderns. Although he mentions the doctrines of the Pythagoreans, who believed in metempsychosis and thought that “the Souls of all living creatures [were] a certain part of the Universal Soul of the World,” or the doctrine of the “Manichees” and “Origenists,” who “granted the like Immortality to the Souls of the Brutes, yea of Plants,”35 he does not consider them influential in his own time. Instead, he links the hypothesis of the corporeity of the soul to the revival of Epicureanism.36 Defining the soul as “plainly corporeal” or “made of a knitting together of subtil atoms,” in agreement with Laërtius, is “as much to say . . . that the Animal is as it were the Loom in which the Yarn is the Body, and the Wood the Soul,” in agreement with Gassendi. The Epicurean hypothesis, according to Willis, is the “basis” upon which “philosophers of this latter Age” (including Descartes) “have built all their doctrines of the soul.”37 We should remember that Willis is referring here to the soul “by which the Brutes

180 | CLAIRE CRIGNON as well as Men live, feel (and) move.”38 If we understand the “soul” as the principle responsible for the primary functions of life, sensation, and motion, and if we consider the fact that “for Descartes the primary functions of life, sensation, and motion are brought about by tiny, invisible particles such as those proposed by Epicurus . . . then it is reasonable to say that the soul, for Descartes, is corporeal.”39 But we should not forget that Descartes made a clear distinction between the corporeal soul, “qui ne dépend que de la seule force des esprits animaux et de la configuration des parties, et que l’on pourroit appeler âme corporelle,” and the soul as a “mind” (“esprit”) or “thinking substance.” Characterizing the soul as the principle responsible for vital functions confounds (intentionally) what Descartes had asked Henry More to distinguish: “Il faut pourtant remarquer que je parle de la pensée, non de la vie, ou du sentiment; car je n’ôte la vie à aucun animal, ne la faisant consister que dans la chaleur du cœur. Je ne leur refuse pas même le sentiment autant qu’il dépend des organes du corps.”40 According to Willis, ancient and modern philosophers agree that “the soul of brutes” is “corporeal and divisible.”41 They agree about the corporeity or materiality of the soul of brutes, but disagree about its passivity or activity. Whereas Pereira, Descartes, and Digby affirm that this soul is “deprived of all knowledge, sense, and appetite,” that “Beasts [want] all Knowledg [sic] or Perception” and “that every action of the Brute consisted in it, as it were an artificial Motion of a Mechanical Engine,” others, “also renowned Philosophers, both Ancient and Modern, professing themselves no less adverse to Atheism than the former, challenge in the behalf of the Beasts, not only the operations of an external and internal Sense, with Perception, Appetite, and spontaneous motions, but besides, grant to them a certain use of Judgement, Deliberation, and Ratiocination.”42 From this second group of philosophers, Willis quotes the first chapter of Nemesius’s treatise On the Nature of Man, where we read that God did not suddenly create rational animals, but rather “first endowed the other animals also with certain natural forms of understanding, devices and resources for their preservation, so that they appear near to the rational animals.”43 Willis also mentions Gassendi’s Physics and his “late Experimental Philosophy,” from which the enumeration of “very many Instances  (of) the Cunning and Wonderful Sagacity of brute Animals” leads him to attribute to them “a certain kind of reason.”44 According to Willis, Descartes is right to think that “brutes are like Machines framed with a more simple furniture . . . determined for the doing still the same thing,” whereas “in Man divers series of motions, and

HOW ANIMALS MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND MEN | 181 as it were complications of wheels within wheels, appear.”45 But his endeavours to “discriminate the Souls of Beasts from the humane”46 cause him to neglect the fact that every machine requires a large amount of energy to function. If the soul of brutes is made of the subtlest atoms, these are active and dynamic atoms. Willis distinguishes two kinds of atoms: one has a fiery nature, arises in the blood, and circulates in the body (the vital part of the soul); while Willis compares the other kind to light to explain the movement of animal spirits: this second kind of atom circulates like rays of light within the body (the sensitive part of the soul).47 Like Descartes, Willis uses the mechanistic model, but he uses it to describe the “self moving energy” (“energeia”) that is at work in all “natural things” and is responsible for vital and involuntary functions, such as blood circulation, respiration, generation, and reproduction.48 The “souls of Beasts” possess a “dignity” that is “beyond the powers of any Machine” and “caus[es] its Efficacy.”49 Indeed, in chapter 6, Willis cites various examples traditionally used to demonstrate the sensibility and intelligence of animals: “Many admirable Histories are reported concerning the subtilities and craft of the Fox, which he is wont to perform for the getting of his living. This creature, that he might allure the Hens within the compass of this Chain, with which he was tyed, lying all along, his legs stretched forth, feigns as if he were Dead, then they coming near him, he readily leaps upon them.”50 Willis, however, does not use these stories as grounds for attributing reason to foxes—at least reason as a capacity of reflection or abstraction separate from sensible things and experience. He uses the description of animals and these classic stories to demonstrate what animals and men have in common rather than to distinguish men from animals.51 Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to discuss some implications of Willis’s innovative position in the debate on the soul of brutes. First, it allows him to demonstrate that we share with brutes a kind of practical or empirical knowledge that is essential to the preservation of the human species. Second, it allows him to reevaluate the status of reason as a defining characteristic of man and to observe how men sometimes are induced to imitate animals or even persuade themselves that they are animals. (1) The difficulty presented in chapter 6 (“The Science of Brutes”) is the following: how can we explain the fact that brutes are able to perceive,

182 | CLAIRE CRIGNON discern, and distinguish between objects, to desire and hate (appetite), and remember their master and pain or pleasure felt in the past?52 To untangle this “knot,” we should not grant the same “cognition” to brutes as to men: “For otherwise, if Cognition be granted to the Brutes, you must yield to them also Conscience, yea and deliberation and Election, and a Knowledge of universal things, and lastly an incorporeal and rational soul.”53 Instead, we should acknowledge that there is an activity inherent in matter, a “self-moving energy” that enables atoms to “cut forth for themselves Pores and Passage” in living bodies and is responsible for vital and involuntary functions, such as reproduction, conservation, respiration, circulation, and even instinct.54 In chapter 16 of Anatomy of the Brain, Willis attributes all involuntary natural functions, such as the pulse, respiration, and chylification, to the regular actions, “being made in the Brain without previous knowledge, . . . done by Instinct merely natural.” Consequently, we may conclude, first, that the same principle explains why man lives and is able to preserve himself, why brute animals “being newly brought forth” are able to feed themselves, and why birds “build nests with wonderful Art” without needing “any shewing for example.”55 This principle also explains why brutes, as well as men, try to “preserve [themselves] as long as [they] can.”56 Second, this natural instinct may be “polished by frequent use and habit, and carried a little further,” giving rise to a kind of “cunning” and “acquired knowledge.”57 Here, Willis describes how “the acts of the senses” and repeated experiences enable brutes to acquire “practical habits”58 and to develop a kind of practical ability to reason, which does not imply any abstract theories or conscious thought, but can be explained entirely by the powers of the “sensitive soul.” Willis suggests as the sources of this practical reasoning first “nature” and “chance,” and then “senses and experience.” He concludes, “according to this sort of analyzing, the most intricate actions of brutes . . . may be explained, and reduced into competent notions of the sensitive soul.” This kind of practical reasoning can explain the fox’s “ruse,” pretending to be dead in front of the hens, and the capacity of the “Ape” to imitate Man: “Hence it is that the Ape so plainly imitates Man.”59 Here we begin to perceive the answer to the problem raised in chapter 26 of Anatomy of the Brain: if we want to understand why the monkey “can so aptly shew and imitate, not only the gestures, but the passions and some manners of a man,” we need to inquire into the sensitive powers shared by brutes and men. This inquiry can help us to understand that cognition does not always imply conscience or abstract knowledge, but rather that

HOW ANIMALS MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND MEN | 183 there is a kind of cognition that enables us to choose the correct behavior or help us to “preserve ourselves” as long as we can. However, the demonstration of this kind of practical knowledge, linked to instinct and to the preservation of the body, also has moral implications. In the following chapter (chapter 7: “The Corporeal Soul, or That of the Brutes, is Compared with the Rational Soul”60), it seems that Willis intends to establish “the eminency of the Rational Soul above the Brutal or Corporeal” by “comparing” their “objects” and “acts or modes of knowing.” First, Willis declares that the intellect “performs the government of the whole man.” This may be shown from an epistemological point of view by recalling the superiority of the rational soul to the corporeal soul. The powers of the rational soul (“intellect, judgement, discourse, and other acts of reason”) enable us to grasp any “ens” or immaterial object, whereas the corporeal soul’s principal mode of knowing (fantasy or imagination) limits men and animals to sensible objects. We should also recall, from a moral and theological point of view, the “Precepts of Philosophers,” “Moral Institutes” and the laws and precepts of “Sacred Religion,” and how they have vindicated the supremacy of the rational soul to the sensitive soul. Here, the rational soul remains the faculty that can “carry Man, not only beyond the Brutes, but . . . above his natural State.”61 But we must not forget that man is “made, as it were, an Amphibious Animal, or of a middle Nature and Order,” that he does not communicate merely with “Angels,” but also with “Brutes.” Willis must also show that this “Divine Politie . . . is not erected in Man without great contention.” He must describe the “Dissentions of one Soul with another” and remember how the “corporeal soul, . . . being nearer to the Body, and so bearing a more intimate Kindness or Affinity towards the Flesh, is tied wholly to look to its Profit and Conservation.” This leads him to conclude that “the Corporeal Soul does not so easily obey the Rational in all things, not in things to be desired, as in things to be known.” This rebellion of the sensitive against the rational soul might prove to be morally reprehensible: it may induce man to “become like the Beast, or rather worse . . . , for as much as Reason becoming Brutal, leads to all manner of excess”; and, losing all “force and ardor of the mind,” men become “little better than dull working beasts in fortitude and wisdom.”62 But it must also be understood, from a naturalist point of view, as a manifestation of a vital instinct of preservation: “From hence the Wars and Strivings between our two Appetites, or between the Flesh and Spirit, both Morally and Theologically inculcated to us, are also Physically understood.”63

184 | CLAIRE CRIGNON (2) This leads me to the second point, the medical perspective on the human mind and on what man and animals have in common, which might help us to reconsider (against Descartes) the status of reason as a defining characteristic of human beings. Observing mental disorders is crucial to understanding how the rational soul depends on the powers and operations of the sensitive soul. “Ratiocination or Reasoning, howsoever strong” may diminish or even be “taken away” when the movement of the spirits within the brain is “hindred” and the faculty of fantasy is affected.64 It is precisely this kind of “obstruction of the Spirits” that explains certain “eclipses” of our “faculties” in pathological states such as lethargy, stupidity, and foolishness: “hence it comes sometimes that the whole soul suffers various Metamorphoses or Changes, and puts in strange species, as often happens in Melancholy diseases, or to mad men.”65 From his Oxford lectures (attended by John Locke) to the Patholog y of the Brain and Nervous Stock (Pathologiae Cerebri et Nervosi Generis Specimen, London, 1667) and the second part of the Two Discourses (London, 1672), Willis devoted several pages to describing these mental conditions. Already in his Oxford Lectures, Willis mentions the “metamorphoses” of what he calls a corporeal soul or “animus sensitivus”: “a contexture of animal spirits and . . . a sort of aetherial man made up of the most subtle atoms being coextensive to our body.”66 Jackie Pigeaud has commented on what is at stake in this definition of the sensitive soul and how it gives Willis access to a doublet (or counterpart) of the physical man dissected by the anatomist: an interior man that is hidden from observation by the senses,67 but rather must be described by a physician of the soul. As Jeremy Schmidt stresses, the “animus sensitivus was to become Willis’s answer in De Anima brutorum to the Cartesian assertion that animals were, like machines, devoid of sense, feeling, and voluntary motion because they lacked an immaterial soul. Not only could a certain kind of matter in the form of the animus sensitivus think; according to Willis this material soul explained certain features of human thought as well.”68 Moreover, observation of this “metamorphosis delirium” allows us to realize that the difference between man and animals may sometimes disappear. Indeed, men sometimes lose the ability to recognize other men or the ability to speak, behaving like brutes, as in the case of the “lethargist” Oxford gardener described in chapter 3, part 2 of Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes.69 In cases of melancholy, and especially what Willis calls “occasional melancholy”—an emotional state of mind that no human being can ever wholly escape, and which can transport us from a joyful and merry state to one of temporary sadness, whereas the term “habitual”

HOW ANIMALS MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND MEN | 185 is used in physics to designate a severe form of mental pathology—some men might persuade themselves that they have lost their human shape and have transformed into a glass or a wild animal, such as a wolf in the case of lycanthropy.70 These observations might be the starting point of a search for a different criterion that could help us to define what it is to be human: should we pay attention only to visible forms and anatomical structures? Yet we have already seen that comparative anatomy cannot answer the question of what it is to be human. Should we conclude that this distinguishing characteristic, being invisible (language, reason, the immortal soul), eludes the hands and sensible tools of the anatomist and must be addressed from a metaphysical point of view? Willis offers us a third option here. Animals are not “only certain Machines wonderful made by a Divine Workmanship,” which could “without any Knowledg [sic], Sense, or Appetite, perform only Corporeal Motions.”71 We have much more in common with brutes than we might think. There is much to be learned about our close relationship to animals from observing and describing the metamorphoses of the corporeal soul: a soul that we share with animals, that sometimes causes us to lose our ability to speak or recognize ourselves and others as human beings, a soul that sometimes leads us to imitate animal behavior and behave like brutes.

Chapter 11 Political Animals in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy Some Rival Paradigms (Hobbes and Gassendi)

Gianni Paganini

D uring the sev enteenth century, modern philosophers drew on at least two rival ancient paradigms to help them conceptualize the relationship between politics and the condition of animals: the Epicurean and the Aristotelian paradigm. Significantly, the modern thinkers most interested in this topic rely on either one or the other: for instance, Pierre Gassendi developed the Epicurean paradigm, while Thomas Hobbes preferred the Aristotelian, even though he also incorporated some features of the Epicurean notion of the political contract. Both thinkers rejected Cartesian dualism, which reduced animals to machines devoid of any sensitivity. Hobbes’s and Gassendi’s polemic against Descartes is well known and need not be summarized here. In his Objections and the even longer Disquisitio Metaphysica, Gassendi rejects Descartes’s disembodied mens in favor of a strong consciousness of the links that bind operations such as sensation, memory, and imagination to their corporeal basis. In this context he also stresses the similarity of men and animals. Less known is Gassendi’s reinterpretation of Epicurean political philosophy. He undertook a careful translation of and commentary on Epicurus’s Ratae Sententiae (Kuriai doxai) that discusses the possibility of political relationships between men and animals. Epicurus had already created a favorable intellectual environment for conceptualizing the fellowship of all living beings. These favorable conditions 186

POLITICAL ANIMALS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY | 187 resulted not only from his fundamental materialistic monism, but also from the point that the Garden based its ethics and politics on notions and needs that are largely common to both men and animals, such as the basic importance of sensation, the cardinal values of pleasure and pain, and the necessity of avoiding harm and seeking security. Nevertheless, Epicurus and Gassendi resolutely deny that animals can be partners in the political contract. The main reason for this is the rigorous conventionalism of Epicurean political philosophy: since beasts lack language and therefore cannot stipulate a contract, they are not political animals. Nor do they have any rights: this is because, for Epicurus and Gassendi, rights in the proper sense of the word derive from a contract. The form of the contract itself is much more decisive than its purpose or content. Its content, which is security and the avoidance of mutual harm, does not differ from the basic goals pursued by both animals and men; its form, however, is an instrument available only to man, because man alone is capable of meaningful language (logos), by which and in which the contract is expressed. Politics, like rights themselves, cannot be natural; it can only be artificial.1 It is significant that we find both these theses (the artificiality of politics and the particularity of human language, on which all contracts depend) also in Hobbes’s political philosophy. He adopts a different approach, however, as we shall soon see: instead of excluding animals from sociability, Hobbes allows them a kind of diminished form of politics. In doing so, his approach shares some features of the rival Aristotelian tradition. As is well known, the affirmation that even animals possess some kind of political association stands at the heart of Aristotle’s Politics. It appears in the same passage that contains the famous definition of man as zoon politikon, which is also found in Nicomachean Ethics.2 In this regard, Aristotle sees the difference between man and animals more as a matter of degree than of nature. In contrast to Epicureanism, the Aristotelian paradigm of political animals has the great advantage of being gradualist. In addition, it is not based on the binary opposition that separates man from aloga beasts in Epicureanism, the latter being unable to speak and hence incapable of entering into a contract. Generally speaking, Aristotelian naturalism contrasts with Epicurean conventionalism. In the passage in which it is claimed that “the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal,” the author of Politics also states that this political feature is somehow shared by some animals, albeit to a lesser extent than men. Animals do not constitute a real polis;

188 | GIANNI PAGANINI nevertheless, they gather in societies. For Aristotle, the decisive factor seems to be the distinction between a proper political constitution and a mere gathering, that is, a kind of gregariousness. The comparison, however, is still based on gradation; it is a matter of more and less. “Man,” Aristotle says, “is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals.” Although Aristotle considers language as a human particularity, however, as usual for him, dualism is replaced by a graded scale according to the general principle of the biological continuity of all living beings. Animals are endowed with some elementary ability to express themselves as well: in the case of beasts, their voice is enough to express “pleasure and pain,” so that they can “intimate them to one another.” Yet Aristotle immediately hastens to add: “no further,” indicating that the real divide regards much more meanings than signs. Beside voice, men also exhibit speech, namely words, with which they communicate to one another not only mere sensations and affects, but also what is “just and unjust,” “good and evil.” The sense of all this, Aristotle concludes, is what makes possible an “association of living beings” that can be “a family and a state”3 and not simply a flock or a crowd. This whole body of ethical and political meanings is what animals lack, so that their rudimentary language, all made of elementary signs, is unfit to supporting true political associations. Hobbes famously rejects the Aristotelian definition of man as zoon politikon, and the grounds for this rejection are clearly stated both in De cive4 and in Leviathan. Against all the authors who, like Aristotle, take it for granted that men are adapted to society “by birth,” being natural enemies to solitude and having a natural desire to consort with other men, Hobbes asserts that men come together not because the opposite is impossible (that they come together by nature), but rather by accident. In reality, men do not love each other, and they do not seek society for its own sake; they seek it for personal, individual advantages, and above all for their own honor and profit. We have yet to remark on the only notable exception in Hobbes’s works. In his first great political work, the Elements, a little of the elder Aristotelian tradition remains. In this book, Hobbes first redefines, in his typical mechanistic way, the cardinal emotions, such as “delight, pain, love, hatred,” and regards love as a “motion about the heart” that strengthens the “vital motion.”5 Furthermore, when summarizing the whole subject of the passions in another chapter (in chapter IX, which relies heavily on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as has been known since Strauss’s studies), he uses “love”

POLITICAL ANIMALS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY | 189 not to mean something generic, such as “the joy that a man taketh in the fruition of any present good,” but rather something more specific, such as a “pleasure they [human beings] take in another’s company.” In this instance, he was probably influenced by the text of Rhetoric, which serves as a useful outline for listing and describing human passions: concerning this, Hobbes surprisingly adds that it is by love in this narrower sense that “men are said to be sociable by nature.”6 We can easily recognize the Aristotelian thesis of men’s natural sociability in a different guise. Might this be simple carelessness on Hobbes’s part? In fact, when sketching the natural condition of man before the establishment of any commonwealth, Hobbes still recognizes in the Elements that “men by natural passion”—and not by accident—“are divers ways offensive one to another.”7 After all, despite this pale shadow of Aristotelian natural sociability, Hobbes affirms in the Elements that in the state of nature “the offensiveness of man’s nature one to another,” combined with “the right of every man to every thing,” inevitably produces “perpetual diffidence,” and ultimately “the estate of war.” This amounts to the opposite of spontaneous concord, as assumed by Aristotle. In this connection, Hobbes reduces natural sociability, as far as it is revealed by private affects, to intimate and personal relationships. He thus excludes the possibility that natural sociability can influence political matters at all. The first time that Hobbes discusses this famous passage of Aristotle’s Politics, he does not explicitly mention the thesis of the zoon politikon. He focuses instead on the subsequent discourse where Aristotle develops his comparison of men and “political animals.” Hobbes thinks that, against his conviction that humans are aggressive and that peace among men is impossible “without some mutual and common fear to rule them,”8 one might cite “the experience—evoked by Aristotle himself—of certain living creatures irrational, that nevertheless continually live in such good order and government, for their common benefit, and are free from sedition and war amongst themselves, that for peace, profit, and defense, nothing more can be imaginable”: exactly like the bees and ants mentioned in Aristotle’s Politics. However, in following the tradition of representing animals as “mirrors of nature” (specula naturae), Hobbes seems to go beyond Aristotle with regard to the significance of these forms of animal behavior. Instead of calling animals merely “gregarious” as in Politics, Hobbes calls them animalia politica, using the word “political,” which Aristotle had reserved for man. What is more, the entire context of Hobbes’s reasoning differs from Aristotle’s. Aristotle had focused on the “sense of just and

190 | GIANNI PAGANINI unjust” in order to distinguish between man and animals, and this explains why the former can create complex political associations such as the family and state, whereas animals go no farther than elementary forms of sociability. By contrast, the real divide for Hobbes is not axiological, but intrinsically political: it is not axiological, because he does not contrast the sense of just and unjust with pleasure and pain, as Aristotle does; for Hobbes, all human conduct is guided by seeking the former and avoiding the latter, exactly like animals. The problem is actually political, or rather depends on one’s definition of politics—and Hobbes’s definition differs from Aristotle’s. This becomes much clearer in De cive, where Hobbes distances himself even more from Politics and explicitly rejects the Aristotelian definition of man as a “political animal.” Even though he does not mention Aristotle by name, preferring to refer to “the greatest part of those men who have written ought concerning Commonwealths,”9 it is clear that Hobbes negatively refers to the definition of man as zoon politikon. Thus, in the same work, Hobbes refuses to acknowledge “a social instinct . . . implanted in all men by nature.”10 Apparently, the distance as to Aristotle is lesser in the evaluation of animal behavior. Now explicitly mentioning Aristotle, Hobbes admits that the lack of reason and articulate language (logos) does not prevent animals from establishing some form of consent. While is true that, without articulate language, animals cannot “contract, and submit to government,” they nevertheless are able to reach some form of mutual agreement. As Hobbes says, by “consenting, (that is to say) ensuing, or eschewing the same things, they so direct their action to a common end.” This kind of association is so consistent that “their meetings are not obnoxious unto any seditions,” unlike human meetings. But Hobbes’s conclusion is still limiting: he now refuses to call animals “animalia politica” as he believed Aristotle had done (in Elements). Even if he had already outlined the concept in his earlier work, it is in De cive that Hobbes explicitly specifies that animal gatherings do not constitute “a civill government” and that therefore “those animals [are] not to be termed politicall.” Of course, animals are capable of expressing consent: “many wills concurring in one object.” This explains the stability and steadiness of their associations, which last even longer than human ones. Nevertheless, they are not able to produce a genuine “one will,” which is the main requirement of a proper civil, political government. In other words, they are incapable of “union.”11 The narrower and more exacting concept of commonwealth such as “union” or “body politic” explains why

POLITICAL ANIMALS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY | 191 Hobbes now rejects even the expression “animalia politica,” for which he showed more tolerance in Elements. In De cive Hobbes’s real dilemma is thus the following: why is consent enough to ensure peaceful gatherings of animals, whereas it is insufficient in the case of men? Having placed animal gatherings at the level of mere consent, Hobbes is obliged to consider at least one case in which human associations can be compared to them: in the pure state of nature, before establishing any political power, men share the gregarious condition that Aristotle describes as typical of beasts. Hobbes does not explicitly make this connection, yet it is clear that in the state of nature the only way to provide security for creatures living according to the laws of nature “consists in the concord of many Persons,” as Hobbes notes.12 Immediately following this statement, he explains that this concord consists in the consent to pursue the same goals,13 and this is also the case with animalia. By contrast, what renders human associations unstable, while animal gatherings are able to “preserve peace,” is the fact that man can paradoxically be worse, morally worse, than animals, despite his possession of reason and language. It is clear that, for Hobbes, talking about animals and politics is simply a means of discussing human politics. This kind of comparison is merely a device to better explain the peculiarity of human commonwealths. Thus, the previous question—why mere consent is not enough for men—might be narrowed further: why is “consent of mind” stable among animals that live “only by sense and appetite,” whereas it is weak and precarious in men that are blessed with reason?14 This question has serious implications for the conception of human politics itself. It is paramount to consider whether “the society proceeding from mutuall help only,” that is from the consent “for the common good,” needs to be strengthened “by fear” and by the constraint of a “common power.” Otherwise men would “again dissent,” especially when “their private Interest shall appear discrepant from the common good.”15 In other words, Hobbes investigates why aiming at a common good successfully brings about durable societies among animals, whereas it leads only to ephemeral gatherings among men in the state of nature, since both of these associations ultimately rely on consent. Comparing animals and men to discuss politics has now become a way to compare the condition of man before and after the establishment of a true commonwealth. Hence, Hobbes’s treatment of the Aristotelian topos of animalia politica results in a totally new concept of politics itself. The main terms of the comparison of human and animal societies are nearly the same in Elements

192 | GIANNI PAGANINI as in De cive and afterwards in Leviathan. We shall refer here to the exposition given in De cive. Hobbes arranges the comparison in five propositions and one conclusion. These may be summarized as follows: (1) Between men, as opposed to animals, there is “a contestation of honour and preferment,” from which “hatred and envy” are derived. These ultimately result in “sedition and warre.” (2) In regard to animals, the goal of their appetites is a “common good which among them differs not from their private.” Among men, however, the goal is “somewhat of eminence in the enjoyment”; it inevitably brings about rivalry and discord. (3) Reason is usually a source of dissension and strife. By criticizing the state and suggesting diverse innovations, rational men fall into “civil warre,” whereas “creatures which are voyd of reason” do not quarrel with each other; they do not find fault with “the administration of their Commonwealth.” (4) This point both recalls and develops the Aristotelian distinction between animal voices and human speech. Since animals have “only voice to signify their affections” and lack the “art of words,” they cannot represent “good . . . as being better, and evill as worse than in truth it is.” Therefore, these “brute creatures” are spared the devastating effects of the supreme last refinement of human speech, the falsifications of rhetoric. This is described with reference to Pericles’ famous oratorical ability as “a trumpet of war and sedition.” (5) Animals “cannot distinguish between injury and harme,” which means that they do not live in such idleness as to stir up controversy over potential injustice unless they are really harmed. By contrast, the more men live in luxury and ease, the more they contend for public honors and quarrel.

All the previous points explain why men must go beyond the natural associations at which animals stop. Hence, the conclusion of Hobbes’s reasoning is as follows: (6) All the findings listed above show that animal appetites are regulated by nature so that they do not conflict with each other; in contrast, humans lack this kind of spontaneous regulation and so fall into discord and strife, unless they devise artificial rules that compensate for the absence of natural regulation. Hence, it follows that animal gregariousness

POLITICAL ANIMALS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY | 193 can be spontaneous, whereas human politics can be only artificial. As Hobbes says, “the consent of those brutall creatures is naturall, that of men by compact only, (that is to say) artificiall; it is therefore no matter of wonder if somewhat more be needful for men to the end they may live in peace.”16

This conclusion seems to align Hobbes with some fundamental trends of Epicurean politics and departs from some features of Aristotle’s political thought. For Hobbes, like Gassendi and the Epicureans, man is not sociable by nature; he is not a zoon politikon by himself. Politics, family, and the state, therefore, are not natural but artificial. Political association is not a natural social goal; it is strictly conventional and even unnatural in the sense that it goes against the natural human tendency toward discord, competition, and fighting. Politics is the result of a contract that requires reason and language; it is thus a typical human product. Animals, which are devoid of reason and possess voices but not speech, cannot enter into a contract. Thus they cannot rise to a properly political level. Hobbes shares all these views with the Epicurean tradition; they are all easily recognizable in Gassendi’s commentaries on Epicurus’s Ratae Sententiae. Nevertheless, Hobbes departs from the Epicureans in at least two notable ways. The first difference relates to the Aristotelian paradigm; the second, in contrast, is deeply rooted in Hobbes’s own political philosophy. First, in reworking Aristotle’s Politics, Hobbes develops a close parallel between men in the state of nature and animals’ spontaneous gatherings. All this results into recognizing the existence of a state that lies between the condition of man in isolation and that of man as political citizen. This mean state is represented by the gregarious associations that certain kinds of animals and groups of men in a pure state of nature have in common. Consent and agreement are applicable both to ephemeral human associations and to stable animal gatherings. Thus, for Hobbes, a weak form of aggregation exists even before a contract, whereas for the Epicureans there is none without a contract. Something like Aristotle’s “sociable animals” still finds a place in Hobbes’s theory, although he is forced to abandon the word “political” in the transition from Elements to De cive: in reality, the term “political” is too specific to man and was not applied to animals by Aristotle himself. Even though Hobbes avoids using the word, however, the main point remains: men in the state of nature join together only by consent, aiming at a common goal, exactly as bees and ants do. In regard to this point, Epicurus and the neo-Epicurean Gassendi are much stricter:

194 | GIANNI PAGANINI according to them, neither society nor politics exist before the contract, which utterly precludes the existence of politica animalia. Hobbes would agree insofar as the proper political state is concerned, but not insofar as a less specific condition (gregariousness) is conceived as a social condition. Accordingly, instead of a two-level schema, we find three different levels in Hobbes that implicitly take into account the Aristotelian notion of gregariousness as distinguished from both savage solitude and the political commonwealth. What still militates in Hobbes against Aristotle in favor of Epicurus is that men are not political naturally but merely conventionally (in the strict sense of the word: to be associated does not necessarily mean to be political). Yet—and this is the second point of contrast with the Epicureans— Hobbes disagrees with Epicurus and Gassendi about the proper content of the political contract, which is not simply tantamount to the motto “neither inflict nor suffer harm,” as Rata Sententia XXXII puts it (“Those animals which are incapable of making contracts with one another, to the end that they may neither inflict nor suffer harm, are without either justice or injustice”). In order to be “just,” it is not enough to join together in simple consent, because according to Hobbes the real content of the political contract is “union” (in the words of Elements and De cive; in the Leviathan this is understood as a process of authorization, by which the sovereign “personates,” that is “represents” the “covenanters”).17 Hobbes seems to adopt a multifaceted position in this complex interplay of cross-references. For him, as well as for the Epicureans, in contrast to the Aristotelians, what properly distinguishes man from animals is above all the act of stipulating a contract, not “the sense of just and unjust” as in Politics. “Just and unjust” are not basic human features, but rather the consequences of the contract. Thus, Hobbes does not consider the content of the contract to be a mere cluster of interests,18 as the Epicureans do. Gassendi believes that mutual consent is enough to establish a political community, whereas Hobbes thinks that real political union is above all an agreement about establishing the power of the sovereign—the sovereign being the only one able to restrain parties to the contract by means of fear.19 The parties to the contract according to Gassendi would be gregarious rather than political in the true meaning of this word. Returning to Hobbes’s five reasons why men, in contrast to animals, need artificial political union, we now realize that everything depends on a moral ambivalence that characterizes human nature. Being endowed with better faculties and abilities than animals does not necessarily mean

POLITICAL ANIMALS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY | 195 that men are morally better. In fact, human psychological superiority proves to entail a kind of moral inferiority, especially in the case of political behavior. This is the paradox that leads Hobbes to consider the third great tradition relating to the comparison of men and animals: the skeptical tradition.20 Montaigne, for example, had already stressed the moral ambivalence of the human condition: precisely because man is endowed with greater gifts, he risks becoming morally worse and politically more dangerous than animals. Unlike animals, men lack natural restraint. As a result their ferocity and aggressiveness, primarily in war, go far beyond the wise moderation characteristic of beasts. In regard to the many virtues listed in the Essays (faithfulness, gratitude, sociability, generosity, etc.), Montaigne often describes animals as far superior to man.21 In particular, Montaigne underlines the moral ambivalence intrinsic to some human talents, such as language and the ability to know and to judge. Humans pay the highest price of “infinite passions” for these gifts, which are nourished and increased by reason beyond all measure. The overall message of Montaigne’s Apologie is a warning against man’s claim to a privileged place in the scale of nature. In a comparative review that is much deeper and broader than anything in his classical sources, Montaigne discards anthropocentrism: for him, any notion of human superiority is a fantasy that has “ny corps ny goust.” And even if man were privileged, it would bring him little advantage. Montaigne calls this “un avantage qui luy est bien cher vendu et duquel il a bien peu à se glorifier,” because it is from this presumed superiority his real troubles begin: “peché, maladie, irresolution, trouble, desespoir.”22 Hobbes shares a great deal of psychological realism with Montaigne. His perspective, however, is different, even if his starting point is nearly the same. Hobbes’s aim is not to praise humility, as in the Essays; it is rather to find a remedy against the imperfections that sometimes make men even worse than animals. From this point of view, Hobbes’s most significant work is Leviathan, which was written during the 1640s in Paris, in close contact with the French heirs of Montaigne’s skepticism, the so-called libertins érudits. In Leviathan, Hobbes takes it for granted that the foundations of human psychology (sensation, memory, imagination . . . ) are largely common to animals. Along the same lines, he would have easily subscribed to one of Montaigne’s boldest claims, that there exists great “equalité et correspondence de nous aux bestes.”23 Particularly in Leviathan, human specificity

196 | GIANNI PAGANINI does not depend on being endowed with different faculties, but rather on language and the search for causes. The latter are all factors that—as we have shown elsewhere—do not spring from any metaphysical or intellectual superiority, but rather from the impulse of a peculiar passion: curiosity.24 It is this unique passion that compels man to develop and refine all his faculties in order to attain great achievements in science and politics. A proper definition of man, according to Hobbes, would not entail that he is a rational or political animal, but rather that he is a curious animal.25 Language, reason, and knowledge are only consequences of this original drive, curiosity. Artificial politics, as expressed in the contract, is merely one such result, though potentially the most important one, whereas simple gregariousness is merely a product of nature. It is well known that Hobbes praises the value of artificial politics to the utmost: it is by means of the contract, that is, by convention, that man becomes a kind of God to man; and even though this artificial man (the Commonwealth) remains only a mortal god, this claim to human divinity substantially departs from the humility preached by Montaigne. Yet a degree of skepticism still remains at the heart of this praise. We find evidence of this skepticism even at the end of Hobbes’s philosophical career: in De homine, the English philosopher once again lists the main points of a close comparison of men and animals, this time focusing primarily on the advantages and disadvantages of language. He argues that, without this faculty, it would have been impossible to establish any kind of society or peace. It is true that animals, without speaking—he now says—may still have a “political organization.” Yet speaking also means cheating, lying, inventing false rules, doing wrong, provoking hostility—all behaviors that one does not find in animals. Man, Hobbes explains, “by means of language does not become better, but more powerful.”26 Politics reflects the profound ambivalence of the human condition; politics is the only technique by which man can simultaneously become better toward his fellows and stronger against his enemies. Being limited to natural gatherings, animals are confined in a happy but peaceful balance; they know neither progress nor regress, as men do. One could therefore say that Hobbes lies in between different early modern streams of thought pushing toward a naturalization of the soul and of the very concept of “man.” On the one hand, Hobbes brings naturalization to its extreme consequences, insofar as the mind itself comes to be naturalized. In this connection one can speak of a radical reductionism that includes psychology, life, and ontology. Hobbes thinks that human

POLITICAL ANIMALS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY | 197 faculties are not, essentially speaking, different from those of animals: if human cognitive faculties appear to be higher or to reach higher results, this is due to a “passion” (curiosity), industry, and the use of language rather than to a different cognitive or essential endowment. The soul is neither spiritual nor immortal, but coincides with life and in particular with vital movement. From an ontological point of view, both cognitive faculties and life can be reduced to “effects of movement” in the internal parts of the human body and more specifically in the movement of “spirits”; it is notable that in this connection Hobbes does not confine himself to general claims, but, along with Gassendi, aims to provide a detailed, although not exhaustive, description of the functioning of the organs that play a role in human, and animal, cognition: brain, heart, blood, nerves, and animal spirits.27 On the other hand, even in its most radical aspects, Hobbes’s philosophy never fails to acknowledge the uniqueness of man in comparison with all the other animals:28 the categorical distinction between “Man” and “Animal” proves to be clear also from his conception of politics, which he looks at as an artificial production that is based on entirely natural passions and faculties. Therefore, his conception of “mankind” cannot be reduced to the contraposition “humanism/antihumanism” that still dominates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Hobbes’s philosophy is not an anthropocentric one and even aims at demolishing the premises for any kind of anthropocentrism, in that it rejects the traditional thesis of the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. Nevertheless, Hobbes admits that no animal but man is able to create, apart from science, also some sort of “mortal god,” namely the state. The only kind of “divine” to which man can have access materializes in a dimension of artificiality, although by means of natural endowments (curiosity, industry, language). Yet men have to struggle to reach such achievements, which are always reversible. The same means through which men achieve better results than all other animals are, however, intrinsically ambivalent: they can make him better, but if they are not used properly, they can also make him worse than the other animals. All these considerations contribute to outline a sort of “genetic perspective” within anthropology. Although Hobbes does not use this expression, his works do contain in brief a natural history of man, which seems to prelude to a number of eighteenth-century accounts of human nature. His particularity consists in his attempt to connect naturalization and anthropologization and to extend this approach to politics. Therefore, he outlines a representation of social life in which the natural

198 | GIANNI PAGANINI (faculties and passions) and the artificial are interdependent. Another distinctive feature of Hobbes’s philosophy is found in a conception of human history that is not yet affected by an optimistic notion of progress. In other terms, Hobbes thinks that progress is possible and that sciences, arts, politics, even his own philosophy may (and should) contribute to enhance humankind. However, he does not think that this enhancement is unavoidable and irreversible and remarks that progress in the various fields of knowledge does not necessarily engender progress in the moral, social, and political sphere. For these latter can be constantly perturbed by human errors, abuses, uncontrolled passions, whereas animals, which do live, so to say, in a stationary condition, are sheltered by their own nature against the typically human degenerations.

PART III Eighteenth-Century Inquiries into the Nature of Sensibility

Chapter 12 Degrees & Forms of Sensibility in Haller’s Physiology François Duchesneau

No scientific discov ery in the second half of the eighteenth century had greater influence on the conception of animals and man as living beings than Albrecht von Haller’s identification of irritability and sensibility as distinct physiological properties. Various authors in the past, in particular Francis Glisson and Giorgio Baglivi, had anticipated the concept of irritability—or at least conceived of something like it.1 Several of Hermann Boerhaave’s and Bernard Albinus’s former students in Leiden had also hinted at the concept of irritability. Some indications of the notion and related interpretive patterns also appeared in Haller’s previous works, such as the Prælectiones academicæ in proprias institutiones rei medicæ (1739–1744) and the first edition of the Primæ lineæ physiologiæ (1747), but it was the experiments Haller conducted with his students in Göttingen in 1750–1752 that provided him with sufficient arguments to establish and defend his views on that crucial distinction. He subsequently delivered two lectures to the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen on 22 April and 6 May 1752, which were published in the Commentarii of the Society the following year.2 In 1755, Pierre-Simon Tissot translated these lectures into French and published them under the title Dissertation sur les parties irritables et sensibles des animaux. The Dissertation was then included in the Mémoires sur la nature sensible et irritable des parties du corps animal published in Lausanne in 1756–1760, together with essays by several authors 201

202 | François Duchesneau (Zinn, Œder, Castell, Tosetti, Housset, Caldani, Fontana, Cigna, among others) on the phenomena in question, as well as Haller’s replies to objections, in particular those of Robert Whytt.3 Since Haller’s findings were disseminated very widely, the new physiological properties he discovered became a general object of scrutiny and discussion across Europe. Until the end of his life, Haller attempted to respond to criticism and especially to clarify the controversial methodological and epistemological issues raised by his analyses. One important challenge he had to overcome was the need to develop a consistent theory of living beings endowed with irritability and sensibility considered as distinct physiological properties. The problem of the organic and functional unity of such natural entities as objects of experimental analysis was inescapable. The issue was twofold: on the one hand, what was the nature of the so-called physiological properties that functioned as specific vital forces in the inner economy of animals and men? On the other hand, what empirical and/or theoretical criteria could be used to identify these properties as distinct and heterogeneous, while the various vital and animal functions they implemented combined in integrative fashion? Several analyses in Haller’s magnum opus, the Elementa physiologiæ corporis humani (1757–1766),4 and in later scholarly works, such as his articles for the Suppléments à l’Encyclopédie (1776–1777), directly or indirectly were intended to resolve or, more modestly, clarify these complicated issues. The difficulties arising from Haller’s inquiries deserve our attention, because they cast into relief both the theoretical ambiguities at the heart of his model of physiology and the potential for adjustment, variation, and even evolution that his doctrine of physiological properties entailed. Indeed, Haller’s theory of irritability and sensibility, as it was revised, reinterpreted, and criticized, caused significant controversy over conceptions of man and animate living beings, controversy that one might be tempted to describe as an antinomy of two types of physiology, respectively following mechanist and vitalist models. Organic Composition and Vital Motions In the Elementa, Haller argues that physiology should analyze and explain vital motions. This implies that the physiologist should inquire into the effects of these motions on organic processes and into their causes identified to specific forces at the phenomenal level.5 He declares: He who writes physiology undertakes to explain the internal motions of the animal body, the functions of viscera, the changes of humors

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 203 and the forces (vires) by which life is preserved; the forces by which the images of things, received through the senses, are represented to the soul; the forces by which the muscles subject to the commands of the mind respond in turn; the forces by which ingested food is converted into so many different nutriments (succos) for us; and finally the forces by which both our bodies are restored from those nutriments and the losses affecting the human race are compensated by new births.6

We should focus our attention on the analytical sequence of this description of the physiologist’s task: Haller proceeds from internal motions of the organs to specific processes that entail changes in the organs and the fluids therein, and from these to the forces inherent in the parts of the body and responsible for all its functions, whether or not they are dependent on the mind through sensation and will. Haller construes these relationships essentially so as to determine the connection between the internal motions of the organs and the forces that drive the functional processes that make up animal life. As a scientific discipline, physiology relies on anatomy, because vital motions are presumed to result from the structure and composition of organic parts. These structures and their composition would be appropriate objects for observation and description, carried out according to the methodological standards of experimental philosophy. On this point, Haller’s undertaking adheres to the methodology advocated by his teacher Herman Boerhaave, who combined observation and mechanistic models, understood in an extended sense, in order to generate hypotheses to explain vital functions. But this empirical-analytical and mechanistic approach immediately presents serious shortcomings. Although, in principle, a physiologist should be able to deduce vital processes from the structure and composition of parts of the body, the process is jeopardized for two reasons: (1) we can never arrive at the ultimate underlying organic elements; at any stage, what we take to be the units of an organic structure may possess a highly complex internal organization that can never be explicated analytically. (2) The observed effects produced by such complex structural units appear to defy all attempts to reconcile them with the mechanistic models to which vital phenomena should presumably conform. Evidence for the latter argument entails the rejection of mechanistic models that would artificially represent the dynamic processes involved. “There are many machines in animals that are absolutely foreign to the common laws of mechanics: small causes stimulate great motions; the

204 | François Duchesneau speed of humors is scarcely decreased by the causes that should have broken them down according to received laws; sluggish motions are triggered by perfectly unknown causes; violent motions are produced by weak fibers; contractions of fibers exceed all calculation, etc.”7 Faced with that apparent impossibility of identifying the microstructures that underlie vital processes and the micromechanistic patterns that would account for integrative functions, Haller might have been tempted to appeal to hypotheses that relied on properly vitalistic or psychological entities, such as “archei,” “plastic natures,” or Stahlian physiological souls. He adopts a different strategy, and instead strives to remain within the inferential confines of his empirical and experimental methodology. His objective is to break down organic structures into the smallest constituent elements that can still be observed by a microscope, while presuming that it is impossible to arrive at the ultimate units of these organic microcompounds. Beyond microscopic anatomy proper, the physiologist therefore has no choice but to rely on pathological and comparative anatomy for analogies that might explain the phenomena under examination. One principle of Haller’s methodology is to make multiple observations so as to compensate for the inherent variability of organic processes and establish what we might describe as the formal structure of a sequence of changes. But an even more essential methodological principle is that the processes or sequences of changes taking place in and arising from microorganic components be assessed by means of in vivo experiments. Experiments on living animals, in this sense, would afford the best empirical, analytical means of revealing the inherent dynamics of organic functions by empirical analysis and observation of the ensuing effects. Although variable processes seem to be a natural feature of living beings, selective and repetitive analyses would enable us to identify constant sequences of phenomena, which in turn would provide a basis for the empirical laws that govern the vital properties of the elements of organic structures. Thus the inherent variation of vital phenomena would be neutralized to the greatest possible extent: No experiment, no intervention should ever be carried out only once; the truth does not make itself known but by the constant outcome of repeated experiments. There are many extrinsic factors that mingle with our experiments: they are eliminated by repetition, precisely because they are extrinsic, and the pure features are left, which occur constantly in the same manner precisely because they flow from the nature of the thing itself. But nature is also variable, and it is only

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 205 through repetition that its meaning and intention become apparent, so to speak. This law, not sufficiently perceived in prior times, was first applied to anatomy by Morgagni.8

In this empiricist methodology, hypotheses are not excluded. Rather, they usefully link specific empirical truths, that is to say, propositions about general phenomena that sufficiently account for observed facts. Thus framed, hypotheses can play a heuristic and theoretical role insofar as they connect partial inferences, provided they are corroborated by strong empirical evidence and properly correspond to the phenomena that have been or, in principle, could be analyzed. It is by determining functional motions in the diverse parts or microparts of an organism that physiological analysis operates. According to an aphorism in the Primæ lineæ physiologiæ, physiology is “animated anatomy” (anatome animata). But this phrase should be interpreted against the background of the classical iatromechanistic approach that had been dominant from Giovanni Alfonso Borelli to Boerhaave: it consisted in describing the fine structure of organs as microanatomical objects (anatomia subtilis) and translating their properties into conceptual equivalents by means of various mechanical or physical-chemical models. In Haller’s view, the system governing physiological phenomena cannot be geometrical, since the elements analyzed do not exhibit the simple characteristics of mathematically intelligible objects.9 Obviously, one might interject here that the definition of fiber as the elementary organic compound is clearly based on a geometrical analogy: “fiber is to the physiologist what a line is to the geometrician, namely, that from which all figures arise.”10 With this comparison to lines and figures, Haller does not intend fiber as a simple indivisible element, a kind of atom, but rather as an elementary organic structure for a given system of processes that underpin vital functions. And we must not forget that the ultimate fiber is presumed to be beyond all possible observation; it serves rather to provide a satisfactory analytical reason for the type of organization encountered in the smallest microparts of a living organism. “From the union of these elements, earth, water, oil, iron, and air, fiber arises, an invisible element of the animal body; invisible insofar as it is simple, considerably smaller than what can be put before our eyes by applying the magnifying power of microscopes, for the smallest animals that can be rendered visible to our eyes by the maximum magnifying force of lens and convex glasses are themselves still constituted of fibers, which are certainly much smaller than the mass of the whole animal.”11

206 | François Duchesneau In the case of organisms, Haller wants to identify the vital motions that make up the various functional processes; and fibers represent precisely the type of elements that seem most likely to explain how the structures on which the observed functional processes depend are integrated. As Haller notes, “fiber” designates a multifaceted and diverse range of elements that may vary indefinitely, but it also indicates a material that possesses and conceals in itself the original properties from which one may derive the specific higher properties of organic wholes that constitute complex living beings.12 If we look back at earlier mechanistic physiology, especially Boerhaave’s, we see that Haller’s approach still adopts the model of organisms as natural machines composed of micromachines, but he modifies it considerably, making the properties of the element depend on determining the properties of the complex systems in question. Analysis must account for the properties of fibers as elementary submicroscopic structures, so that by combining them we may account for the emergent functional properties that characterize tissues, organs and systems. Microscopic observation shows fiber structures nested inside one another down to an infinitely small size compared to organic structures at the macroscopic level. Hence Haller draws the corresponding inference that elementary physiological properties might combine through successive integrations and thus generate functional processes that arise from such integrated fiber structures in complex living beings. According to this analytic view of organic processes, Haller conceives physiology as a science of vital motions. The relationship between integrated organic structures and the functions they produce seems to Haller so complex that he sets himself the task of relying strictly on observation and experiment to identify the dynamic properties (forces) and the functional constants (processes) specific to the various structural elements that combine to form organs and systems. His method of observation and experimentation, however, permits him to infer and control hypotheses with empirical data, and he develops these hypotheses by analogies from one field of experience to another. He thus lays the groundwork to progressively develop theories that might legitimately be accepted. As an element of vital organization, fiber is part of the composition of various organic structures. It is diversely endowed with dynamic properties that express vitality and determine higher functional processes. Haller refuses to reduce the functional properties of elementary fiber to the physical and chemical properties of the materials it consists of.

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 207 Starting from the data provided by his analysis of organic structures and their emergent processes, Haller supposes that these organic units possess specific properties that may account for global vital operations, in that same way that the properties of elementary geometric figures, combined with those of other elementary figures, may account for the function of the complex structures they comprise. In an organism, our understanding of the relationship between emergent organic functions and the tiniest internal structures depends on these elements or units. For Haller, the level of integration in an organism no longer strictly corresponds to the mechanical system of minuscule organic machines, side by side or nested in one another. But with respect to fiberlike microdevices and their specific functional properties, Haller attempts to show how the membranes that integrate such devices are composed and combine so as to yield the organization and motions of organs and systems. Sensibility Among Physiological Properties As properties of organs composed of fibers, irritability and sensibility are defined by Haller according to the empirical and experimental criteria that make it possible to identify and distinguish them. He states at the beginning of the Dissertation in Tissot’s edition of the Mémoires: I call “irritable” the part of the human body that becomes shorter when some foreign body touches it a bit forcefully. Supposing the external touch to be even, the irritability of the fibre will be stronger the shorter it gets. A fibre that becomes much shorter by a slight touch is very irritable; a fibre in which violent contact produces slight change, is not very irritable. I call a “sensible fibre” in man that which when touched transmits the impression of this contact to the soul. In animals about whose souls we have no certainty, we shall call a “sensible fibre” one which when irritated causes obvious signs of pain and discomfort in them. On the contrary, I call an “insensible fibre” one which, when burned, cut, pricked and bruised to the point of complete destruction, causes no mark of pain and no change in the body’s condition. This definition is based on our knowledge that an animal in pain seeks to retract the injured part from the source of the pain; it retracts an injured leg, shakes its skin if pricked and exhibits other signs that prove it is in pain.13

208 | François Duchesneau The series of experiments that Haller conducted prior to formulating these definitions essentially served to establish a system of vital motions in relation to elementary organic structures and the types of dynamic dispositions inherent in the fibers that composed them. Irritable fiber is that which contracts in a spontaneous motion that cannot be attributed to elastic contractility, when it is stimulated physically or chemically. Sensible fiber is that which, when stimulated, transmits the impression of that stimulation to the central organs of sensibility and produces the physiological effects in them that in turn are translated into signs of pain or discomfort. Haller systematically devotes experiments to these functional properties of basic organic structures in order to establish a typology of the parts respectively endowed with these distinct dynamic dispositions, and intensity scales that go along with them. His objective is to find sufficient empirical evidence that organs endowed with irritability exhibit the effects of that property without any intervention from the nervous system. Indeed, some nerve endings may normally be found connected to muscle fibers, such as in the parenchyma of the heart. If these nerves are prevented, however, by excision or ligature from stimulating the organ’s tissues, then the live contraction that affects them when physical or chemical stimuli are directly applied cannot result from sensibility as a necessary condition. On the other hand, Haller appeals to experience to establish that nervous tissues by themselves exhibit no contractions when stimulated: their proper action must consist exclusively in transmitting impressions to the brain, which cause sensations or the signs of sensation. Conversely, motions originating in the nervous system from sensations may only cause alterations in various muscle tissues by intensifying the autonomous contractile action that normally results from inherent irritability. Haller completes the empirical typology of parts by identifying the organs or tissues that lack both irritability and sensibility, as, for instance, bones, tendons, membranes of the brain, such as the dura mater, and the so-called cellular tissue (tela cellulosa) that corresponds to an interstitial parenchyma. From a histological point of view, with these new distinctions between types of fibers and their associated properties, Haller is rejecting the unitary fiber theory of his teacher Boerhaave, who held that all fibers were composed of small vessels at the submicroscopic level, without significant differences between the elements of the nervous system and those of other systems, and without significant differences in the vital motions supposed to take place in the various organic structures. Before Haller, Baglivi had identified two separate systems for the

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 209 coordination of vital motions in the living body, one vascular and the other fibrous. This latter system was endowed with irritability in its various components with the brain membranes acting as prime movers, communicating their hypothetical pulsations to the individual parts via the nervous system. By identifying nonirritable nonsensitive parts, including the dura mater, and by reducing irritability to a specific property of individual muscle fibers, Haller would also upset this hypothetical unified anatomical framework. In spite of his professed empiricism, while gathering empirical data to distinguish between types of organic constitutions and functional processes they performed, Haller nonetheless attempted to assess the theoretical import of his analysis of irritability and sensibility as vital properties. The concept of fiber irritability is used to specify the distinct nature of the active structures of organic life, namely muscles, the cardiac muscle to start with, as compared to the organs of animal life, which essentially respond to stimuli transmitted by the network of nerve fibers. As a last resort, Haller defines a law of correlation between structures and functions: “Sensibility is proportional to the number of nerves and their nakedness, while irritability in general is proportional to the number of fibers exposed to the irritating cause.”14 However, this twofold law does not depend exclusively on the empirical data collected and their classification, but rather also on a functional distinction between the principle of sensibility, which is responsible for activating the nerve fibers that make up an integrative network, and the less centralized agents of the other vital motions, which individually affect fibers of the muscular type. As I was able to establish in my analysis of the controversy over sensibility between Haller and Robert Whytt, if irritability appears as a property of individual fibers, even of microfibers subject to live contractility, Haller regards sensibility as a property that depends on a network of nerve fibers connected to the cerebral organ. Sensibility relates to a conscious manifestation in man, that of a sense impression that is felt or perceived as a sensation. Though we have no access to the conscious awareness of sensation that takes place in animals in an experiment, Haller does not adopt a Cartesian beast-machine position that would exclude the existence of something like a sensitive soul in animals. If he did so, he would have undermined the analogy he draws from physical signs of pain and discomfort in animals to argue that sensibility is a specific property of the integrative components of a nervous system in man. I will not push this argument further here, but merely presume that Haller would have accepted

210 | François Duchesneau something like the Leibnizian notion of an animal soul whose operations are no different from our own as long as we limit ourselves to what may be termed empirical inferences. The analogy underpinning Haller’s conclusions might be thus legitimized from an ontological perspective, but Haller generally avoids metaphysical speculation: he is content to use this analogy as an acceptable hypothetical inference in view of similar physical reactions to nerve stimulation between men and animals. But the specific argument that guides his interpretation of the inherence of sensibility in the integrated network of nerve-brain fibers is that this property must be connected to a power of perceiving sensations that is normally correlated with brain operations. For Haller, an unconscious sensibility that operates independently in fibers peripheral to the network or, worse, in anatomical elements beyond nervous connections, as Whytt supposed in his Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals (1751), would amount to an appeal to occult qualities. The experience of sensibility as a physiological property could ultimately be explained with the metaphysical hypothesis that the soul is endowed with perception and acts as if it were at the center of the network of nerve fibers, but this experience absolutely could not justify the assumption that a Stahlian physiological soul might intervene in an unconscious, rational way in fiber elements detached from the network. What then would be the nature of nervous forces, considered as acting in the elementary components of the network or system? Haller himself could not completely dismiss the hypothesis that peripheral dynamic dispositions might intervene and condition the global activity of sensibility at the center of the nervebrain network. Haller opens the door to systematic identification of the various forces that cause vital motions in animal and human organisms. He explores how these forces relate to a typology of elementary structures that constitute various organic combinations. In his physiological representation of man, he breaks with the notion of the hegemony of a unitary structuralfunctional system, whether it relies on the uniformity of such processes as can be attributed to a vital mechanisms, as Boerhaave and Hoffmann argued, or on the complete control of the organic machine by a single soul, as Stahl held. If I may make a rough categorization, both mechanistic and animistic physiologies suppose a unitary ontology as a common basic principle for explaining vital processes. By contrast, the theoretical concepts underpinning Haller’s conception of animal or human life tend to illustrate a greater propensity to allow a plurality of agents or forces that are

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 211 responsible for producing functional processes. At least, this might be the thrust of the theory if it had been spelled out in greater detail. Hubert Steinke has proposed a relevant analysis that would account for Haller’s shifting views on the distinction between physiological properties after the initial experimental demonstrations publicized in his 1752 lectures and ensuing publications.15 Steinke notes that, in the Elementa, Haller intended to integrate his ideas on irritability and sensibility into a more complete theory of sensation and animal motion.16 But the discrete analytical treatment of the subjects of that treatise was certainly not favorable to unifying these concepts in a systematic appraisal of corporal powers and functions. Obviously, Haller draws sharp distinctions between elasticity, a property of all fibers in the body; irritability, which is a trait of muscular fibers and can contract such fibers even when detached from the body; and vis nervosa, which is activated by stimulation of the nerves or triggered by the will, but intensifies and regulates muscular contractions. But in his late works, Haller lays greater emphasis on the correlation of forces. As Steinke observed, in the 1765 edition of the Primæ lineæ Haller describes a “triple force” (triplex vis) operating in the muscles, and in the seventh volume of the Elementa, published in the same year, he introduces the notion a scala motus animalis that extends hierarchically through the levels of organic structure. Whytt had accused Haller of equating irritability with the mere physical property of elasticity instead of viewing the phenomenon involved as the extension of sensibility to all organic systems that are governed by a soul-like agent. In his reply, Haller makes each lower force a precondition for the next one up, and essentially defines all the forces as inherent powers that arise in successively more complex organizations. “The basic conditions (rudimenta) of contractile nature are in gluten: from contractile nature, the scale of animal motion ascends to inherent force (ad vim insitam) and from inherent to nervous force (ad nerveam). I have defined the respective limits of these moving forces extremely carefully. My opponent [Whytt] has confused them as much as possible, when he elevates irritable force to nervous force and breaks the chain that connects animal to vegetable force, and surely this force acts independently of the soul’s command.”17 Steinke supplements this passage with a later quotation that makes the same type of argument: “There are three contractile forces in animal fibers, or, if you prefer, three degrees—but very distinct—of the same force: dead force, irritability, and nervous motion.”18 A significant explanation of this nervous motion follows: nervous fiber may be presumed to contain stimulating fluid that causes muscular fiber to contract.

212 | François Duchesneau In voluntary muscles, this stimulation by sensibility-triggered nervous force is required for the functional economy of motions to be preserved. This is not the case for the vital muscles, which may function without this extra stimulation. Haller adopts a decentralized view of organic activity that is based on the functional properties of the different elementary structures that are variously integrated into more complex organic structures. He nevertheless feels embarrassed when he has to determine the theoretical significance of these functional properties and the extent of correspondence between them. He identifies them by analogy with particular Newtonian forces of attraction according to the observable effects that indicate their presence and particular nature, but, when he presents them as forces inherent (vires insitæ) in fibers as the elementary vital units, he leaves the question of their nature as vital forces open, suggesting the unverifiable supposition that they might ultimately be reduced to inner dispositions that fit the pattern of organic mechanics: “A motion cannot occur in the human body, unless there is sufficient cause for it in the structure of the part, and the effect could not occur unless there is such a cause.”19 Could the phenomena indicated by the distinct notions of irritability and sensibility be merely the product of special mechanical dispositions that lie within the units in organic combination, but are out of reach for our limited means of investigation? On the one hand, Haller holds that the functional properties of living beings, like so many vital powers inherent in the elementary structures of organisms, cannot be reduced to inorganic phenomena. But he also supposes that the potential derivation of these properties from organic causes might permit a type of mechanical explanation that I have termed a “special mechanistic hypothesis.”20 Faced with this theoretical dilemma, Haller feels unable to solve it by simply appealing to experience and remains ambivalent toward options that we could retrospectively connect to what later emerges as a kind of antinomy between mechanism and vitalism in the explanation of biological phenomena. Haller’s explanation of functions on the basis of specific physiological properties is ridden with ambiguity. Explaining the functions of organs and of systems of organs that act jointly amounts to breaking down their structures into morphological components, defining the actions and specific powers of hypothetical elementary structural dispositions, and then inferring that the combination of elementary processes and implied microstructures be equivalent to the global processes of functions proper.

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 213 This conjectural part of the explanation entices the physiologist to project on morphological elements and organic properties the power to make more complex combinations of organic parts emerge. Correlatively, the functions performed by this machine of nature on account of its organic composition are invoked to explain the causal role of elementary physiological properties within integrated organisms. This time, the explanation of functions takes the form of an appeal to vital forces or principles expressed by physiological properties that include something that goes beyond the definition of these properties, determining the features of the functions that arise from them. On sensibility itself, apart from his direct clash with Robert Whytt, who had reasserted the hegemony of a soul-like principle ruling over a decentralized network of sensible parts,21 Haller had to deal with several analytical problems. Georges Canguilhem underlined that Haller was unable to develop a notion of nervous reflex because he believed in a radical difference between “automatic motion, which no sensibility conveys to the soul and no voluntary determination rules over,” 22 and motion truly excited and caused by the encephalic structure that serves as the “central anatomical seat of the soul.”23 And it is true that Haller’s position derives from such a general principle: “Nerves are extensions of the brain and spine, and they are totally sensitive (sensiles); sensations (sensus) pass from limb to head and brain; the fact remains that even the brain medulla is sentient, and in it impressions are represented to the soul, impressions that the nerves, moved at their extremities, transmit to the brain.”24 But in reality the distinction is not so clear-cut. Haller collects observations on affections of the brain that result into reduced sensibility in lesser parts of the nervous system without an obvious central encephalic cause. And he addresses some of the objections raised against his principle. First, he must take into account the point that nerves perform a function not only of sensibility, but also of motility. Motions of stimulation in the nervous fiber trigger motions in the muscles where nerve ramifications end. Sectioning or ligaturing nerves can cause localized paralysis. Haller does not draw a real distinction between sensitive and motile nerves: sensibility and motile power can therefore be linked to the same structure. He models his explanation accordingly: “All the facts collected prove that a rather serious irritation in the nerves first causes the brain to move into consensus and then excites a convulsion in all the muscles.”25 But excited nerves may produce convulsion in muscles even if they have been severed from all communication with the brain. The widely held hypothesis of

214 | François Duchesneau the nervous origin of animal motion, according to which animal motion depends exclusively on an internal fluid receiving an impulse from the brain, is in need of revision. Otherwise, how could one explain that, below the ligature, the excited nerve can cause the muscle to convulse? Of course, in analogy to electric current, one could imagine that the nervous impulse is not stopped by the ligature and completes its journey from brain to muscle without interruption. But, in that case, one must explain how the phenomenon occurs when the nerve has been cut, or the brain and spinal medulla have been destroyed. It cannot depend strictly on irritability, since it passes through parts of the nervous system that are not irritable. Haller’s position concerning the elementary nervous structure and its vis motrix ultimately concludes with a rather ambiguous statement. After distinguishing this sensitive triggering of convulsive motion from a mere effect of irritability, he declares: “It appears that the cause of motion is transmitted through the nerves: however, whatever that cause may be, it nevertheless subsists for some time intact and efficient in the nerve, even if the nerve, having been separated from the brain, has not received it recently.”26 That is to say, the nerve can exert a substitute or remnant of cerebral function for a while, but its exact nature eludes attempts to analyze it precisely. Here we may refer to what Haller says of the monstrous cases of functional anencephaly. He starts by stating the principle that the central nervous system can potentially replace parts by means of network effects: “When the spinal medulla perishes, something can be hoped for from the cerebral roots of the major sympathetic nerve; and when the cerebellum is damaged, vital force (vis vitalis) can be supplied by the intact part of the rest of the brain; or vice versa, when the cerebrum is destroyed, by the surviving cerebellum.”27 In this framework, Haller approaches cases of the relative survival of cold-blooded animals and anencephalic fetuses despite pathological or experimental destruction of the brain. He interprets observations that insects may survive decapitation and display sensibility as indicating that the seat of sensibility and the origin of nervous motion can extend beyond the brain itself. He understands the sensitive-motile center as a kind a composite entity in which the proportions of its several parts and their respective roles may vary. Relative autonomy of the spinal system may result from the distribution of structures and functions throughout the global nervous system. Of course, the ratio between brain and peripheral structures in man is the inverse of that in invertebrates, for instance. But, since cases in which sensibility and motility are reduced

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 215 to the spinal system may also occur in man, one must allow the possibility of an indefinite gradation of structural-functional degeneration. There would be a gradation of processes, since they may degenerate to a minimal level of integration, as represented by the frog whose brain has been destroyed as in Whytt’s experiments. In the case of temporarily surviving anencephalic fetuses, one must acknowledge that a rudimentary spinal or cerebral-spinal structure suffices to support life on a low level. In sum, Haller hypothesizes the operational self-sufficiency of a centrally coordinated sensitive-motile network, which in its highest form is presumed to be systematically correlated with the consciousness of sensations in men or equivalent physiological effects in animals. But this theoretical conception may imply a series of derivative, degraded forms of integration leading to cases of minimal animal sensibility, which would be virtually indistinguishable from mere irritability. We can seek confirmation of this analogical scheme in passages concerning nervous “sympathies,” that is, identical motile effects across adjacent nerves that are produced without central connective action and concomitant sensation. For Haller, it would be impossible to admit Whytt’s supposition that the specific sensibility of peripheral nervous networks is underpinned by the activity of the soul. Instead, one should always suppose that sensation occurs as conscious awareness of an impression conveyed by the nervous force (vis motrix nervea) to the brain. Only specific disturbing circumstances may cause the regular mechanism of nervous communication to deteriorate into a form of direct sensitive consensus between nerves that are functionally severed from cerebral regulation. Thus, the lachrymal glands secrete tears when the conjunctive membrane is irritated. In the same manner, pain and inflammation can be transmitted from one eye to the other by an accidental junction of their respective nerves. To this we should add all cases of pain radiating through some cohesion between nerves in inflamed parts. With respect to sneezing and other presumed effects of local nerve interactions, Haller declares: “Physicians customarily explain such symptoms by communication between nerves.”28 But he expresses reservations that this would occur by direct interfiber stimulation. He generally argues that coordination with a center akin to the brain is necessary to produce such effects. This is especially the case when a sensation arises from a sympathetic event. Even in degraded forms of nervous activity, sensibility must be conceived as operating in conjunction with processes that would normally entail sensations that arise centrally. Hence Haller concludes:

216 | François Duchesneau The experiments we have reviewed demonstrate that there is a certain consensus (consensus) between adjoining nerves and that pain may spread from an injured nerve to another particular definite nerve, whatever mechanism is responsible for these phenomena. In all cases in which we have observed such consensus it is from one nerve to another definite nerve, and not to others, that both the sensation and the cause of convulsion pass. But that this conjunction would rather take place in the brain than in the nerves, one may conjecture from the sensation itself (ex ipso sensu) that the soul perceives, and which would not exist, unless some pain-producing impression reached the brain.29

We should add here that, in Haller’s late views, the brain as a concept tends to indicate a centrally controlled nervous network more generally, in which and through which sensibility might coordinate and regulate most vital operations. If we follow Steinke’s reading of Haller’s contributions to the Suppléments à l’Encyclopédie published in the 1770s: “the nerves assumed a third function which was neither conscious perception (sensibility) nor the voluntary contraction of the muscles (vis nervosa), but a kind of unconscious, involuntary, modulatory role.”30 This indeed seems to be the case, especially if we note that Haller ultimately adopted Johann August Unzer’s notion of a stimulating-reactive nervous (reflex) action controlled by the ganglia, as if these constituted lower-level centralized networks.31 I would note, however, that, already in the Elementa, the action of Haller’s nervous force is not limited to voluntary muscles, but rather also intensifies and regulates vital motions in involuntary muscles and by extension in all tissues in which irritability carries out the processes of organic life. But where can we find the key to the ontological tenet that underlies this integrative theory of physiological properties? For this type of question, Haller generally offers very little help on account of his methodological skepticism of metaphysical issues. There are, however, a few remarks in the Elementa that might put us on the right track toward some of his significant presuppositions. At one point, for instance, Haller has occasion to inquire about the nervous force that stimulates muscular contractions. He asks what the source of this power is. What “entelechy” (entelechia) could be responsible for it?32 After dismissing both Stahl’s notion of a physiological soul exerting a direct physical control over the body’s parts and a pure Cartesian occasionalistic position making God into the sole cause of sequences of thought and corporeal motion, Haller recalls that his

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 217 teacher Boerhaave was partial to Leibniz’s theory of preestablished harmony, a doctrine that presumed regular correspondence between perceptionsappetitions in the soul and functional motions in the organic machine. If I wish to raise my arm, the motions needed for the deltoid muscle to contract and for the arm to move accordingly do not arise in the soul, but rather are generated by inner dispositions of the body that establish the regular sequences of corporeal processes. For Haller, the soul is capable of distinct representations and as such can achieve only limited cognition: by no means, as the Stahlians believed, could it exert intuitive, active, and regulative power over the complex structures and processes of the living mechanism. It can represent to itself and conceive a single object at once, as if it would spell a word by reading each letter individually. “It moreover can obscurely perceive something, be affected by pain or pleasure, but it cannot represent to itself anything distinctly. When it sees, it sees only one point distinctly at a time; manifestly, because when it reads, it pronounces and sees a single letter distinctly, but it follows all the others in order with the eye and head.”33 In the case of leaping, for instance, the soul has absolutely no awareness of the appropriate corporeal means of accomplishing what will has resolved to do: “[The soul] has no idea of the extremely complex ‘equation’ that governs the coordination of the muscles of the entire body and the flexion or extension of so many joints for the intended purpose.”34 Haller adds that, like Boerhaave, he adheres to this Leibnizian position which implies, besides preestablished harmony and the strict correspondence of processes between body and soul, the concept of minute perceptions-appetitions that underpin conscious representations and the notion that the organic body is endowed with self-sufficient powers of motion. Further proof that this doctrine is well founded can be adduced from observation of the complex mechanisms involved in involuntary organic motions, for which there is insufficient justification for appealing to direct regulation by mental representations, as the Stahlians claim. Interestingly enough, here Haller develops at some length his views about the autonomous systems that function in animals and plants without any properly reflective cognition. Stephanie Eichberg has recently questioned Haller’s justification for interpreting his experiments on animals as evidence that sensibility is the most fundamental property of living beings. Her final question reads: “how did Haller address the differences between humans and animals in the context of his investigations?” Formulating the problem from a presumably dominant Cartesian perspective, she finds Haller confronted

218 | François Duchesneau with an unresolved methodological issue: “Although Haller never openly affirmed an analogy of human and animal minds, his insistence on the conscious perception of sensation left no other conjecture. . . . Yet the crux of using animal models was precisely that doubts would always remain regarding a positive knowledge of the existence or non-existence of a soul (i.e., psychic functions) in animals.”35 But the real case with Haller appears to be slightly different and somewhat less problematic once we presume the methodological principle that a systematic analogy may be drawn between animals and humans as living beings. Both exhibit the same type of “organism,” with gradations in perceptual capacity as well as corporeal powers, that is, in terms of structure and physiological properties. This neo-Leibnizian presupposition may in fact lay the basis for two significant statements: (1) according to Haller, irritability and sensibility should be viewed as forces deriving from elementary, but highly complex, organic structures that are constituted by various types of fibers: as derivative properties of living mechanisms they should be treated as objects of enquiry for a special (mechanistic) branch of physics; (2) although they are defined as structurally and functionally distinct, both these properties should be conceived in a theoretical setting centered on the notion of an integrative machine of nature or, alternatively, on the more or less decentralized systems such a machine comprises: and this proposition may persuade us to admit various levels of sensibility, more or less connected to sensations. Concluding Remarks Whatever the specifics of this theoretical framework, after Haller, his physiological explanations would transform into or inspire vitalist theories that substantialized, so to speak, the inherent forces of organized living bodies and transformed them into autonomous principles ruling over the functions of animal and human bodies. These forces would then be viewed both as transcending the physical and mental orders and simultaneously responsible for the morphological development and the actual functions of the developed organism. Thus, physiological properties would be endowed with teleological powers to bring about the higher-level operations that maintain the generation, development, and functions of animals and of humans as animals. Tissot, the editor of the Mémoires sur la nature sensible et irritable des parties du corps animal, in a way anticipated this metamorphosis of Haller’s approach when he declared as the foundation for explaining vital

DEGREES & FORMS OF SENSIBILITY IN HALLER’S PHYSIOLOGY | 219 processes a new conception of nature defined as “the sum of the forces of the vital principle.”36 He could have added that the Hallerian analysis of irritability and sensibility was paving the way for a theory of animal life that would imply grafting it onto organic life by integrating the diverse vital forces and their distinct structural bases into a hierarchical system: in this system, sensibility is called upon to regulate, via the nerve-brain network, the vital dynamics inherent in organic parts down to the most elementary. Akin to this view, an analogous conception of the constitutive forces of the two life forms would stand, for example, at the center of Bichat’s physiological theory half a century later.37 The transformations that Haller’s theory underwent and that hastened the advent of so-called vitalist systems took place in two distinct ways that I will only sketch here. On the one hand, as Tissot had suggested, it became possible to conceive Hallerian irritability as the basis for all phenomena that characterize the economy of animal and human living beings, a basis to which one could graft a neural-cerebral system in which sensibility plays the role of an enhanced regulative irritability, to some degree correlated with awareness of sensations. In my view, this corresponds to the position of Bonnet, Spallanzani and most of Haller’s immediate followers. Conversely, it became possible to break down sensibility into the basic physiological property by linking it to the tiniest parts of the nervous system and analogously, to the tiniest fibers and organic molecules, absorbing irritability itself into a unified, even unilateral system of vital forces. This seems to me to be the case for the essential positions held, for instance, by Whytt, Diderot, and Unzer in extremely diverse theoretical contexts. But two other positions can also be conceived as theoretical variants. One synthesizes both properties into the activities of an integrated vital principle: this position was set forth by Barthez, among others, and came to be further illustrated by Cabanis in his Rapports du physique et du morale de l’homme, whose conception of sensibility-governed organic reaction centers is analyzed in Tobias Cheung’s contribution to this volume. The other integrates vital forces, including irritability and sensibility, under the aegis of a sui generis principle of vital organization and epigenesis: this option was advocated distinctly, if very differently, by Blumenbach and Bichat. Nor may we neglect to consider various compromises between these diverse options, not to mention the genealogies and phylogenies that were devised a posteriori to establish a relationship between these conjectures and theories. In any event, they might be cited as forerunners of a physiology that aimed to serve as the true foundation of a science of man. From the start, this new

220 | François Duchesneau physiology attributed an essential theoretical role to vital properties and tried to formulate scientific hypotheses about sensibility. Short of fully succeeding in this attempt, it led to significant interpretations of the causal nature and ontological basis of these properties. These diverse hypotheses may retrospectively be viewed as worthy options in the multifaceted quest for an anthropology that would conform to the norms of the leading methodological approach of Enlightenment science, that of experimental philosophy.

Chapter 13 Anthropological Medicine & the Naturalization of Sensibility Stephen Gaukroger

For m an y thinkers in Fr a nce from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, sensibility was the route to the naturalization of the human condition. This is nowhere more true than in the work of the médecins philosophes, those physicians who explored the physiological basis of sensibility and used this to expand the remit of medicine into the social, political, and moral realms. This project, like much else in the eighteenth century, found its initial stimulus in Locke. Locke approached epistemology in the Essay not through the philosophical texts of his predecessors and contemporaries but through travel books, and he was acutely sensitive to both the historical and the regional variation in moral and other precepts. Moreover, the medical origins of his interest in questions of epistemology should not be forgotten, for among other things it motivates a rejection of the idea that a search for underlying causes is the only worthwhile form of explanatory strategy, because such a search would abstract from the empirical connections that Locke considers to be of interest in their own right.1 Intimately connected with this, and of even more importance in the present context, is Locke’s exploration of just what follows from making sensation into a primary source of knowledge. Once sensation takes over as the sole source of knowledge, in Condillac, this question becomes even more pressing, 221

222 | stephen gaukroger and the incorporation of sensation into the general notion of sensibility transforms the questions so that what, even in Locke, had an implicit moral and political dimension, now explicitly comes to the core of moral and political thinking.2 These developments are a form of naturalization, in that questions that would earlier have been dealt with in theological or metaphysical terms, now come to be thought through in ways that appeal to empirical evidence. In order to do this, they are removed from theology and metaphysics and anchored in another discipline, medicine, because this had by far the strongest claim as the most appropriate discipline to deal with sensibility in empirical terms. Before we consider the médecins philosophes something needs to be said about sensibility more generally: what it is, why it was important. Antoine Le Camus’s very popular La Médicine de l’esprit, first published in 1753, was followed by an expanded second edition in 1769. Whereas the term sensation appears regularly in the first edition, in the second edition the word has disappeared and the discussion now proceeds in terms of sensibilité, reflecting the rise to prominence of the notion in these decades. It is largely a question of substituting the one term for the other, although sensibility, while including sensation, has a wider remit, being responsible for all human activities from conception to cognition. From the entries on sensibilité in the Encyclopédie, we can distinguish four phenomena that fall under the term, as used at the time: aesthetic sensibility, a kind of awareness or appreciation that accompanies perceptual cognition in varying degrees; moral sensibility, an ability to exercise untutored moral discrimination; sensation, something that figures in our cognitive relation to the world; and sensitivity, something that accompanies certain kinds of physiological activity. These are not unconnected phenomena. As Anne Vila has pointed out, “sensibility was the essential link between the human body and the psychological, intellectual, and ethical faculties”: it helped unify the human faculties, as it was “seen as the root of all human perceptions and reflections, as the innate and active principle of sociability that gave rise to human society, as a kind of sixth sense whose special affective energy was essential to both virtue and to art, and finally, as the paradigmatic vital force whose actions could be detected in every bodily function, be it healthy or morbid.”3 In particular, the inclusion of sensitivity—a physiological phenomenon—in sensibility adds a distinctive layer of complexity to considerations of the relation between reason and sensibility, for it means that we are considering phenomena that, to a significant extent, mirror

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 223 the contrast between the spiritual and the material. In France, where the debates were particularly intense, there was a general acceptance that questions of sensibility fell under the purview of medicine, with the result that the physiological nature of sensibility was taken as given. Here, what had earlier been formulated in terms of the mind-body distinction now comes to be reformulated in terms of the relationship between reason and sensibility, with the decision that one came to on these questions playing a determining role in deciding what resource it was most appropriate to draw on in investigating questions of our relation to the natural realm. The contrast between sensibility and reason is important here, and it is remarkable how much sensibility has displaced reason in a variety of areas by the mid-eighteenth century. Adam Smith, for example, simply dismisses the view that reason might ground morality. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the “moral sentiments” to which the title refers are felt— as opposed to reasoned—judgements on the propriety of others’ actions. Morality is taken out of an abstract realm of intellectual reflection, and becomes a form of sensibility. Smith writes that “it is altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from reason”; rather, they must be traced to “sense and feeling.”4 Within the next fifteen years, the expectations of what an account of sensibility could do increased radically. In 1786, Condorcet was arguing that the logic of a sensationalist/sensibilist psychology yielded conceptions of universal right and justice. These are formed in all beings with sensibility, and are therefore universal and uniform. Moreover, he moves from these to “natural rights,” which comprise the rights of personal liberty and security, freedom to enjoy property and trade, equality before a properly codified law, and participatory politics.5 This is a huge leap, and should be seen in terms of Destutt de Tracy’s distinction set out in his “Mémoire sur la faculté de penser” (1796), between “physiological ideology” and “rational ideology.”6 The former, he writes, requires vast learning, and in its present state can do little more than help us identify a few truths, albeit scattered and uncoordinated, and isolate a few errors. Rational ideology, by contrast, is action-oriented and requires far less knowledge: it can get by with far fewer facts, which makes their connections easier to establish, and its chief advantage is that it is directly applicable and “forms a complete system” in its own right. Developments originating with the physicians of the medical university of Montpellier in the 1730s offered an integrated account of cognitive and affective states that was quite different from the physiological-cum-

224 | stephen gaukroger psychological theories of sixteenth-century Aristotelians and seventeenthcentury biomechanists. One can think of these earlier concerns in terms of a two-stage process, in which one first accounts for the natural realm, and then proceeds to explore our place in this realm. But the kind of anthropological medicine pursued by the Montpellier physicians does not follow this sequence: it takes the question of our relation to the natural realm as something on a par with our attempt to understand this realm. The two must be taken as part of a whole. Far from being autonomous forms of inquiry, they must form an integrated whole, deriving from the same basic principles. Because of the way in which it expanded the range and responsibilities of medicine, anthropological medicine postulated an intimate connection between maladies of the body and maladies of the soul. It sought a general account of the interconnections between the realms of the physical, the mental/intellectual, and the emotions. Anything external to the body that affected these three realms was included, for it had an effect on well-being. The idea that medicine might take over ambitions traditionally fostered in metaphysics and theology was novel and unprecedented. There were, however, two earlier developments that enabled it to rise to prominence in the late eighteenth century. The first was the widely perceived failure of mechanical conceptions of nature to account for the properties of matter, and the subsequent shift to the life sciences as an area in which investigation of matter might proceed more fruitfully. The second development was more specific to anthropological medicine—the increasing awareness of the place of sensibility in our emotional and cognitive lives, and the belief that medicine might be better placed than philosophy or more traditional forms of physiology (such as biomechanics) to deal with questions of sensibility. As the Montpellier vitalist Bordeu put it, sensibility “is most suitable as a basis on which to explain all the phenomena of life, whether in a state of health or of sickness.” As a result, “this is the way of considering the living body that has been adopted by those who, among modern thinkers, have pursued their speculations beyond practical medicine and the received systems of the schools at the beginning of the century. Such is the scope that philosophical medicine has assumed concerning the purely material functions of the body.”7 On the mechanist conception, such phenomena as nervous sensitivity had been reduced to biomechanics: basically, inert matter moving under pressure. This bore no relation to how physicians were coming to think of sensitivity and sensibility more generally. In particular, a number of

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 225 crucial developments had taken place in the wake of Haller’s pathbreaking work on irritability, developments that located sensitivity within matter itself. Haller was explicitly concerned to distinguish the living from the nonliving, and to subject the former to its own kind of empirical investigation: physiology. His initial interests were in involuntary and semivoluntary animal motions, such as the beating of the heart and circulation of the blood, and he established that the cerebellum was not, as had been thought, the primary regulatory mechanism for heart activity and respiration. Rather, regulatory mechanisms were decentralized, and he concerned himself specifically with local regulation, with specific functions of muscle and nerve fibers, correlating defined functions with particular structures. In seeking the cause of cardiac activity in the structure of the heart, he developed an account that located this cause in muscle irritability or contractibility. Every animal muscle fiber, he showed, contracts upon stimulation, and there is a scale of degrees of irritability, depending on how strong the stimulus has to be to provoke a response. Irritability is a completely different phenomenon from sensibility/sensitivity on Haller’s account.8 The latter is a property of tissues imbued with nerves, whereas the nerves play no role in irritability. Haller advocated a traditional view on the causes of irritability, namely the powers of organs that are manifested in irritability derive directly from God and require no intermediary soul. But his approach nevertheless has radical consequences. Organs manifest something that can be characterized as a life force in Haller’s view, by contrast both with a view of matter as inert, and that of being acted upon from outside. The local, intrinsic regulation of the operations of organs prompts a rethinking of the idea of an organism. Centralized, extrinsic regulation of organs, of the kind advocated by Whytt, provided a source of unification for the organism whose organs these are. Local, intrinsic regulation of the kind advocated by Haller, where the macroscopic hydraulic vessels of the iatromechanists are replaced by microscopic muscle fibers, provokes the question of what the unity of the organism consists in. If all there were to the organism were localized centers of irritability, there could be no unity. But it is not as if a centralized sensibility could simply be added to a localized irritability to provide a unifying principle for the organism, for Haller’s point was that organs exhibiting irritability do so independently of whether nerves are present, and if they are not present, then such organs can hardly be connected through sensibility, which requires nerves. In the light of this kind of difficulty, and the fact that he provides no

226 | stephen gaukroger details about the nature of sensibility, it is not surprising that Haller’s sharp distinction between sensibility and irritability was gradually blurred and then effectively abandoned by those who saw themselves as continuing his work. Moreover, Haller had argued that it was fibers that exhibited sensibility, whereas Bonnet subsequently extended the account of “sensible fibers” to mental acts, arguing that they too depend on the arrangement of fibers. In doing this, he not only made the action of all types of fibers the same, but in his assimilation of the action of brain fibers to those in other parts of the body, he undermined the distinction between irritability and sensibility. A crucial issue underlying this extension of physiological investigation into the realm of the psychological, and thereby into that of sensation in its fullest sense, is that of the relations between parts and wholes. This had significant consequences not only for how phenomena involving sensibility were examined, but in marking out sensibility from reason and indeed unifying the epistemological question of sensation and physiological question of sensitivity. With the publication of Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1747), there emerged a very influential general account of the whole/parts relation that stood in direct contrast to accounts that assumed the primacy of reason in perceptual cognition, typically through the postulation of innate ideas. Condillac’s model was developed to bolster a sensationalist account of perceptual cognition, one in which sensation, rather than reason, was the key to understanding how cognition was possible. Whereas reason had always been construed very much in terms of a single source of rules and procedures regulating our cognitive life, in Condillac’s account of sensation we find the inverse of this: a thoroughly decentralized account of our cognitive life, as reflected in language. Whereas reason encourages a topdown model in which a grasp of the whole is necessary if we are to establish, deductively, a necessary order in the parts, sensibility on this view works in the opposite direction, starting with the parts and building up from these a picture of the whole. The upshot of this exercise is that all observed facts form their proper, natural arrangement in the observer’s mind. When Condillac took over a Lockean model of perceptual cognition, he radicalized it, rejecting Locke’s theory that sensation and reflection were the origins of our ideas, and arguing instead that sensation was the sole source of ideas. Even more significantly, to support this, he transformed the discussion of the nature of knowledge by arguing that the only way to understand our ideas was to trace their genesis, identifying those

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 227 primitive ideas with which we start and exploring how other ideas are generated from these. He writes that “the key question is to discover how ideas are connected with one another, and that to achieve this we must examine the way in which, and the order in which, ideas are generated.” Condillac himself has set out, he tells us, “to do what [Locke] forgot to do: I have gone back to the first operation of the soul, and I believe that I have not only given a complete analysis of the understanding, but have also discovered the absolute necessity of signs and the principle of the connection of ideas.”9 In the physiological writings of Bonnet, we can see how Condillac’s account of sensation is extended to another form of sensibility, namely sensitivity, thereby providing something more like a general bottom-up “analytic” model for sensibility that marks it out from the top-down “synthetic” model for reason. Like Condillac, Bonnet is committed to analysis as the only method of discovery, telling us that “we must anatomize each fact, decompose it into its smallest parts, and separately examine all these parts. We must look for the relations linking these things to one another and to analogous things, and find results that can become principles.” The physiology of sensation was taken further in the mid-eighteenth century by the Montpellier physicians, who expanded it into a medicine of sensibility. In the process, sensation and sensitivity come to be joined up more intimately with the question of moral sensibility, as one’s mental life comes to be comprehensively medicalized. We can delineate three issues in this thinking through of questions of sensibility. The first is that of the priority of the parts with respect to the whole. In his Encyclopédie entry on “observation,” the Montpellier-trained physician Jean Jacques Ménuret provides an account of one of the core ideas behind this conception: “Several facts taken separately appear dry, sterile, and unfruitful,” he writes, but “the moment we compare them, they acquire a certain power, assume a vitality that everywhere results from the mutual harmony, from the reciprocal support, and from a chain that binds them together.”10 The commitment to building up from parts goes beyond methodological questions, however. On the kind of account offered by the leading Montpellier figure, Bordeu, the whole is as it is because the parts are as they are: in particular, the organism is a living thing because the fibers and organs that make it up are living. The question of the relation between the whole and the parts is now central to the understanding of the nature of life. The second issue is the anatomical question about what organs one can explore in terms of irritability and sensibility, and what one can learn

228 | stephen gaukroger from this. Once anatomical attention was no longer confined to muscles, the autonomous nature of the behavior of individual organs, particularly the way in which they react to stimulation, becomes evident, and the idea of life and sensibility consisting in the central organization of otherwise inert matter now becomes questionable on empirical grounds. The third issue is that of the nature of life. Trembley’s 1740 discovery that sliced sections of a hydra can regenerate into the whole animal suggested that life was a property of matter, or at least organic matter, something not only smaller than organs, but far more primitive.11 As might be expected, there was considerable dispute and uncertainty about just what the minimal living entities were, but it was now evident that organs at least were living in their own right. This contradicted not only Cartesian biomechanics but also Aristotelian theories whereby life was due to a form suffused throughout the material body. The questions of sensibility, life, and the ultimate units of the living clearly become intimately connected here, and it is in this context that we should understand Bordeu’s account of the living. Bordeu attributes sensibility to all organs, where this sensibility has now become localized: each organ leads a life of its own, and the lives of organs contribute to—indeed constitute—the collective life of the organism. “Life is only feeling and movement,” he claims. In the context of physiology what is at issue here is irritability and sensibility. The structure of fibers making up the organs of the body is the core issue for Bordeu. These he regards as extensions of the nerves, embedded in a spongy, mucous, cellular substance, which serves both to provide nourishment for the fibers that it encases, and, as it stretches from organ to organ, to connect these different organs.12 This mucous cellular substance orders the agitations of the fibers, making them act harmoniously and producing the visible functions of the body. In general terms, one might say that it is because the parts are living that the whole is living, and it is because the living parts are connected in the way they are that the whole is the way it is. The distributive account of life and sensibility proposed here is one in which these qualities exist at a level that is smaller than that of the organism, and in which the smaller organs are autonomous, in that they have these qualities in their own right, not to the extent to which they play some functional role in a hierarchical organization dictated by the needs of the organism. In particular, note that sensibility is a sine qua non not only of the autonomy of the organs, but more importantly of the unifying connections that they are able to form.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 229 The distributed nature of sensibility, and hence life, is crucial here, because a healthy body is one in which the autonomous parts are in harmony with one another. In his entry on “observation” in the Encyclopédie, Ménuret spells out the nature of the connections: “One could compare man to a flock of cranes, which fly together in a particular order, without any mutual assistance or dependence on one another. The physicians or philosophers who have studied and carefully observed man have noticed this sympathy in all animal motions: this constant and necessary agreement in the interaction of the various parts, however disparate or distant from one another.”13 A distributive view of life provided a popular model of bottom-up unification for other areas in the 1760s and 1770s. In his Rêve de d’Alembert, written in 1769, and in the Éléments de physiologie, published in 1778, Diderot used the model of the unity of the organism to show how there can be a unity of the subject of thought without postulating an immaterial soul. And Rousseau moved effortlessly from the biological version of the question to a political one, asking in Du Contrat Social how an aggregate of individual wills can be transformed into a collective will, and identifying the discovery of a form of government that achieves this as the fundamental problem to which the social contract is a solution.14 What is at stake here is not just the question of deciding whether understanding a living thing is a matter of understanding its living parts and establishing how they are connected, or even of understanding how these parts partake in a shared vital principle. There is also the question of what it is that we have to know in order to comprehend the cognitive and affective states of organisms so constituted. In the case of everything except human beings, there is a clear assumption that there is nothing further that we need to understand to have a complete grasp. But what about human beings? Bonnet believed it necessary to introduce a soul in the case of human beings, but the introduction of the soul would seem to add nothing to our understanding of human cognitive and affective states. If we have successfully constructed our fully functioning statue-man, Bonnet asks, what would happen if we then introduce a soul into this automaton? The answer is that all the feelings, and all the faculties, such as memory and imagination, would remain as they were, for these are all a function of the behaviour of the fibres in the brain, which are “independent of the soul.” Moreover, if we placed the soul of a native American Indian in Montesquieu’s brain, the Indian soul would have the same sentiments, perceptions, and abstract ideas as Montesquieu, as well as speaking French and writing De l’esprit des lois.15

230 | stephen gaukroger This is a development with radical consequences. As Anne Vila has pointed out, there is a move here from “sensibility as a power to be observed to a vision of sensibility as a power to be harnessed and redirected,” for “if the development and successful conduct of the intellect could be shown to be determined entirely by the action of fibers in the common sensorium, then the soul could be completely marginalized from discussions of human nature. It was now the body that, through its inherent reactive properties, seemed to offer the most effective site of intervention in the moral, intellectual, and physical constitution of human beings.”16 What we act upon when we proceed in this way is sensibility, not reason. Bordeu emphasizes this new standing of sensibility: “The reign of feeling [sentiment] or sensibility [sensibilité] is among the most extensive; feeling is involved in all the functions; it directs them. It dominates over illness; it guides the action of remedies; it sometimes becomes so dependent upon the soul that the soul’s passions take the upper hand over all the changes of the body; it varies and modifies itself differently in almost all the parts.” This is instructive, for in its new expanded domain, sensibility no longer looks like something for which physiology or psychology alone could account. Rather it is medicine—a form of medicine in which control of sensibility holds the key—that now becomes the primary tool of investigation. The principal significance of the work of Louis de La Caze’s popular Idée de l’homme physique et moral, was, as the title intimates, his explicitness in drawing out the moral and social consequences of this newly conceived medical science. Although he considered himself to be developing Bordeu’s work, he went beyond anything that Bordeu had advocated. His starting point is a revival of the doctrine of “nonnaturals,” whose first systematic formulation can be traced back to Galen’s Ars medica. Factors relating to health are divided there into the naturals, the nonnaturals, and the contranaturals. The naturals were structural and functional elements innate in each body such as the temperaments, humors, parts of the body, faculties, and functions. The nonnaturals were those factors that determined the state of the body without being controlled by the natural functioning of the body: ambient air, food and drink, movement or exercise and rest, sleep and waking, excretion and retention, and the passions of the soul. The contranaturals comprised diseases, and these could result from an internal imbalance in the naturals or from an imbalance between naturals and nonnaturals. Health on this account was the result of a proper ordering of the naturals and a proper regimen of the nonnaturals, brought under the general notion of “hygiene.”

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 231 This Galenic conception was revived in eighteenth-century medicine in France. The theme of the perils to health of misuse of the nonnaturals, particularly for those with a sedentary lifestyle, is pursued with vigor in the Encyclopédie, for example, above all in the articles by the Montpelliertrained physician Arnulfe d’Aumont. The nonnaturals are identified as preserving health, so long as they are used properly, and they are seen in terms of the healing power of nature, for “the role of the medical art in the curing of diseases is in fact less than is commonly believed. . . . In acute diseases the cure is usually the work of nature. . . . Chronic diseases, especially those that are intractable, are almost always beyond all the cures of medicine.”17 There is a shift in the direction of thinking about the role of medicine here. D’Aumont shows how the basic medical concern in the popular expression of the doctrine of the nonnaturals was care, not cure, and that the physician’s primary role had become that of pedagogue and advocate. One nonnatural that was of particular interest to many physicians was the sixth, the passions of the soul. La Caze, armed with the broadened notion of sensibility that he had inherited from Bordeu, set out to establish connections between physiologically characterized sensibility and affective states in terms of a general notion of health as a harmonious “animal economy.” The crucial thing about this animal economy was that sensations were not just physiological in nature but were pleasurable or painful, with an intensity corresponding to the needs of the animal economy. Our moral habits are determined by this animal economy, in terms of the pleasure or pain with which particular behavior is associated. But although this means that there is no direct social shaping of behavior, for example, there is nevertheless an indirect influence, because the body’s “constitution,” and hence its animal economy, are themselves shaped by the “constitution” of society, which La Caze argues is variable: regionally, in terms of the social distribution of tasks, and in terms of whether society is in a savage state, or civilized.18 As Elizabeth Williams notes, this line of argument “culminated in an extension of Bordeu’s definition of health as harmony and balance to social practice: moderation was the key to health because any kind of excess disturbed bodily harmony, promoted ‘disorder,’ and put the all-important connective tissue into a state of ‘vicious sensibility.’”19 The issues that are at stake here form the core of disputes in the second half of the eighteenth century over the extent to which human faculties and behavior can and should be shaped by social and medical intervention. Beginning in the 1750s, there was a burgeoning stream of literature

232 | stephen gaukroger advocating the use of medicine in these matters. It is in this context that the médecins philosophes thrived, for their interests transcended those of traditional medicine and projected it firmly into the moral or human sciences. In the wake of the médecins philosophes, the objectives of anthropological medicine became far more ambitious than anything to which physicians had aspired up to this point. There matters might have rested. After all, while medical advice on a range of matters that fell outside physical remedies for physical maladies was certainly sought from a significant section of the reading public, and while there is likewise no doubt that this was accompanied by a new interest in medical matters on the part of this same public, the changed standing of medical expertise could simply have placed it more favorably within a range of possible sources of advice on moral and social questions. The emergence of the médecin philosophe could just have been the emergence of yet one more group claiming social and moral authority. But what happened was rather more significant. In the revolutionary period, the centralized organization that had been characteristic of French culture disappeared. By 1793, the medical structure of prerevolutionary France was dismantled, and for a decade the state exercised no supervision of medical practice: not only was the corporatist organization, with its central system of supervision and licensing, abolished, but so too were the traditional distinctions between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. During this period, anthropological medicine had to reshape an identity for itself, in the context of deep ideological conflicts between clerical and anticlerical, and conservative and radical, as well as deep divisions over such questions as the relation between the material and the spiritual. In a period when the authority of church and state was collapsing, physicians found themselves as authorities in a range of intellectual and social domains, as anthropological medicine was transformed into psychological, social, and educational programs. What is striking about these reforms is that, while they are the product of the kind of broadened conception of medicine that the médecins philosophes had sought to establish, at the same time they undermine the whole idea of medical anthropology—that is, a project in which exclusively medical resources are used to build a “science of man”—and indeed mark the beginning of its decline. This decline turned on problems concerning the direction of naturalization. There was a fundamental problem with the project of naturalization employed in anthropological medicine: not with the fact of naturalization itself, which is of course what Catholic and other

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 233 critics focused on, but with competition between naturalizing strategies. For the médecins philosophes, sensibility was the vehicle of naturalization. The legitimacy of their claims to offer a new and fruitful account of human beings that bypassed the dead ends of metaphysical and theological speculation rested crucially on naturalization, that is, the appeal to empirical evidence in the treatment of questions that had hitherto been dealt with in a priori or purely conceptual terms. But naturalization is not any one single procedure: it rests on strategies of naturalization that privilege certain forms of naturalization and marginalize or exclude others. This can be overlooked if one thinks of naturalization in monolithic reductionist terms: as microreduction, for example, or some other form of reduction to physics. But naturalization, as I have defined it, is about what kinds of resources one deploys and what kind of evidence one appeals to in an investigation. There is no reason to think that this must take a reductive form. In the present context, it is a question of competing naturalizing strategies on the question of where exactly the empirical dimension of one’s inquiry lies and what kind of empirical evidence one should be appealing to. There was a widespread rejection among those coming from the médecin philosophe tradition of experimental work in medicine. Barthez, for example, was adamant in his opposition to the new chemical theory of respiration, preferring vitalistic explanations of animal heat. And leading medical figures such as La Caze, Fouquet, and de Sèze castigated “cruel animal experiments,” and denigrated the “optical illusions” of microscopy as an aid to pathology. Cabanis brings out what is at stake in a revealing way. While warning that medicine must rid itself of unwarranted intrusions from the other sciences, at the same time he insists that the time was ripe for Hippocratic reform “to place medicine in harmony with the other sciences and to determine precisely their mutual relationships.”20 These truths, he argues, will eventually form a chain, and their points of contact will enable one to deduce new truths from basic principles. Yet the physician had to know these foundations of his discipline without subverting its identity or autonomy, and he warns that the physician must guard against “specious deductions” from chemistry. Medicine is, in true Hippocratic fashion, a matter of observation of the patient, and cannot be replaced by laboratory observation that employs animate and inanimate bodies. The only certain results in medicine are those that come from observing animate bodies, for to the extent to which they concern inanimate bodies, physical and chemical hypotheses could provide no insight into the nature of living

234 | stephen gaukroger things, by contrast with sound Hippocratic medical practice, that is, detailed observations at the sickbed and in infirmaries. The crucial point is that medicine needed to independently establish its own truths in its own way before relating them to chemical discoveries. In short, medicine had to be in the driving seat: not anatomy, not pathology, not laboratory tests. These areas could be pursued, but only if they could be assimilated to the naturalized sensibility that forms the basis for medicine with its newly acquired anthropological aspirations. To appreciate what is at issue here, we need to consider the achievements of anthropological medicine. Above all, its claims were that the reductionist aspirations of biomechanics had finally been overcome, and that the existence of a vital principle, which only medicine can capture, had been established. At the turn of the century, its successes were significant: from the wholesale reform of hospitals to the new understanding of nervous diseases. This is potentially undermined if the autonomy of medicine is threatened by anything that suggests a return to something that ignores or does not respect life as the core issue. It is worth remembering in this context that Cabanis even made gravitation ultimately subordinate to sensibility. The problems of competing strategies of naturalization, and the scale of the claims being made for the role of anthropological medicine in relation to other disciplines, must be considered in the context of political developments in the course of the 1790s. The political landscape changed significantly, and to the detriment of anthropological understanding generally. I have indicated that the emergence of the médecin philosophe could just have been the emergence of yet one more group claiming social and moral authority, had it not been for the fact that, in the wake of the Revolution, there was an authority vacuum, as it were, due to the collapse of church and state authority, and this created a situation in which physicians found themselves as authorities in a range of intellectual and social domains. Crucial here is the kind of intimate connection that Destutt de Tracy made between the broader claims of anthropological medicine, which he referred to as physiological ideology, and a revolutionary political program deriving its principles from what were argued to be basic natural rights, which he termed rational ideology. Tracy was adamant that physiological ideology provided the ultimate rationale for rational ideology. With the arrest and execution of Robespierre on 27 July 1794, and the institution of a constitutional republic—the Directoire—there was an immediate rounding up of Jacobins, and rejection of the kind of radical politics that Robespierre

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDICINE & THE NATURALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY | 235 had pursued. With the coup of 18 Brumaire 1799 and the institution of the Consulate under Napoleon, there was a counterrevolutionary shift to the right. This autocratic regime, one in which the Catholic Church regained some of its standing, generated an environment not at all conducive to the kind of naturalizing claims that characterized anthropological medicine, claims now inextricably connected to a revolutionary program, even though they were conceived quite independently of it. The kinds of very strong claims to which anthropological medicine is committed were not likely to receive the same degree of support before and after the Consulate, especially if they had been associated explicitly with a now-discredited revolutionary program. This would only have contributed to the difficulties in holding together a program, which had extolled the virtues of naturalization against metaphysical and theological speculation, while at the same time resisting forms of naturalization in physiological research and experimental medicine due to the increasing use of microscopy and chemistry.

Chapter 14 Cabanis & the Order of Interaction Tobias Cheung

I n 1802, P ierre-Jea n-G eorges C a ba nis, a member of the Institut de France and professor of medicine at the École de médecine in Paris, published his most influential work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme.1 The book was a treatise on the animality of humans, and yet it contained the outline of a “science of man.” Like Paul Thiry d’Holbach in his Système de la nature (1770), Cabanis sought to explain how the “physiological” and “intellectual operations” of human beings interacted as physical orders of “living systems.”2 According to Cabanis, human bodies were organized physical ensembles or “living machines” with a certain set of “vital” phenomena, among which sensibility was the most important. Cabanis thus tried to translate the sensibility-discourse of Théophile de Bordeu, Paul-Joseph Barthez, and the School of Montpellier into the physical science of man that the Idéologues supported.3 He acknowledged that humans possessed souls, but he thought that souls were not necessary to explain the interaction of “physiological” and “intellectual operations.”4 Rather, in his view, it would be sufficient to refer to the “physical sensibilities” of “reaction centers.”5 In the Rapports, Cabanis suggested that these sensibilities might rely on a specific force, but he did not discuss the “metaphysics” of the “general laws” of nature.6 Rather, he emphasized the necessity of focusing on “facts” 236

CABANIS & THE ORDER OF INTERACTION | 237 and “observations” that are based on the “art of experiments.” Through “repeated” experiences, it might be possible to “elucidate” some of the “circumstances” that produce the specific phenomena of “organized bodies” as “consequences” of “properties of matter.”7 In this chapter, I focus on the role of “reaction centers” (centres de réaction) in Cabanis’s “living systems.” Cabanis was interested in the way in which the different modes and states of the centers produced, influenced, and reproduced the activity of the entire systems. For him, “reaction centers” possessed three basic properties: they can receive impressions, transform them through “inner acts” (actions intérieures) into the dynamic framework of their own inner order, and react to them through “outer acts” (actions extérieures) in the worlds that surround them. “Living systems” are composed of multiple “reaction centers,” such as the organs or organic subsystems. Through the interaction of “reaction centers” and their different inside-outside interfaces, “living systems” maintained their inner order. In Cabanis’s human body, “reaction centers”—for example the brain or the stomach—possessed different sensibilities, exhibited different reactions and produced different effects (sentiments, nutrition, thoughts). Furthermore, the organization and capacities of “reaction centers” were different in humans and higher animals. However, all “reaction centers” operated according to the same processual framework of “inner” and “outer” acts. It was thus the same logic that defined humans and animals as “living systems” and that distinguished humans from animals through specific properties. In Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800), Xavier Bichat had drawn a distinction between the “animal life” and the “organic life” of humans. According to Bichat, their “animal life” relied on acts in the outer world, that were regulated by the nervous system of the brain, while their “organic life” relied on the activity of inner organs and spinal cord.8 However, he also indicated that this was merely an “idealized” distinction. Within living bodies, both lives interacted.9 Cabanis’s “science of man” focused precisely on the order of these interactions.10 In his view, interactions constituted both “physiological” and “intellectual operations.” In the first section, I examine the processual framework of “physical sensibilities” in Cabanis’s “living systems” of human bodies. The second section explores the organizational changes to the “reaction centers” that occur before and directly after birth. In the third section, I consider the effects of interaction between “living systems” and their outer worlds.

238 | tobias cheung The Processual Framework of Physical Sensibilities Rejecting Haller’s dualism of the sensibility of nerves and the irritability of muscles, Cabanis adopted the model of Bordeu, who held that each organ in a “living system” had its “proper sensibility.”11 While Cabanis considered the nervous system the “specific seat” (siège particulier) of sensibility in higher animals, many lower animals, such as the polyps, could nonetheless produce movements through stimulus-response mechanisms without such a system.12 Cabanis described the physical basis of sensibility as a form of “energy” that, like electricity, is mediated through substances without moving them. If such an “energy” could remain in amputated limbs, it would produce movement until it is “consumed.” Irritability was thus merely a consequence of sensibility.13 Cabanis held that human sensibility not only produced movement, but also different “kinds of impressions” (genres d’impressions) or “sentiments.” These sentiments were modified within the body. Sentiments that entered the brain through the nervous system triggered “intellectual operations.” These operations in turn could transform sentiments into “perceived impressions” (impressions perçues).14 However, not all sentiments were directed toward the brain. Many of them oscillated between the inner organs.15 Cabanis described these sentiments as “unperceived impressions” (impressions inaperçues).16 In the processual framework of “intellectual operations,” “inner sentiments” just represented “confused impressions” (impressions confuses). As “unperceived impressions,” however, such “confused impressions” had a precise role within the “play” of inner organs. They constituted the animality of humans. In Cabanis’s view, the production of ideas and the operations of the intellect relied on the transformation of sentiments. However, Cabanis critized Locke and Condillac for focusing exclusively on the “distinct sentiments” (sentiments distincts) of sensory organs, and not on the interaction of different kinds of sentiments in living bodies.17 According to Cabanis, a good philosopher should “classify” sentiments “in such a way that one could assign each organ the inner impressions that are proper to it.”18 Using this classification, the philosopher could then determine the different roles of sentiments in “living systems.” Cabanis called the outer sentiments of the sensory organs “sensations” (sensations), which were transported to the brain through specific nerves. On their way to the brain, however, they might come into contact with “inner sentiments” circulating in the body. In general, outer sentiments

CABANIS & THE ORDER OF INTERACTION | 239 reached the brain more directly than inner sentiments, but they were not transported like messages through a pneumatic tube system. Rather, they often interacted with various “reaction centers,” such as ganglia, that have a life of their own and might function as mediating nods for both kinds of impressions. When sensations finally arrived in the sensorium commune of the brain, they might be “mixed” with other sentiments. Strong inner sentiments, such as instinctive needs or passions, might moreover modify “intellectual operations” and “voluntary acts.” Finally, very weak inner sentiments, which passed into the brain “unnoticed” by the intellect or will, might also influence their operations. Cerebral “operations” thus depended in various ways on the “play of organs” and their “sensibility without sensation”: “In this limited sense of the word sensation, it is beyond doubt that only some of our ideas and resolutions come from sensations; many of them are due to inner impressions resulting from the play of different organs.”19 With his critique of Locke and Condillac, Cabanis defined his objective in the Rapports: he intended to examine the “production,” “cooperation,” “enchainment,” and “subordination” of different kinds of sentiments and movements across a range of “physical operations” that covered both “intellectual” and “physiological operations.” All these operations were executed by “inner” and “outer acts” of “reaction centers” in “living systems.” “Living systems” in turn interacted as “total systems” (systèmes totaux)20 with the outer world. Cabanis explored the complex order of interaction of “reaction centers” in two steps. First, he described their development from early fetal stages to birth. Second, he classified them according to their influence on the overall economy of adult bodies. The Development and the Economy of “Reaction Centers” Cabanis distinguished the “inner existence” (existence intérieure) of fetuses from the “way of life” (genre de vie) of adult bodies.21 Besides tactile sensations, the human fetus produced and received nearly all its impressions from within its own body. The impressions of “outer bodies” were “foreign” to its inner organization. Formed by a combination of molecules and swimming in the amniotic fluid, the fetus begun to develop a “primitive organization” through habitualized “automatic operations” that resulted from the various chemical affinities of its inner parts.22 These affinities translated into the stimulus-reaction schemes of its first “reaction centers” or “instincts.”

240 | tobias cheung Cabanis divided the development of fetal instincts into three phases. The first phase established the “instinct of preservation” (instinct de la conservation). It relied on a “pulsatile point,” which contained a self-contracting liquid, and on a “whitish substance,” which could mediate stimuli without moving.23 The self-contracting liquid transformed into the circulatory system, and the “whitish substance” into the nervous system. Through the interaction of their properties, both systems became subsystems in a single overarching system. The second phase begun when the organs of digestion formed and established the “instinct of nutrition” (instinct de nutrition). These organs collectively restored the material basis of the “energy” that the interactions of the circulatory and the nervous system had “consumed.”24 However, the digestive organs remained inactive for a long period, because the “umbilical cord” connected the fetus to the mother’s circulatory system.25 The mother’s blood thus delivered nutritional material to the fetus directly. Last, during the third phase, the fetus developed a distinct muscular system so it could move its arms and legs. Based on “fibers” that had the faculty to “contract” and “extend,” the muscle system represented the “instinct of movement” (instinct de mouvement).26 While the three “reaction centers” or primary “instincts” continuously developed into ever more complex and interactive subsystems, birth marked the moment when the fetus, detached from the mother’s body, begun its own “proper life” (vie propre) through contact with the outer world.27 Although the adult organs of the infant’s body were already formed in nuce during its “inner existence,” specific outer stimuli—like air and light—were necessary to initiate activity in some of them, especially the lungs and the sensory organs.28 The pressure of the surrounding air moreover changed the balance between solids, liquids, and gases in the infant’s body.29 The experience of the outer world after birth resulted in a “growing sensibility” of the inner world. This “growing sensibility” was coordinated primarily by the nervous system, differentiated into a “cerebral center” and various other subordinated yet individually acting “centers.” However, unlike Bichat, Cabanis did not focus on the distinction between animal and organic lives. In Cabanis’s model, nervous centers were both regulating agents and mediators in a field of interaction between the “instincts” of inner organs, the “sensations” of the sensory organs and the “intellectual operations” of the brain. In this field, each “reaction center” functioned as a “central point” that established a “sphere of activity” (sphère d’activité) within which it reacted to stimuli and regulated movements.30 Between stimulation and reaction,

CABANIS & THE ORDER OF INTERACTION | 241 however, stimuli were “transformed” by an assimilative process into proper entities of the center. Cabanis called this process “metamorphosis.”31 While each center had its own particular sensibility and organization, the general framework of their activity was always the same: stimulation, transformation, and reaction. Cabanis could thus compare the brain, which transformed impressions into perceptions, to the stomach, which transformed food into digestible material: Will someone say that the organic movements through which the functions of the brain operate are unknown to us? But the action with which the nerves of the stomach cause the various operations that constitute digestion and the way in which they instill gastric fluid with the most effective dissolving power are no less hidden from our research. We see food descend into this soft organ with its particular qualities; we see it then leave with new qualities, and we conclude that it (the organ) has truly caused them to undergo this transformation. We also see impressions reach the brain through the mediation of the nerves: at that moment they are isolated and incoherent. The organ begins to operate; it works on them, and soon it sends them back metamorphosed as ideas that the language of physiognomy and gesture or the signs of words and writing exhibit outwardly. We conclude, with the same certitude, that the brain somehow digests impressions; that it organically produces the secretion of thought.32

Besides the brain or the “thinking organ,” Cabanis cited three other “main centers” in the body of human animals: the “phrenic region” of the diaphragm and the stomach, the “hypochondric region” of the liver, spleen, and upper intestines, and the reproductive organs, urinary system, and lower intestines.33 These three “regions” exerted a “considerable influence” on the “intellectual operations” of the brain. However, they also interacted within a single “total system.” Through this “order of correspondence” (ordre de correspondance), the centers “maintained” and “reproduced” the activities that continuously decomposed and recomposed organic material.34 The order of transformation, the order of correspondence, and the order of reproduction are thus part of a single cyclical process of interaction: In this uninterrupted chain of impressions, of determinations, of functions, of any movements whatever, whether they be internal or external, all the organs act and react on one another. They communicate

242 | tobias cheung their affections to one another; they excite or repress one another; they second or balance one another and mutually limit one another. Linked by relations of structure or of situation and continuity, as parts of the same whole, they are even more linked by the common aim that they are to fulfill, by the influence that each is to exercise over all the activities that interact with each other for the general preservation of the individual. Thus nutrition can be regarded as the most indispensable function relative to this object. But in order for nutrition to take place, the stomach and the intestines must be subject to the nervous influence necessary for their action; moreover, the liver, the pancreas, and the glandular follicles must pour in their dissolving juices. Thus, on the one hand, the nervous organ must be appropriately stimulated by the sympathetic impressions that determine this influence and, on the other hand, the circulation of the general liquids and the secretion of the particular juices must be executed with regularity in their respective organs. In order for the nervous organ to be appropriately stimulated it needs to be supplied by the blood circulation; in addition, the animal heat must spread throughout the most important sentient extremities, and the course of the circulation is in turn subject to the respiration, which itself contributes very powerfully to the production of that heat. If one considers all the important functions successively in this way, one will see that each is linked with all the others by more or less direct relations; that they must stimulate and support one another; that, as a consequence, they form a circle within which, maintained by this reciprocity of influence, life progresses.35

Through cyclical processes of interactions, human animals were able to maintain a balance within their bodies. This “normal state,” however, varied from individual to individual. Its modifications did not only depend on the influence of the outer world, but also on the “use” that individuals made of “outer circumstances.” In Cabanis’s view, “histories” of living systems thus included “histories” of their modifications. While some modifications were pathological, others might result in a new “normal state” of “living systems.”36 Habits, or the History of Circumstances, Use, and Change Like Erasmus Darwin in Zoonomia (1794–1796) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in Philosophie zoologique (1809), Cabanis focused on certain modes of

CABANIS & THE ORDER OF INTERACTION | 243 interactions with the outer world that could result in changes to the inner organization of human animals.37 These changes were part of their “physiological histories” (histoires physiologiques).38 Even the “primitive organization” of the fetus could be altered by strong outer stimuli, physical damage, or illness. After birth, there was a new source of possible changes: its ongoing interactions with the outer world. Cabanis described the ensemble of interactions of human animals with the outer world as their “way of life” (genre de vie). It depended on three factors: first, on the general inner disposition of outer acts, also called “temperament,” second, on “particular” or “accidental circumstances” that were part of the “ensemble of physical circumstances” (ensemble des circonstances physiques) that constituted the outer world, and third, on living entities as agents that made use of the “circumstances.”39 For these agents, the “randomness of circumstances” (hasard des circonstances)40 represented potential “chances in life” (chances de la vie),41 that is, opportunities to act in order to maintain their inner order, although certain “circumstances” might also prevent such acts. The outer world was thus not only an “ensemble of physical circumstances,” but also an ensemble of “circumstances of life” (circonstances de la vie).42 The choices that human animals made in changing outer circumstances could result in “physical habits” that differed from the “habits” of their “primitive temperaments.” According to Cabanis, “habits” were “ensembles” of coordinated “acts” in the outer world. He called them also “regimens” (régimes) or “plans of life” (plans de vie).43 They were shaped by a variety of inner and outer factors, such as instincts, natural and “social” circumstances, and “conscious” choices. If the continuous use of these factors over a long period resulted in new “habits,” these “habits” might not only produce “accidental dispositions” (dispositions accidentelles)44 in some organs, but also modify the “general plan of organization”: We have thus recognized that the general expression regimen includes all the physical habits taken together; and we know, moreover, that these habits are capable of modifying and even of changing not only the organs’ mode of action but also their inner states and the character of the inclinations of the living system. In fact, it is well known that the plan of life (plan de vie) can, according to whether it is good or bad, considerably improve the physical constitution, or can alter and even destroy it without recourse. Through this influence, each organ can fortify or weaken itself; its habits can be perfected or dissipated from

244 | tobias cheung day to day. The impressions through which the order of the stabilizing movements is reproduced, impressions that incessantly tend to introduce new series of movements, are themselves capable of undergoing notable changes. Just as, through the advantageous or harmful effect of the regimen, the organs take on new ways of being and of acting, they also take on new ways of feeling. Finally, even when the initial change has been circumscribed and local, these modifications of the sensibility are most often reproduced, as it were, by the entire living system.45

Habitualized outer interactions, which modified the “total system” and the “primitive disposition of sensibility,” led to new inner “temperaments.” Such “acquired temperaments” (tempéraments acquis) could be “transmitted” to the next generation.46 Cabanis thus entered into the speculative realm of the “transformation” of “primitive organizations.” Like Étienne de Lacépède in his Discours sur la durée des espèces (1800), Cabanis supported a Cuverian taxonomy of natural types (based on the resistance of “primitive organizations” to modifying outer influences), but he did not neglect the point that accumulated “accidental changes” could result in “important transformations” (transformations importantes).47 However, a natural history of the natural limits of the impact of these transformations on the persistence of organizational types or “species” would imply that their histories of “adopting habits” (contracter des habitudes) could be traced.48 For Cabanis, such histories were, at least for his contemporaries, too deep to be known.49 Conclusions According to Cabanis, interactions relied on a complex web of stimulusreaction chains. There were different kinds of stimuli, and these stimuli became sentiments within various “reaction centers.” The “reaction centers” themselves produced new stimuli or stimulating products. Stimulating acts thus resulted in reactions that became again stimuli. These chains of interaction were moreover multiplied in “living systems” as they interacted with the world that surrounded them. Cabanis was interested in the logic of these interactions: there is no action without reaction, and yet each reaction recreates or reproduces the capacity to act. Cycles of action and reaction, or processes of interaction, transform stimuli and stimulate their reproduction. Life is sensibility,

CABANIS & THE ORDER OF INTERACTION | 245 sensibility operates through interaction, interaction is a process of action and reaction executed by “reaction centers,” and “reaction centers” reproduce the conditions necessary for sensibility. Life as a process is thus maintained through the inside-outside interface of “reaction centers,” and individual bodies remain sensible until they die. The main components of Cabanis’s model of a new agent—the human animal as an interactive sensible system—came from Bordeu, Bichat, and Condillac. Cabanis used Bordeu’s notion of organ-specific “sensibilities” to explain the activity of “reaction centers,” he transformed Bichat’s dualism between the two lives of human bodies into a discourse on different “states” of interaction, and he connected Condillac’s statue, which relied exclusively on the sensory organs, to the complex processual framework of the production of sentiments in “living systems.” By means of these discursive moves, Cabanis established a physical “science of man” in the Rapports that corresponded to the general program of the Idéologues. In Cabanis’s “science of man,” organic interactions with the outer world not only maintained and reproduced the dynamic order of “living systems” but also changed it. Like chess figures that change their shape during the play, the bodies of human animals were modified through the “play of organs” as they made use of outer circumstances. Within the framework of “primitive organizations,” Cabanis did not define clear limits for these “transformations.” However, wherever these limits were, they became the limits of “living systems,” or human beings, that not only transformed the outer world into their inner world, but were also themselves transformed by their “way of life” in the outer world.

Chapter 15 Self-Feeling Aristotelian Patterns in Platner’s Anthropology for Doctors & Philosophers

Stefanie Buchenau

G erm an E nlightenment a nthropologists buried the main tenets of Aristotelianism  long ago. Indeed, they not only abandoned Aristotelian hylomorphism—that is, the definition of the soul as the form of the body and his definition of the body as the matter of the soul—but also, more importantly, they adopted an anthropology that simply could no longer be cast in Aristotelian terms. Over the course of the eighteenth century, one notices a proliferation of new words such as Empfindsamkeit, Gemütsbewegung, and various semantic shifts concerning sensibility (Sinn, Sinnlichkeit), which all attest to a new, modern, and clearly un-Aristotelian psychology and anthropology. In particular, sensibility began to embrace specifically human capacities, such as a human sense for beauty or taste (Geschmack) and a feeling (Gefühl), different from the sense of touch, for which there had been no room in the Aristotelian paradigm.1 According to the Adelung dictionary, sense (Sinn) comes to denote even the totality of cognitive or rational faculties in the wide sense.2 Such changes signaled the rise of modern models of the human being. In light of this situation, it may seem paradoxical that major philosophers of the German Enlightenment used Aristotelian terminology to write about anthropology and even to introduce their own innovations in this field. Despite the length of time between them, authors such as Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Platner, and even Kant all undertook 246

SELF-FEELING | 247 to reinterpret Aristotelian psychology, rather than make a fresh start, as if the old terminology conferred greater philosophical authority and legitimacy on their innovations and enabled them to be heard and understood. It occasionally even seems as if they somehow still believed in a form of Aristotelianism. In this chapter, I will highlight one major figure of the German history of anthropology who exemplifies such an unorthodox use of Aristotle: Ernst Platner (1744–1808), professor of physiology and philosophy at the University of Leipzig and author of the widely read Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise [Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers].3 Platner in fact explicitly revived Aristotelian terminology in his Anthropolog y. Like his contemporaries Herder and Tetens,4 he made Selbstgefühl a key concept in his philosophy and paved the way for a major debate on self-feeling and self-consciousness in German Idealism, involving authors such as Fichte, Reinhold, and Novalis. 5 What Platner calls Selbstgefühl or, later, Gefühl Ich is a sense of the self, a sensus sui that corresponds to an internal common sense that coordinates the stimuli transmitted by the various senses and receives common sensibles such as magnitude and motion. For Platner, the physical counterpart of this common sense is the sensorium commune, which Platner calls proton aistheterion in Greek or, more frequently, the “organ of the soul.” This organ obviously performs the major functions of the Aristotelian primary or common sense organ.6 Platner located the proton aistheterion or seat of the soul in the brain. While this argument appealed to Platner’s contemporaries and successors, such as Kant and Fichte, it leaves today’s readers perplexed. Unable to specify the features of the soul according to the modern understanding, Platner seems to regress to a kind of simplistic or incoherent Aristotelianism. He seems to encounter difficulties especially when trying to reconcile Aristotelianism and his mechanical explanation of the community of body and soul and when discussing the question of the distinction between humans and animals. I will attempt to come to Platner’s defense by putting his argument back in its context. This reconstruction will hopefully enable us to better appreciate both the Aristotelian and modern features of his anthropology. The Revival of Aristotelian Psychology in the Wolffian School Why did Platner use obsolescent Aristotelian terminology? His definition of the soul as a force of representation7 obviously relies on the conceptual

248 | stefanie buchenau framework of Leibnizian and Wolffian psychology. This framework, in some sense, constituted a modern form of Aristotelianism—which I would like to explain now in some detail. Wolff had inherited many elements of his psychology from Leibniz and had in fact revived the concept of the sensitive soul and the Aristotelian or Scholastic division of faculties. Two major concerns motivated him to return to Aristotle: one was to rescue the concept of the animal soul, which had been abandoned by Descartes; the other was to maintain the difference between man and beast and to claim the attributes of reason, personhood, and immortality exclusively for man. Of course, like his contemporaries, Wolff had abandoned the major principles of Aristotelianism. He rejected ancient psychological realism in favor of a kind of preestablished harmony. According to this view, the soul is a vis representativa or a substance that perceives in harmony with the movement of the body to which it belongs, but is not affected by any external objects that cause it to perceive In such a universe filled with what Leibniz called “windowless” monads,8 philosophers came to endorse an abridged form of Aristotelianism: Leibniz and Wolff suggested reducing Aristotle’s ontological division of faculties to a division based on a “logical” distinction, as Kant described it later in his Critique of Pure Reason.9 According to such a logical distinction, the difference between sensibility and reason was based on the difference between clear and distinct cognition. Nonetheless, Wolff, like Leibniz, emphasized his debt to the Aristotelian tradition. Wolff, whose philosophy is often called a new scholasticism or Schulphilosophie, repeatedly declared that the ancients and Scholastics had held “well-founded opinions” in psychology. He undoubtedly made the most impressive attempt to reconceive the old gradated scale and the distinction between sensitive and rational or lower and higher faculties of cognition and desire. His description of the lower senses in German Metaphysics and in Latin treatises on rational and empirical psychology included all the Aristotelian sense faculties: the particular senses, the common sense and the sense of the self, memory, and imagination, including a facultas fingendi and an analogon rationis or Vernunftähnliches, the Scholastic origin of which Wolff stressed on several occasions.10 The sensitive soul corresponds to the animal part of man, reflecting Wolff’s rehabilitation of the animal soul. Like Leibniz,11 Wolff obviously believed that one could infer the existence of an animal soul from the analogy of the human and animal body and sense organs. Highly developed animals must have clear images of objects and thus also have clear perceptions. They must be endowed

SELF-FEELING | 249 with sense perception, imagination, and memory (a faculty that enables them to perceive things as permanent objects) and they furthermore must possess a sensus sui: “An animal knows that it sees or hears or feels.”12 This self-awareness serves as the basis for instinctive or habitual behavior and for what the Scholastics call the analogon rationis or estimative faculty. This faculty prompts animals, or at least more sophisticated animals, to pursue what is good for them and avoid what is not. In Wolff’s view, animals are capable of a form of empirical consecution or expectation that is similar to reason. Perceiving a stick enables a dog to imagine the consequences of his actions: since the act of cognition is parallel to the act of volition, the dog will run away from and avoid what is harmful, namely, punishment. Since animals, however, are incapable of articulating speech, the animal faculty of consecution can be no more than an analogon rationis, a form of pseudorationality, similar but inferior to reason, that is, the faculty of rational consecution or ordering. Although animals possess a simple and indestructible soul, they lack the human attributes that require speech, namely, will, reason, and personality. Whereas sensibility based on clear and yet indistinct cognition is characteristic of animals and represents a lower state of being than humanity, understanding, reason, will, and freedom “comprise the advantage of the soul of man over the soul of beasts,” as Wolff puts it.13 Understanding, or the faculty of distinct cognition and forming concepts, not only serves as a general term for the totality of human faculties, but it is also the most fundamental higher faculty and in particular the faculty of judgment and reason: “the soul of man differs essentially from the soul of beasts on account of understanding, that is, the distinct representation of particulars.”14 Insight into the connection between truths is called reason. Strictly speaking, reason comprises at least two faculties: a faculty of rational consecution and a faculty of apperception. Rational consecution or arrangement makes apperception possible insofar as it gives insight into causal connections and universal and necessary truths. It thus allows the soul to rise to reflexive actions and gain insight into the self. A human being is a self, and one can refer to oneself in the first person singular. My consciousness gives access to and lays the foundation of my personhood, responsibility, and freedom: not only am I part of a mechanical nexus, but I am also part of a final nexus; while in the natural world, I am part of a moral world. It is clear that Wolff’s criticism of Aristotle’s position is not directed against the doctrines themselves, to which he essentially subscribes, but

250 | stefanie buchenau rather against the explanations given for them. His objective is to consolidate the ancient doctrines by providing the missing explanations for the “obscure terms of the scholastics.” In his own explanation, he expounds the principal metaphysical—that is, ontological, psychological, and cosmological—concepts in systematic order. This genealogy of ideas starts with reflection on ourselves and the “effects” or powers of our soul; Wolff then supplements this empirical psychology by a rational psychology, deducing the nature and the faculties of the soul. This genealogy is intended to rehabilitate Aristotelianism by putting it on a new systematic basis. And yet, when stripped of its underlying Aristotelian metaphysics, this basis proves to be more fragile than Wolff thought. Platner’s Revision of the Aristotelian Paradigm In fact, Wolff’s pupils in the later German Enlightenment would ultimately turn the Aristotelian model upside down. Authors such as Baumgarten and, later in the century, Platner found ambiguities in the Wolffian construction and exposed the fragility of Wolff’s “rationalism,” his definition of reason, and its alleged equivalency to the Aristotelian nous or intellect. The later Enlightenment critical discussion of rationalism radically redistributed the functions of sensibility and reason and emphasized their interdependence. In the first stage of the debate, around 1735–1750, Baumgarten’s founding of aesthetics and reinvention of reason and sensibility initiated a debate over the “horizon” or scope of reason and the dangers of abstraction; authors such as Georg Friedrich Meier, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Moses Mendelssohn were involved. Baumgarten notably continued to use Aristotelian terminology, deriving the name of his new discipline from the Greek verb aisthanomai. He emphasized the poverty of reason and its need to be complemented by a second kind of logos or rational faculty, namely poetry or sensibility, which provided images instead of symbols. Baumgarten, however, inverted the old paradigm, conferring a new fundamental, human, and rational status on aisthesis and what he called the analogon rationis: the term that had previously denoted an animal sense faculty was now applied to a human faculty of beauty and poetry.15 Platner obviously shared Baumgarten’s doubt that modern reason could serve as an equivalent to the Aristotelian nous and continued the transformation of Wolffian neo-Aristotelianism. He argued, however, from a different medical and physiological perspective, which has remained largely

SELF-FEELING | 251 unacknowledged. And yet it is clear that these new insights in physiology concern both body and soul and brought about what commentators have called the anthropological turn and the Enlightenment interest in “the whole man.”16 It was under the influence of this new physiology that Platner proposed a definition of the faculties that was Aristotelian in a different sense. Platner seemed to react in particular to Haller’s new distinction between sensibility and irritability and their attribution to particular organs: sensibility in the nerves, and irritability in the muscles. Haller himself, although reluctant to spell out the philosophical implications of his thesis in greater detail, had nonetheless already acknowledged that it was necessary to rethink the human soul and to restrict the domain of the soul and consciousness to the sensitive, nervous parts of the body: “If, then, what a muscle or intestine is suffering causes a change in another soul but not in mine, then that soul is not my soul, and that (body) part does not belong to me.”17 The soul may thus be considered responsible for voluntary but not for involuntary motions, such as reflexes or the heartbeat. This idea seriously undermined the Aristotelian concept of the soul as responsible for the motion and life of the body. Platner began his lifelong dialogue with Haller in 1770, with Letters from a Physician to His Friend about the Human Body [Briefe eines Arztes an seinen Freund über den menschlichen Körper] and he continued to debate physiology in Anthropolog y for Doctors and Philosophers and in a series of later writings.18 In Platner’s view, Haller’s physiology placed new demands and restrictions on philosophy. In his dedication of the Letters to Haller’s assistant Johann Georg Zimmermann, Platner criticizes the philosopher's ignorance of physiology, which leads him to make unfounded assumptions about the soul.19 Platner’s own Anthropolog y, published in 1772, can be read as a revision of Wolffian metaphysics according to the new physiological standards. Let us take a closer look at this treatise. The title of the work takes up the venerable, ancient philosophical tradition of following the Socratic maxim inscribed in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself, gnothi seauton. In the preface, Platner proposes an anthropological reorientation of Wolffian philosophy. It is necessary to refocus philosophy (which Wolff defines as the “science of all possible things”20) on the human being. In fact, philosophy must be anthropology or “the science of man and the spirits and bodies related to man”21 if it is to be philosophy at all. New medical insights seem to underlie his newfound suspicion of traditional metaphysics, here qualified as “speculative” in a negative sense. Platner suggests abandoning the vain attempt to model philosophy on mathematics

252 | stefanie buchenau and following a medical paradigm instead. Science itself imposes such a paradigm shift: in order to adopt a comprehensible language that is not devoid of content and to avoid vain speculation, it is necessary to forgo deep metaphysical questions and the quest for first causes and principles. Like a physician, a philosopher should set out from experience and consider what presents itself as next causes. Instead of developing a complete system, Platner recommends starting with a “history of the soul” and employing a medical, aphoristic style. This method and style would make it possible to refocus philosophy on anthropology, on human beings and their happiness. At first glance, Platner seems to follow in Wolff’s footsteps: he maintains the idea of a soul and psychology. Like Wolff, Platner also sets out from self-reflection and empirical psychology in order to establish a rational psychology and to infer the nature of the faculties from experience. Platner, however, seems to consider the genealogy of ideas in Wolff’s rational psychology insufficiently rigorous. In particular, Platner considers it impossible to acquire an intuitive knowledge of oneself via contemplation of necessary truths. In his view, Wolff still dismisses the dependence of the soul on the body and its sense organs. Platner’s medical criticism led him to develop an alternative version of Wolff’s rational psychology 22 that would investigate the premises of knowledge of the soul more thoroughly and adopt a broader perspective than purely psychology so as to detect the inherent errors in the human mind. This combination of psychology and anthropology starts with human beings’ empirical knowledge of the community of body and soul. According to Platner, I have clear knowledge of my composite nature and also know that the soul is both united with the body and yet different from it. The soul’s knowledge of itself (of its existence and its nature or personality) must therefore originate in clear cognition of its distinctness from other things.23 Since the soul is a force that represents the world according to the state of the body,24 I distinguish myself from the body while recognizing it as mine. Second doctrine: proof of the soul’s existence from self-feeling I am conscious of the objects I think of as being external to me, and I distinguish them from my person, from my self—each time I consider my relationship to them—consequently, I am conscious of myself, insofar as I never conflate myself with other objects. . . . I can represent all parts of my body as being external to myself. Consequently, all parts of my body are external to myself—except my

SELF-FEELING | 253 person. I am no part of my body, and my body is external to myself. . . . I distinguish myself, my person from my entire body, insofar as I consider it my possession, the property of my person, of myself. I say “my body” and so forth.25

According to Platner, when I distinguish myself from other things and reflect on who I am, I can already refer to myself in the first person singular and acquire a “distinct” type of self-feeling.26 Besides being conscious of myself, I also know that I am the same I that was conscious of myself before. My feeling of permanence or identity seems to be a sufficient basis for the substantiality of my soul. I can furthermore represent myself as separate from my body or as united with a different body. Consequently, I know that my soul is an “immaterial” substance.27 In Platner’s view, Selbstgefühl or self-distinction is the only possible human type of consciousness. When I turn my attention inward and represent my distinctness from the body, I am conscious of myself as a thinking entity: this consciousness is based on clear perception of that fact that I am both united with and different from my body and, as Platner added later, on an obscure or clear representation of the time and place where I am, that is, the situation of the body.28 This newly defined self-reflection, however, opens up fewer perspectives than Wolff anticipated: I cannot represent myself. “Mich selbst mein Ich kann ich nicht vorstellen.”29 In fact, my self gives access to two different categories of ideas: first, complex images that represent qualities such as extent, shape, size, and resistance, which come from outside myself and produce an idea of matter as characterized by all the aforementioned qualities (size, shape) together (§ 64); second, simple30 ideas, such as consciousness, feeling, thought, and volition, which come from inward reflection on the nature of the soul. Although no less distinct in the soul than the first category of ideas, the second category is of a different kind. Inward reflection on the self gives insight into certain (spiritual) attributes that are derived from my idea of the soul. This allows me to infer the existence of a spiritual type of force. I furthermore have clear knowledge of the interdependence (§ 138) of the two substances, the soul depending on the body in order to perceive and to think, and the body depending on the soul in order to move. My insight into the purpose of the union of body and soul goes no further. Self-reflection does not grant any intuitive access to the nature of the soul, unlike the Aristotelian nous. Although I know that the soul or its

254 | stefanie buchenau attributes (thought) are distinct from matter, I cannot know whether my soul is a monad or an atom, or what the nature of its composition and the number of its fundamental forces are—Platner affirms that there must be at least two. Self-knowledge furthermore does not give insight into God as creator. It is possible to infer the existence of a perfect being from the experience of our faculties of thought and volition (possibly two in number), but the idea of God can only be derived from the perfection of the world. Finally, self-reflection does not give insight into the nature of the soul’s union with the body. The various metaphysical attempts to explain the community of the body and soul, namely the Malebranchean thesis of divine action on the soul, the Leibnizian thesis of preestablished harmony, and the system of the physical influence, are all doomed to remain hypothetical. Whatever metaphysical constructions philosophical reason may devise, all such systems remain abstract, speculative, and devoid of meaning if human beings cannot relate them to themselves, that is, produce ideas from within their souls. In consequence, self-feeling is the only possible path toward concepts of the “effects” (Wirkungen) or faculties of souls and spirits (§ 65). Such self-feeling simply attests to the existence of an active ordering principle different from matter. Platner here argues against French materialism and La Mettrie, who inferred from Haller’s new physiology that the principle of life should be located in matter itself. For Platner, consciousness cannot be the effect of harmony between the movements of the brain but rather reveals the existence of a separate being, of a soul (§ 60) and an active faculty of reason or thought. This reason is not primarily a faculty of consecution, as Wolff held; instead, reason is a faculty of distinction and, more generally, of comparison, giving insight into similarities and differences and into harmonious and conflicting relationships (§ 42). This basic function or Grundthätigkeit underlies both apperception and ordering or rational consecution. Reason allows one to apprehend or recognize (anerkennen) an idea as similar to or different from others. It may be described as active, in contrast to the “faculty” of the soul that receives (auffassen) an object or is struck or touched (gerührt) by it. It is therefore possible to differentiate between reason as an active faculty and sensibility as a passive, receptive, or material faculty.31 Although he completely abandons Aristotelian hylomorphism and questions the mind’s intuition of essences, Platner here returns to the Aristotelian distinction between reason and sensibility in terms of active and passive faculties. Since, however, the soul is united with the body as Platner describes, all

SELF-FEELING | 255 representation involves both faculties, so that reason and sensibility (and more generally the cognitive and sensitive faculties) are strictly correlated, interdependent functions.32 There is no sensibility without reason and no reason without sensibility. Reason and self-feeling underlie all perception of objects, insofar as I perceive them as external to myself. In the act of sense perception, I can simply focus more on the object than on myself, so that my representation is of the object and not of myself. Conversely, when I perceive myself and turn my attention inward toward myself, I detach myself from the representation of an object and focus on the idea or feeling of the activity of thinking. In other words, thought depends on the body not only in the sense that the soul acts through the body, moves the body, and has mediated knowledge of external objects through the body, but also in the sense that the soul somehow has the same kind of mediated knowledge of itself through the body  that it has of external objects (according to the new psychology): there is no incorporeal cognitive faculty and no immediate knowledge of things in their reality. As Platner puts it, philosophy is a science of relations. Both external and internal objects are mediated or “refined” by the body. “Since the soul itself can neither think nor observe its actions (Handlungen), it acquires all concepts (Begriffe) that it has of its own internal activities through impressions of the brain, just like other concepts” (§ 287). One can therefore conceive of an internal sense or feeling of the self that is analogous to the external senses33—this argument foreshadows Kant’s view of the physiology of the internal sense, as expounded in Critique of Pure Reason. Furthermore, the body or the point of the body where mutual contact is closest may be called the proton aistheterion or the organ of the soul. “The system of the organs presenting a refined version of the world is the brain. Thus the brain is the mirror presenting the world to the soul according to the situation of the body” (§ 131). Platner develops the physiological dimension of his anthropology in some detail. He describes the interaction of the soul and body in terms of physical or real influence between substances. Admittedly, such a representation can have no more than hypothetical value, since the community of substances remains a metaphysical demonstrandum. In different metaphysical systems, however, the theory of physical influence, representing body and soul as two substances acting on each other by some sort of mechanical causation, has the greatest explanatory value. Platner describes the soul as mechanically “struck” by objects through the mediation of the body, which transmits external and thus “material” ideas. These ideas are

256 | stefanie buchenau said to leave an internal impression on the nervous fluid (Nervensaft) or nervous spirit (Nervengeist) of the brain marrow (Knochenmark). Whereas Aristotle located the proton aistheterion in or close to the heart, Platner situates what he also calls the “organ” or the “seat” of the soul in the brain marrow. He justifies this argument with medical evidence: the fact that damage to the brain triggers confusion or death of reason (§ 173). While the soul occupies a particular space, it is simultaneously connected to the whole body so that nervous spirits may circulate throughout the nervous system. Although, in his own treatise on the Organ of the Soul, Sömmerring moved the organ or the seat of the soul to a nervous liquid, he still relies on this idea of Platner’s (whom he approvingly quotes at the beginning of his work).34 As Aristotle argued, the proton aistheterion is, first of all, the instance that unites and centralizes the impressions received by the various external senses. According to Platner, the intensity of the impact determines whether one perceives an external or an internal object. From the intrinsic difference of sense impressions, color, heat, and so forth, I can furthermore deduce the existence of the various senses.35 Unlike Aristotle, however, Platner considers the sense of touch—which he does not call Tastsinn (tactile sense) but rather Gefühl (as in Selbstgefühl and also in fühlen)—the most perfect precisely because of the simplicity of the organ and the immediacy of the object’s impact. In contrast to sight and hearing, which require light and air as a medium, touch may be said to produce the truest, that is, the least deceptive (§ 317) and purest kind of representation.36 The mechanistic model of the soul-body relationship here implies the complete inversion of the Aristotelian model. Second, the proton aistheterion or organ of the soul is the organ of thought and reason. This argument is also not Aristotelian, because Aristotle explicitly denied the existence of such an organ. Thought and attention, therefore, depend on the body and certain corporeal states, which explains why consciousness or attention fade on account of sleep, disease, and loss of consciousness or, on the contrary, increase when the movement of the animal spirit reaches a certain level of intensity (§ 284). The definition of the organ of the soul as the organ of thought also implies that there is no thought in the soul unless it proceeds through the body and sensibility—this idea takes up Haller’s own insights. Thought is simply a cognitive correlate of my representation, of which I become aware when I turn my attention inward. This makes reason more dependent on sensibility and explains why each cognitive faculty has a sensory counterpart. Sensible and rational attention and conviction make up thought. Since the soul’s attention

SELF-FEELING | 257 depends on whether it is animated by the movement of the animal spirits, the sensible conviction about the existence of an external body is as strong and as certain as the rational conviction achieved by a geometrical proof (§§ 332–33). Conclusion: From Animal to Man—The Lost Symmetry Platner’s new anthropology seriously complicates the comparison of man and beasts and threatens man’s intermediate status between God and beasts in the chain of beings. As I have shown, Platner breaks with earlier ideas of reason. The faculty of comparison or distinction that he calls reason depends on human sensibility (or the soul being affected) and on man’s composite status as a soul united with a body. Reason may be described as active but not as separable from the body. It does not allow one to represent, but only to “feel” the self. Can sensibility and “feeling”  that are correlative with reason  still be called a human and animal faculty? In the first edition of his Anthropolog y, Platner responds in the affirmative. He acknowledges an animal faculty of sensibility (Empfindung), but he is also committed to acknowledging the spiritual (geistig) character of such a sensibility. He is furthermore led to attribute a certain kind of cognition (Erkennen) to animals. What distinguishes humans from animals is reason, or a faculty of comparison that allows them to compensate for their lack of instinct and animal industry (Kunstfertigkeit)37 and to strive for a properly human kind of happiness—the argument foreshadows Herder’s anthropology. Second, by redefining the relationship between man and animals, Platner also raises theological questions about man’s relationship to God. He destroys the symmetry of man and God. God has reason but neither body nor sensibility. Man, in contrast, cannot be called a rational animal unless he is a composite of soul and body.

Notes

introduction

1. See, for example, Raphaële Andrault, Stefanie Buchenau, Claire Crignon, and AnneLise Rey, eds., Médecine et Philosophie de la nature humaine, de l’Âge classique aux Lumières (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014); Peter Distelzweig, Benjamin Goldberg, and Evan Ragland, eds., Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016); Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. See in particular Simone De Angelis, Anthropologien: Genese und Konfiguration einer ‘Wissenschaft vom Menschen’ in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). 3. See for example Justin H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 4. See for example Tobias Cheung, Transitions and Borders between Animals, Humans, and Machines, 1600–1800 (Boston: Brill, 2010). 5. See for example Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); C. Blackwell and S. Kusukawa, eds., Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century: Conversations with Aristotle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 6. See for example A. R. Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750 (New York: Longman, 1983), 147: “Would the historian perhaps properly speak of a negative revolution in seventeenth-century biology, for example, one which certainly destroyed the ancient basis of confidence without creating an effective research programme permitting rapid and cumulative development?” 7. See, among others, Paul O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Luca Bianchi, “Continuity and Change in the Aristotelian Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49–71; Hiro Hirai, Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life and the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 8. On the anthropological difference and comparative anatomy, see Andrault et al., Médecine et Philosophie de la nature humaine, de l’âge classique aux Lumières, ch. 2. 9. Hubert Steinke, Irritating Experiments: Haller’s Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 10. Cabanis himself hints at the proximity of his own science of man to German anthropology in the 1805 edition of his Rapports: “la physiologie, l’analyse des idées et la morale ne sont que les trois branches d’une seule et même science, qui peut s’appeler à juste titre la science de l’homme. (Note: c’est celle que les Allemands appellent l’Anthropologie.)” ch a pter 1. rena issa nce a ristoteli a nism & the birth of a nthropology

1. Charles B. Schmitt, “Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism,” History of Science 11 (1973): 159–93; Charles B. Schmitt, Filosofia e scienza nel Rinascimento, ed. 259

260 | notes to pages 17–24 Antonio Clericuzio (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2001); Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard University Press for Oberlin College, 1983). 2. Simone De Angelis, Anthropologien. Genese und Konfiguration einer “Wissenschaft vom Menschen” in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010). 3. Edgar Zilsel, “The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law,” Philosophical Review 51 (1942): 245–79; Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis, eds., Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theolog y, Moral and Natural Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Gerd Graßhoff and Hubert Treiber, Naturgesetz und Naturrechtsdenken im 17. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002); Christian Schütte, Gesetze am Himmel: Die Astronomie der Frühen Neuzeit als Wegbereiterin moderner Naturwissenschaft (Zurich: Chronos, 2008). 4. Stefanie Buchenau et al., Découvertes Médicales et Philosophie de la Nature Humaine (XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles). Revues de synthèse 134, series 6, no. 4 (2013): 537–51. 5. Vivian Nutton, “Greek Science in the Sixteenth-Century Renaissance,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. V. Field and F. A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15–32. 6. Marco Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism: Logic and Epistemolog y in the British Isles (1570–1689) (New York: Springer, 2013). 7. Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition, 7. 8. Alexandri Aphrodisei Enarratio De Anima ex Aristotelis institutione, interprete Hieronymo Donato, Patritio Veneto. Locaque librariorum vitio partim depravata/partim penitus omissa/Nuperrime per doctissimum Virum recognita/restitutaque (Venice: Apud Octavianum Scotum, 1538). 9. De Angelis, Anthropologien, ch. 4; Simone De Angelis, “Experiments, Judicial Rhetoric and the Testimonium: Practices of Demonstration in the Hamberger-Haller Controversy on the Respiration Mechanism,” in Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, ed. André Holenstein et al. (Boston: Brill, 2013), 679–701. 10. Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de anima (Wittenberg: Iohannes Crato, 1553). See also Philippi Melanchthonis, “Opera quae supersunt omnia,” in Corpus Reformatorum, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider, vol. 13 (Halle a. S.: C. A. Schwetschke, 1846), here Corpus Reformatorum (= CR), 13, col. 19. See also De Angelis, Anthropologien, ch. 1. 11. Claudii Galeni, Opera omnia, ed. Carl Gottlob Kühn (Hildesheim: Olms 1965), vol. 5 (De plac. Hipp. et Plat.), 607–8. 12. Jürgen Helm, “‘Medicinam aspernari impietas est’—Zum Verhältnis von Reformation und akademischer Medizin in Wittenberg,” Sudhoffs Archiv 83, no. 1 (1999): 22–41 (23). 13. Helm, “Medicinam aspernari impietas est,” 24. 14. Helm, “Medicinam aspernari impietas est,” 29 and 36 f. 15. Divi Thomae Aquinatis, Summa theologica, ed. Jacques Paul Migne, 4 in 3 vols. (Paris: Apud J.-P. Migne Editorem, 1864), qu. 91, art. 1–4. 16. CR 13, 137–42 and 145 f. 17. Philipp Melanchthon, Loci communes theologici (Basel: Per Ioannem Oporinum, 1550), 138. See also Philippi Melanthonis, Opera quae supersunt omnia, in Corpus Reformatorum, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Henricus Ernestus Bindseil, vol. 21 (Braunschweig: C.A. Schwetschke, 1854), here CR 21, col. 686. 18. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 140 (= CR 21, col. 687). 19. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 183 (= CR 21, col. 711). 20. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 184 f. (= CR 21, col. 712). 21. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 137 (= CR 21, col. 685). 22. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 139 (= CR 21, col. 686). 23. CR 13, col. 169.

notes to pages 24–28 | 261 24. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 184 f. (= CR 21, col. 712). 25. CR 13, col. 169 and 163 f. 26. CR 13, col. 164. 27. CR 13, col. 171. 28. Helm, “Medicinam aspernari impietas est,” 36 f. 29. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 93 (= CR 21, col. 658). 30. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 45 (= CR 21, col. 629 f.). 31. CR 13, col. 169 f. See also Aurelius Augustinus, De Trinitate IX, 7–8 and CR 13, col. 170. 32. CR 13, col. 141 f. 33. CR 13, col. 10f. u. col. 33. 34. CR 13, col. 20. 35. CR 13, col. 146. 36. CR 13, col. 33, col. 153, and col. 167. 37. CR 13, col. 57 and 98. 38. CR 13, col. 7. 39. CR 13, col. 121. 40. CR 13, col. 121. 41. CR 13, col. 139. 42. CR 13, col. 71. 43. CR 13, col. 88f. See also Helm, “Medicinam aspernari impietas est,” 36 f. 44. CR 13, col. 125. 45. CR 13, col. 57. 46. CR 13, col. 7. 47. CR 13, col. 162. 48. CR 13, col. 21. 49. Helm, “Medicinam aspernari impietas est,” 34 and 38–40. 50. Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle, “Humanismus und Medizin an der Universität Heidelberg im 16. Jahrhundert” in Semper apertus. Sechshundert Jahre Ruprecht-KarlsUniversität Heidelberg 1386–1986, ed. Wilhelm Doerr, vol. 1: Mittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit 1386–1803 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer 1985), 255–89 (256 f.). 51. See De Angelis, Anthropologien, ch. 2. 52. Pietro Pomponazzi, Tractatus de immortalitate animae (Bologna: Justinianus Leonardus Ruberiensis, 1516), ch. 15. 53. Commentaria Reverendissimi patris fratris Thomae de Vio Caietani artium sacrae theologiae almique ordinis praedicatorum professoris ac eiusdem ordinis Generalis Magistri super tres libros Aristotelis de anima una cum quaestione subtilissima de infinitate primi motoris: novissime recognita cunctisque erroribus castigata (Venice: Per Giorgium Arrivabenum, 1514). 54. Lectiones excellentissimi Philosophi Federici Pendasii in Libros de Anima [books 1–3], fol. 1–860, Biblioteca Universitaria di Padova, Ms. 1264. 55. Antonino Poppi, Cremonini, Galiliei e gli inquisitori del Santo a Padova nel 1604: Nuovi documenti d’archivio (Padua: Antenore, 1993). 56. Federici Pendasii Mantuani, In Librum tertium de Anima lectiones, f. 437. 57. See Simone De Angelis, “From Text to the Body. Commentaries on De Anima, Anatomical Practice and Authority around 1600,” in Scholarly Knowledge. Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Emidio Campi et al. (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 205–27. 58. Constantii Varolii Medici Bononiensis, De Nervis Opticis nonnulisque aliis praeter communem opinionem in Humano capite observatis: Ad Hieronymum Mercurialem (Padua: Apud Paulum & Antonium Meiettos fratres, 1573), fol. 14v. 59. On the Pendasio-Varolio episode, see Simone De Angelis, “Sehen mit dem

262 | notes to pages 29–33 physischen und dem geistigen Auge. Formen des Wissens, Vertrauens und Zeigens in Texten der frühneuzeitlichen Medizin,” in Diskurse der Gelehrtenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Handbuch, ed. Herbert Jaumann (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 211–53. 60. Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri, Exotericarum exercitationes liber quintus decimus de subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Paris: Michele Viscosani, 1557). See also De Angelis, Anthropologien, ch. 3. 61. Exotericarum exercitationes, f. 14r. See also Rodolphi Goclenii Professoris Logici et Mathematici in Academia Marpurgensis, Analyses In exercitationes aliquot Julii Caesaris Scaligeri, de Subtilitate, quas è dictantis or exceptas Philosophiae studiosis exhibit & communicat M. Johannes Schroderus Suecus (Marburg: Typis Pauli Egenolphi, 1599); Rudolph Goclenius, Adversaria: Ad Exotericas aliquot Julii Caesaris Scaligeri acutissimi Philosophi exercitationes (Marburg: Typis Pauli Egenolphi, 1594). 62. Psychologia Anthropologica; Sive Animae Humanae Doctrina, Methodicé informata, capitibus dissecta, singulorumque Capitum disquisitionibus, ac controversarum questionum ventilationibus illustrata. . . . , tractata a Othone Casmanno. Secunda Pars Anthropologiae: hoc est; fabrica humani corporis; methodice descriptiva (Hanau: Apud Guilielmum Antonium, impensis Petri Fischeri, 1594–1596). See on Casmann also Paul Mengal, La naissance de la psychologie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005). 63. Ioannis Magiri, Doctoris Medici et Philosophi clarissimi, Anthropologia, hoc est Commentarius excellentissimus in aurum Philippi Melanchthonis libellum de Anima; Completus & locupletatus Opera Georgii Caufungeri D. Med. & Physici Reip. Fridbergensis ordinarii (Frankfurt: Wolfgang Richter, 1603). 64. Jacobi de Back, Dissertatio de Corde (Rotterdam: De Officina Arnoldi Leers, 1648). 65. De Back, Dissertatio de Corde, Ad Lectores Alloquium, 18 f. See also De Angelis, Anthropologien, 275 f. 66. Thomas Willis, Cerebri Anatome: Cui accessit Nervorum Descriptio et Usus (London: Typis Jo. Flesher, impensis Jo. Martyn & Ja. Allestry apud insigne Campanæ in Coemeterio D. Pauli, 1664). 67. Richard Lower, Tractatus de Corde, Item De Motu & Colore Sanguinis Et Chyli in eum Transitu (Amsterdam: Apud Danielem Elzevirium, 1669). 68. See De Angelis, Anthropologien, ch. 5. 69. On the theory of accommodation see Lutz Danneberg, “Von der accommodatio ad captum vulgi über die accommodatio secundum apparentiam nostri visus zur aesthetica als scientia cognitionis sensitivae” in Hermeneutica Sacra: Studien zur Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Studies of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, ed. Torbjörn Johansson et al. (Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 313–79 (338–49); Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmolog y and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 174–79 (on Wittich). 70. Christoph Wittich, Dissertationes Duae Quarum Prior De S. Scripturae in rebus Philosophicis abusu (Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1653). 71. Christoph Wittich, Consensus Veritatis in Scriptura Divina et Infallibili Revelatae cum Veritate Philosophica a Renato Des Cartes Detecta (Nijmegen: Apud Adrianum Wyngaerden, 1659). 72. Samuel Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (Lund: Sumptibus Adami Junghans, 1673); Samuel Pufendorf, Les Devoirs de l’Homme et du Citoyen, Tel qu’il lui sont prescrit par la Loi Naturelle, ed. Jean Barbeyrac (Amsterdam: Veuve de Coup, & G. Kuyper, 1735). 73. Pufendorf, De Officio, preface. 74. Pufendorf, De Officio, ch. 3, § 8. 75. See De Angelis, Anthropologien, ch. 6. 76. See Simone De Angelis, “Lex naturalis, Leges naturae, ‘Regeln der Moral’: Der Begriff des ‘Naturgesetzes’ und die Entstehung der modernen ‘Wissenschaften

notes to pages 33–39 | 263 vom Menschen’ im naturrechtlichen Zeitalter,” in “Natur” Naturrecht und Geschichte: Aspekte eines fundamentalen Begründungsdiskurses der Neuzeit (1600–1900), ed. Simone De Angelis et al. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), 47–70. 77. Richard Cumberland, De Legibus Naturae Disquisitio Philosophica, In qua Earum Forma, summa Capita, Ordo, Promulgatio, & Obligatio é rerum Natura investigantur; Quinetiam Elementa Philosophiae Hobbianae, Cum Moralis tum Civilis, considerantur & refutantur (London: Typis E. Flesher, Prostat verò apud Nathanaelem Hooke, 1672), Prolegomena, § 28. 78. In 1671, for example, Marcello Malpighi’s paper on embryology, De Formatione Pulli in Ovo, was communicated to the Society; see Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. 3 (London: Printed for A. Millar in the Strand, 1757; reprt. 1968), 30–40. 79. Cumberland, De Legibus Naturae, Prolegomena, § 28. 80. Cumberland, De Legibus Naturae, ch. 2, § 20. 81. Cumberland, De Legibus Naturae, ch. 2, § 17. 82. See De Angelis, “Lex naturalis,” 54–55 and 65. 83. On Johann Gottfried Herder, see Wolfgang Proß, “Naturalism, Anthropology and Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 318–47. On Ernst Platner, see Simone De Angelis, “Unbewußte Perzeptivität und metaphysisches Bedürfnis. Ernst Platners Auseinandersetzung mit Haller in den Quaestiones physiologicae (1794),” Aufklärung 19 (2007): 243–73. ch a pter

2. ( dis )embodied thinking & the sca le of beings

I am most grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for its financial and institutional support, and to Philip van der Eijk and the colleagues of the Berlin research group Medicine of the Mind, Philosophy of the Body, who shared insightful comments on an early version of this paper. 1. See Charles B. Schmitt, “Aristotle among the Physicians,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–15. 2. See Simone De Angelis, Anthropologien: Genese und Konfiguration einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2010). 3. A very thorough reconstruction of this controversy is given by Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1986), 124–234. See also Vittoria Perrone Compagni, introduction to Pietro Pomponazzi, Trattato sull’immortalità dell’anima (Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 1999), v-ci; José Manuel García Valverde, introduction to Agostino Nifo, L’immortalità dell’anima (Milan: Nino Aragno Editore, 2009), xi-lxviii. 4. For references to the bodily aspects of thinking, see De anima, III, 3 and 9 (respectively, 429a5–8 and 421aff.), De memoria et reminiscentia, 450a27ff. and 453a14ff., De partibus animalium, II, 2 (648a2ff.), II, 7 (653b5), III, 10 (672b28ff.), and IV, 10 (686a23ff.), Historia animalium VII (VIII), 1 (588a31ff.), Politica, 1270b40 and 1327b20ff.; for references to degrees of intelligence in man and animals, see De anima, III, 3 and 9 (respectively, 429a5–8 and 421aff.), Metaphysica, I, 1 (980a27–39), Ethica Nichomachea VI, 7 (1141a26–28), Historia animalium, I, 1 (488b12–29) and VII (VIII), 1 (588a18–32), De generatione animalium, I, 23 (731a31-b4), II, 6 (744a30), De partibus animalium, II, 2 and 4 (respectively, 648a2ff. and 650b19ff.) and IV, 10 (686a25ff.). 5. See Philip J. van der Eijk, “The Matter of Mind: Aristotle on the Biology of ‘Psychic’ Processes and the Bodily Aspects of Thinking,” Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 206–37. 6. The best and most thorough account of Aristotle’s gradualist approach to animal

264 | notes to pages 40–43 cognition is by Andrew Coles, “Animal and Childhood Cognition in Aristotle’s Biology and the Scala Naturae,” in Aristotelische Biologie: Intentionen, Methoden, Ergebnisse, ed. Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), 287–324. See also Arbogast Schmitt, “Verhaltensforschung als Psychologie: Aristoteles zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Tier,” in Aristotelische Biologie, ed. Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger, 259–86; and Eve Browning Cole, “Theophrastus and Aristotle on Animal Intelligence,” in Theophrastus: His Psychological, Doxographical, and Scientific Writings, ed. William W. Fortenbaugh and Dimitri Gutas (New Brunswick-London: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 44–62 (see especially 45–51). 7. Aristotle gives a theoretical account of the imagination in De anima, III, 3 (427b29– 429a9). 8. John Philoponus, Ioannis Philoponi in Aristotelis de anima libros commentaria, ed. Michael Hayduck, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, vol. 15 (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 1897), 388, 16-389, 4. 9. Aristotle, Aristotelis libri omnes, ad Animalium cognitionem attinentes: Cum Averrois Cordubensis variis in eosdem commentariis (Venetiis apud Iunctas, 1562), 134. 10. Aristotle, Aristotelis libri omnes, 193. 11. See Helmut Gatje, “Die inneren Sinne bei Averroës,” Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 115 (1965): 255–93; and Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroës on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of the Human Intellect (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 315–56. 12. Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, I, 1, 3 (p. 20 Stadler). 13. Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, I, 1, 2 (p. 6 Stadler). 14. Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, I, 3, 1 (p. 184 Stadler). 15. Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, VII, 1, 1 (p. 496 Stadler). On the doctrine of the “vis cogitativa,” see George P. Klubertanz, The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the “Vis Cogitativa” According to St. Thomas Aquinas (St. Louis: Modern Schoolman, 1952); Dominik Perler, “Intentionality and Action: Medieval Discussions on the Cognitive Capacities of Animals,” in Intellect et imagination dans la philosophie médievale, ed. M. C. Pacheco et J. F. Merinhos, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brepols, 2006), 1:73–98. 16. Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, XXI, 1, 2 (p. 1328 Stadler). See Joseph Koch, “Sind die Pygmäen Menschen? Ein Kapitel aus der philosophischen Anthropologie der mittelalterlichen Scholastik,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 40 (1931): 194–213; Theodor W. Köhler, “Anthropologische Erkennungsmerkmale menschlichen Seins: Die Frage der Pygmaei in der Hochscholastik,” in Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter, ed. A. Zimmermann and A. Speer, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991), 2:718–35; Bernd Roling, “Syllogismus brutorum: Die Diskussion der animalischen Rationalität bei Albertus Magnus und ihre Rezeption im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 79 (2011): 221–75. 17. See Peter G. Sobol, “The Shadow of Reason: Explanations of Intelligent Animal Behaviour in the Thirteenth Century,” in The Medieval World of Nature. A Book of Essays, ed. J. E. Salisbury (New York: Garland, 1993), 109–28. 18. For the Latin text of Pomponazzi’s Tractatus, I have used the 1525 edition: Pietro Pomponazzi, Tractatus acutissimi, utillimi et mere peripatetici (Venetiis, 1525). All the passages of Pomponazzi’s Tractatus cited in this chapter are quoted in William Henry Hay II’s English translation published (with revisions by John E. Randall Jr.) in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 280–381. 19. Pietro Pomponazzi, Utrum anima rationalis sit immaterialis et immortalis (Naples, Bibl. Naz., ms. VIII. E. 42, ff. 179r-183r). The Latin text of this quaestio has been published and commented

notes to pages 43–50 | 265 by Antonino Poppi, Pietro Pomponazzi: Corsi inediti dell’insegnamento padovano, II, Quaestiones physicae et animasticae decem (1499–1500; 1503–1504) (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1970), 1–25. 20. Pietro Pomponazzi, Tractatus, IX, 16, 45ra (English trans. 318 CassirerKristeller-Randall): “To need an organ as subject is to be received in the body in a manner both quantitative and corporeal so as to be received with extension . . . knowing is said not to be in an organ and in the body only insofar as it is not in it in a quantitative and corporeal manner.” 21. See Andrew H. Douglas, The Philosophy and Psycholog y of Pietro Pomponazzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 64; Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, 141–43; Jürgen Wonde, Subjekt und Unsterblichkeit bei Pietro Pomponazzi (Stuttgart-Leipzig: Teubner, 1994), 84; Vittoria Perrone Compagni, “Mens, intellectus, ratio: Scala dell’essere e modi di conoscenza in Pietro Pomponazzi,” in Per una storia del concetto di mente, ed. Eugenio Canone (Florence: Olschki, 2005), 207–40. 22. Pietro Pomponazzi, Tractatus, VI, 2, 43ra (English trans. 298 Cassirer-KristellerRandall). 23. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, VI, 2, 43ra. 24. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, IX, 16, 45ra (English trans. 319–20). 25. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, IX, 21, 45va (English trans. 323). See Vittoria Perrone Compagni, Introduction, xxxvii and lix. 26. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, IX, 20, 45rb (English trans. 322). See Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, 232–34. 27. See Paolo Rubini, “Pomponazzi e l’anima degli animali,” in The Animal Soul and the Human Mind. Renaissance Debates, ed. Cecilia Muratori, Bruniana & Campanelliana, Supplementi, XXXVI (Pisa-Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore), 75–95. 28. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, IX, 30, 46ra (English trans. 327–28). 29. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, IX, 21, 45rb-va (English trans. 322–23). See Douglas, The Philosophy and Psycholog y of Pietro Pomponazzi, 110–13. 30. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, VIII, 5, 43va (English trans. 304). 31. Pomponazzi, Tractatus, VIII, 5, 43va (English trans. 304). 32. Pietro Pomponazzi, Utrum anima sit immortalis, 5, 19–25 Poppi. See De Angelis, Anthropologien, 80. 33. On the work and thought of Agostino Nifo, see Edward P. Mahoney, Two Aristotelians of the Italian Renaissance (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000); Pasquale Tuozzi, “Agostino Nifo e le sue opere,” Atti e memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padova, N.S., XX (Padua, 1904): 63–86; Stefano Perfetti, Aristotle’s Zoolog y and Its Renaissance Commentators (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 85–120 (on Nifo’s commentaries on the De animalibus). 34. See Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, 44–45. 35. Agostino Nifo, De immortalitate animae, LXXXII (L’immortalità dell’anima, ed. and trans. José Manuel García Valverde [Milan: Nino Aragno Editore, 2009], 418). 36. Nifo’s notion of the “pygmy” stems directly from Albert the Great and his understanding of the reference to the pygmies made by Aristotle in HA VII (VIII), 12, 597a7ff. See above note 16. 37. Agostino Nifo, De immortalitate animae, LXXXII (p. 420 García Valverde). 38. Agostino Nifo, Expositio subtilissima . . . in tres libros Aristotelis de anima (Venice: Scotum, 1559), 330. 39. Aristotle, De anima, III, 10, 433b28–31. 40. Agostino Nifo, Expositio subtilissima de anima, 867. 41. Nifo, Expositio subtilissima de anima, 867–68.

266 | notes to pages 50–56 42. Nifo, Expositio subtilissima de anima, 867. 43. Aristotle, De memoria et reminiscentia, II, 453a6–14. Nifo comments on this passage in Agostino Nifo, Parva Naturalia Augustini Niphi Medicis Philosophi Suessani (Venice: Scotum, 1550), 83va. 44. Aristotle, De memoria, II, 453a6–14. 45. Aristotle, De memoria, II, 453a15–31. 46. Nifo, Parva Naturalia, 84va. 47. Nifo, Parva Naturalia, 83va. Here Nifo refers to the aforementioned passage of Aristotle’s Historia animalium, VII (VIII), 12 (see above, notes 16 and 36). 48. Agostino Nifo, Augustini Niphi medicis philosophi Suessani expositiones in omnes Aristotelis libros De Historia animalium, De Partibus animalium et eorum Causis ac de Generatione Animalium (Venice: Scotum, 1546), 220. 49. Nifo, Expositio subtilissima de anima, 328. 50. Nifo, Expositio subtilissima de anima, 328. ch a pter

3. for christ ’s sa ke

I would like to thank Martin Klein, Sven K. Knebel, Christoph Lüthy, Leen Spruit, and the editors of this volume for their comments on earlier versions of this article, and Jo Hedesan for her comments on the epilogue on Van Helmont. I thank Anna Siebold and John Noël Dillon for their linguistic revision of the article. 1. See Traiano Boccalini, Ragguagli di parnaso e scritti minori, ed. Luigi Firpo, vol. 3, Scrittori d’Italia 199 (Bari: Laterza, 1948), 340. 2. A good outline is given in Eric A. Constant, “A Reinterpretation of the Fifth Lateran Council Decree Apostolici Regiminis (1513),” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, no. 2 (2002): 353–79. 3. For Pomponazzi and some of his precursors, see Martin L. Pine, “Pomponazzi and the Problem of ‘Double Truth,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 29, no. 2 (1968): 163–76. 4. For an overview, see Paul Richard Blum, “The Immortality of the Soul,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 211–33. 5. See Theodor W. Köhler, Homo animal nobilissimum: Konturen des spezifisch Menschlichen in der naturphilosophischen Aristoteleskommentierung des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 1, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 94 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 235. 6. See, e.g., Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance, Saggi e testi 21 (Padua: Antenore, 1986), 68–75. With regard to Jesuit authors, some information can be gleaned from Salvador Castellote Cubells, Die Anthropologie des Suarez: Beiträge zur spanischen Anthropologie des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1962), 43–47, 95–96. Mário Santiago de Carvalho, “Intellect et Imagination: La ‘scientia de anima’ selon les ‘Commentaires du Collège des Jésuites de Coimbra,’” in Intellect et imagination dans la philosophie médiévale. Actes du XIe Congrès international de philosophie médiévale de la Société internationale pour l’étude de la philosophie médiévale, S.I.E.P.M., Porto, du 26 au 31 août 2002, vol. 1, Rencontres de philosophie médiévale 11, ed. Maria Cândida da Costa Reis Monteiro Pacheco and José Francisco Meirinhos (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 119–58, here 131–35. 7. A good example of explicit condemnation of the view that brute animals possess reason (rationis capaces esse) may be found in the very influential catalogue of heresies by Alfonso de Castro (OFM). See Alfonso de Castro, Adversus omnes haereses libri XIIII (Paris: Jean Foucher, 1543), 52v. 8. See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summae Theologiae, Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Opera omnia (Leonina) 5–12 (Rome: Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1889– 1906), Ia, q. 79, art. 8, s.c.; henceforth quoted as ST.

notes to pages 56–57 | 267 9. See Theodor Schneider, Die Einheit des Menschen: Die anthropologische Formel “anima forma corporis” im sogenannten Korrektorienstreit und bei Petrus Johannis Olivi. Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte des Konzils von Vienne, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 8 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973). Of course, the Council of Vienne attempted to establish a much more sophisticated notion of the unity of man. I merely wish to show that Aristotelian terminology was closely intertwined with dogmatic Christian vocabulary. 10. See Charles H. Lohr, “Jesuit Aristotelianism and Sixteenth-Century Metaphysics,” in Paradosis: Studies in Memory of Edwin A. Quain, ed. Harry George Fletcher III and Mary Beatrice Schulte (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), 203–20, here 205. See also Andreas Inauen, “Stellung der Gesellschaft Jesu zur Lehre des Aristoteles und des Hl. Thomas vor 1583,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 40 (1916): 201–37. Ulrich Gottfried Leinsle, “Delectus opinionum: Traditionsbildung durch Auswahl in der frühen Jesuitentheologie,” in Im Spannungsfeld von Tradition und Innovation: Festschrift für Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger, ed. Georg Schmuttermayr, Wolfgang Beinert, and Heinrich Petri (Regensburg: Pustet, 1997), 159–75. Dennis A. Bartlett, “The Evolution of the Philosophical and Theological Elements of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: An Historical Study, 1540–1599,” Ph.D., diss., University of San Francisco, 1988. I am well aware that many claims and conclusions of this article are also valid for other religious orders of the time. 11. I rely on László Lukács, ed., Monumenta paedagogica Societatis Iesu, 7 vols., Monumenta historica Societatis Iesu (Rome: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 1965–1992), henceforth quoted as MPSI followed by the volume number and pages. See here MPSI V, 101, 283, 397. I also rely on Cecilio Gómez Rodeles, Mariano Lecina, Frederico Cervos, Vincentio Agusti, and Aloisio Ortiz, eds., Monumenta paedagogica Societatis Jesu, quae primam Rationem studiorum anno 1586 editam praecessere, Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu (Madrid: A. Avrial, 1901), abbreviated MPSI* followed by the page number. 12. On Catholics and the immortality debate, see Sascha Salatowsky, De Anima: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Psychologie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie 43 (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 2006), 246–57. Mário Santiago de Carvalho, “Filosofar na época de Palestrina: Uma introdução à psicologia filosófica dos ‘Comentarios a Aristóteles’ do Colégio das Artes de Coimbra,” Revista filosófica de Coimbra 22 (2002): 389–419. Henrik Wels, Die Disputatio de anima rationali secundum substantiam des Nicolaus Baldelli S. J. nach dem Pariser Codex B.N. lat. 16627: Eine Studie zur Ablehnung des Averroismus und Alexandrismus am Collegium Romanum zu Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2000). 13. See Jos V. M. Welie, “Ignatius of Loyola on Medical Education: Or, Should Today’s Jesuits Continue to Run Health Sciences Schools?” Early Science and Medicine 8, no. 1 (2003): 26–43. See also Christoph Sander, “Medical Topics in the De Anima Commentary of Coimbra (1598) and the Jesuits’ Attitude towards Medicine in Education and Natural Philosophy,” Early Science and Medicine 19, no. 1 (2014): 76–101. 14. See Paul Richard Blum, “Der Standardkurs der katholischen Schulphilosophie im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Aristotelismus und Renaissance: In memoriam Charles B. Schmitt, ed. Eckhard Kessler, Charles H. Lohr, and Walter Sparn, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 40 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 127–48. 15. See Ugo Baldini, “The Development of Jesuit Physics in Italy, 1550–1700: A Structural Approach,” in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 248–79, 251. 16. A good example may be found in Benito Perera’s (SJ, 1535–1610) study program, which explicitly highlights the importance of physical fitness to successful study. See

268 | notes to pages 57–59 MPSI II, 672–74. See also Hubertus Lutterbach, “‘Auf die Kräfte des Leibes achten!’ Die Bedeutung der Gesundheit im Leben und Wirken des Ignatius von Loyola,” Theologie und Philosophie 69 (1994): 556–69. Barea Fermín Sánchez, “The Practical Application of Psychobiological Theory of the Four Humors in the Jesuit Colleges of the Modern Age: A Model of Guidance for Allocating Government Positions,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 30 (2011): 2335–40. Paulo José Carvalho da Silva, “Psicologia organizacional e exercício do desejo na Antiga Companhia de Jesus,” Revista de Estudos da Religião—REVER 6, no. 4 (2006): http://www.pucsp.br/rever/rv4_2006/t_silva.htm (accessed 18 October 2014). Cristiano Casalini, “Umori, troppi umori: Temperamenti e malattie dell’anima nella formazione dei primi gesuiti,” Rassegna di pedagogia 3–4 (2013): 331–50. 17. See Michael Edwards, “Digressing with Aristotle: Hieronymus Dandinus’ De Corpore Animato (1610) and the Expansion of Late Aristotelian Philosophy,” Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 2 (2008): 127–70. 18. See MPSI III, 382–85. Some information can be gleaned from Leinsle, “Delectus opinionum,” 161. Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 133–45. In the critical edition, the DB lists only sixteen propositions; however, the seventeenth proposition appears as a variant in ARSI, Fondo Ges. 656/A, see MPSI III, 385 (apparatus). It seems reasonable to follow this manuscript, since early Jesuits (like Ledesma or Bellarmine) counted seventeen propositions and hence obviously relied on this source, see MPSI* 567; MPSI VI, 5. See also below, note 20. 19. The reading of the edition in MPSI III, 384 differs slightly, omitting “nec in bruto sensitiva et vegetative,” but this addition appears in the critical apparatus in MPSI II, 501 and in MPSI* 550. 20. On Ledesma’s engagement in pedagogy, see Bartlett, Evolution, 55–93. Christoph Sander, “In dubio pro fide: The Fifth Council of the Lateran Decree Apostolici Regiminis (1513) and Its Impact on Early Jesuit Education and Pedagogy,” Educazione. Giornale di pedagogia critica 3, no. 1 (2014): 39–62. 21. MPSI II, 474–78. 22. See Paul Richard Blum, Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism, History of Science and Medicine Library 30/7 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 141–47. Christoph Sander, “The War of the Roses: The Debate between Diego de Ledesma and Benet Perera about the Philosophy Course at the Jesuit College in Rome,” Quaestio 13 (2013): 31–50. 23. See MPSI II, 502–3. 24. See MPSI II, 496–502. 25. This has been suggested by other scholars as well; see MPSI III, 384n2. 26. Perera wrote several commentaries on De anima, but they have not yet been edited. In a document instructing students for the study of philosophy (Documenta quaedam perutilia iis qui in studiis philosophiae cum fructu et sine ullo errore versari student, Cod. Ambros. D496 inf., ff. 25r–31v), Perera remarks that some crucial Christian doctrines cannot be demonstrated by reason alone. One of his examples is Christ’s resurrection, i.e., one of the topics addressed by Ledesma. See fol. 25r: “Licet in ijs quae docet fides christiana perspicuum sit quaedam esse quae non possunt lumine naturae scientifice comprehendi, aut demonstratione probari, cuiusmodi sunt ea quae traduntur . . . de resurectione mortuorum.” An edition of this treatise will appear in a forthcoming article by Cristiano Casalini and myself to be published in History of Universities. 27. See MPSI II, 503. 28. See MPSI II, 497 and 501. 29. See MPSI II, 498 and 502.

notes to pages 59–61 | 269 30. See MPSI II, 503. 31. The commentary is edited only in MPSI* 548–69. It is not dated but bears a strong resemblance to a letter Ledesma wrote in 1574, see MPSI IV, 196. 32. See MPSI* 553. 33. See Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:175. For the Latin text, see also Heinrich Denzinger and Clemens Bannwart, eds., Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (Freiburg: Herder, 1911), 156 (§ 338). 34. MPSI* 553. See below, note 65. 35. MPSI* 554. 36. MPSI* 554: “quia illa anima sensitiva, cum informet corpus, faceret cum materia unum per se, non rationale, sed irrationale; atque adeo homo esset compositus ex illo bruto et anima rationali; sicut si quis diceret ex capra et anima rationali componi hominem.” 37. As a starting point for medieval discussions about the unity of the soul, see Dominik Perler, “How Many Souls Do I Have? Late Aristotelian Debates on the Plurality of Faculties,” in Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De Anima, Philosophes Médiévaux 58, ed. Russell L. Friedman and Jean-Michel Counet (Louvain: Peeters, 2013), 277–96. Thomas M. Ward, “Animals, Animal Parts, and Hylomorphism: John Duns Scotus’s Pluralism about Substantial Form,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 4 (2012): 531–57. 38. See MPSI* 555: “Haec nona et decima, ut alibi dixi, si facienda sit aliqua in melius mutatio, addendo etiam alia, nunc possent omitti; non quod non sint verae et tenendae, sed quod non videantur, ut inter alias debeant collocari.” I have no idea to what other work “alibi” refers. When the DB was reviewed at the Roman College again in 1582, a majority of the professors voted to dismiss propositions (a) and (d), and all agreed to omit (b) and (c). See MPSI VI, 5. 39. See MPSI* 555. 40. See MPSI* 555: “in Sacramento corpus Christi sub specie vini, et sanguinem sub specie panis, animamque sub utraque, vi naturali, ait, illius connexionis et concomitantiae, qua partes Christi, qui iam ex mortuis resurrexit, non amplius moriturus, inter se copulantur.” English translation adapted from Tanner, Decrees, 2:695. Official Latin text also in Denzinger and Bannwart, Enchiridion, 286 (§ 876). 41. For the historical and theological background, see Stephen E. Lahey, “Late Medieval Eucharistic Theology,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 26, ed. Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 499–539. Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theolog y and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 92–96. Robert J. Daly, “The Council of Trent,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 46, ed. Lee Palmer Wandel (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 159–82. 42. See Denzinger and Bannwart, Enchiridion, 53 (§ 117) and MPSI* 555. 43. On the Unigenitus, see Denzinger and Bannwart, Enchiridion, 220 (§ 550). The Barcelona affair is outlined in Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 113–16. Ledesma refers to Mazzolini, Silvestro. Aurea rosa (Venice: J. Leoncinus, 1573), 605 (tr. 3, q. 31). 44. See PA II, 2; HA III, 2 and 19; ST IIIa, q. 54, art. 2. 45. See MPSI* 556. He refers to PA II, 10 (656b21). 46. He refers to ST Ia, q. 119, art. 1, ad 3. 47. A case study is available in David Satran, “Fingernails and Hair: Anatomy and Exegesis in Tertullian,” Journal of Theological Studies 40, no. 1 (1989): 116–20. For an

270 | notes to pages 62–63 overview, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200– 1336, Lectures on the History of Religions 15 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theolog y, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Examples given below are taken from there. For a medieval and early modern account of bodily resurrection and its justification in Aristotelian philosophy, see Bernd Roling, “Die Rose des Paracelsus: Die Idee der Palingenesie und die Debatte um die natürliche Auferstehung zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit,” in Natural History and the Arts, ed. Paul Smith and Karl Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 263–97, here 272–74. 48. Reynolds, Food and Body, 15. 49. See ST IIIa, q. 54, art. 2, co. 50. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 85–131. 51. See MPSI II, 268 (document from 1572). See also Bartlett, Evolution, 75. 52. See Gabriel Biel, Sacri canonis Missae lucidiss. Expositio (Brescia: Thomas Bozzola, 1576), 472 (lc. 53, K). Alfonso Tostado Ribera, Commentaria in Matthaeum: In Sextam Partem, Opera omnia 18 (Venice: Sessa, 1596), 113v (c. 22, q. 244). 53. A comprehensive doxography is given in Antonius Rubio, Commentarii in libros Aristotelis Stagiritae philosophorum principis De anima: Una cum dubiis & quaestionibus hac tempestate in scholis agitari solitis (Cologne: J. Crithius, 1613), 207–10 (lib. 2, c. 3, q. 8). For brevity’s sake I omit further references. 54. See Mazzolini, Aurea rosa, 593–613 (tr. 3, q. 30–34). 55. On the enmity between Cajetan and Prierias and the Pomponazzi affair, see Michael M. Tavuzzi, Prierias: The Life and Works of Silvestro Mazzolini Da Prierio, 1456–1527 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 91–104. 56. See Constant, “A Reinterpretation,” 374–75. Jared Wicks, Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1978), 5–11. 57. See Thomas Cajetan, Commentaria in libros Aristotelis de anima (Venice: Arrivabene, 1514), 14rb (lib. 2, c. 1). Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa is available in the Editio Leonina, see ST (vol. 11), 512 (ad IIIam, q. 54, art. 2): “Haec responsio est apud me ambigua: quia non video necessitatem ponendi sanguinem et alios humores esse partes in actu animalis. Compositio siquidem animalis ex humoribus sufficienter salvari videtur si sit compositio ex humoribus ut materia transeunte. . . . Quia tamen non oportet sapere nisi ad sobrietatem, indubie credendum est, sanctae matris Ecclesiae doctrinam sequendo, sanguinem vere esse in Christi corpore post resurrectionem, quamvis ratio naturalis de hoc non appareat certa.” For a short discussion of the passage, see Marcel Nieden, Organum deitatis: Die Christologie des Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 62 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 218–19. 58. For a general account of blood in Aristotle’s biology, see Alberto Jori, “Aristotele sul ruolo del sangue nei processi della vita,” Medicina nei secoli. Arte e scienza, N. S. 17, no. 3 (2005): 603–25. Cajetan relies on PA II, 3. 59. See ACDF S.O. Censura librorum I, fol. 447r, written by Stephan de Ast (OP). For a transcription, see Claus Arnold, Die römische Zensur der Werke Cajetans und Contarinis (1558–1601): Grenzen der theologischen Konfessionalisierung, Römische Inquisition und Indexkongregation 10 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), 112. Other than Arnold (112n303) claims, Nieden (Organum, 218n148) is right that a part of the crucial paragraphs (see above, note 57) was not taken into the Editio Piana, see Thomas Cajetan and Thomas Aquinas, Tertia Pars Summae Theologiae, Opera omnia (Piana) 12 (Rome: Accoltus, 1570), 174r (q. 54, a. 2).

notes to pages 63–66 | 271 60. See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 146. Cajetan’s account of the Trinity is rejected in MPSI* 557. See also below, note 75. For Cajetan’s role in Jesuit commentaries on the Summa, see MPSI II, 778. 61. On Toletus, see L. Gómez Hellín, “Toledo: Lector de filosofía y teología en el Colegio Romano,” Archivo Teológico Granadino 3 (1940): 1–18. Ricardo Garc´ia Villoslada, Storia del Collegio Romano dal suo inizio (1551) alla soppressione della Compagnia di Gesù (1773), Analecta Gregoriana 66 (Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1954), ad indicem. Mario Scaduto, L’Opera di Francesco Borgia (1565–1572), Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia 5 (Rome: Edizioni “La Civiltà Cattolica” 1992), ad indicem. Toletus lectured on De anima in 1560/61. 62. Ledesma had already died at the date of its publication. See Franciscus Toletus, Commentaria vna cum quaestionibus in tres libros Aristotelis de anima (Venice: Iunta, 1575), 183v. 63. See Hieronymus Nadal, Epistolae P. Hieronymi Nadal ab anno 1546 ad 1577, vol. 2, Monumenta historica Societatis Jesu 15 (Madrid: A. Avrial, 1899), 442. Gómez Hellín, “Toledo,” 18. The commentary on the Summa I refer to is published from manuscripts in Franciscus Toletus, In Summam theologiae S. Thomae Aquinatis enarratio: Ex autographo in bibliotheca Collegii Romani asservato, ed. Josephus Paria, vol. 3 (Rome: Marietti, 1869). Toletus frequently quoted from Ledesma’s manuscripts: see Toletus, In Summam theologiae, 380, 385, 387, 450, 453, 454. One known work by Ledesma concerning the Summa is a table of contents; see Antonio Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum: Ad disciplinas, & ad salutem omnium gentium procurandam, vol. 1 (Venice: Salicatius, 1603), 129. Anton Michelitsch, Kommentatoren zur Summa theologiae des hl. Thomas von Aquin, Thomistenschriften 3 (Graz, Vienna: Styria, 1924), § 445. Ledesma’s (incomplete) commentary on the Summa is partly preserved; see Rome, APUG, Curia, F.C., Ms. n. 126. Toletus’s commentary is partly preserved together with parts of Perera’s commentary on the Summa; see Rome, APUG, Curia, F.C., Ms. n. 1024A–B. 64. Toletus, De anima, 6v–8r, titled “Propositiones aliquot Fide tenendae, quibus vera debet esse Philosophia consentanea.” 65. See Toletus, De anima, 61r and 63v (lib. 2, c. 3, q. 7). 66. See Toletus, De anima, 70r (lib. 2, c. 4, q. 9). For an explicit comparison of the Thomistic and Scotistic view, see Bernhard Sannig, In libros de anima, Schola philosophica Scotistarum, seu cursus philosophicus completus 3 (Prague: Hampel, 1685), 32 (disp. 2, q. 3). 67. Toletus, De anima, 52v (lib. 2, c. 2, q. 4). 68. See Toletus, De anima, 52v–53r. For an analysis, see Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 191–98. For an outline with regard to Aristotle, see Jennifer Whiting, “Living Bodies,” in Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty (eds.), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75–91. 69. Toletus, De anima, 53v. 70. HA III, 19 (521a6–8). See below, note 83. 71. See Toletus, De anima, 53v. With regard to the interpretation of the passage in Toletus, I disagree with Des Chene, Life’s Form, 197n13. 72. See Toletus, De anima, 53v. 73. See Toletus, In Summam theologiae, 140 (IIIa, q. 5, art. 1). 74. See Toletus, In Summam theologiae, 140. 75. See Toletus, In Summam theologiae, 141. Toletus criticizes Cajetan on several points; see Friedrich Stegmüller, “Tolet et Cajétan,” Revue Thomiste 39 (1935): 358–70. 76. See Toletus, In Summam theologiae, 142. Surprisingly, Toletus considered fingernails to be united immediately.

272 | notes to pages 66–68 77. See Domingo de Soto, In quartum sententiarum, vol. 2 (Salamanca: Terranova, 1562), 446a (dist. 44, q. 1, art. 2). 78. For an early Jesuit discussion of the physiology of baptism, see Gregorius de Valentia, Complectens materias tertiae partis ac supplementi D. Thomae, Commentarii theologici 4 (Ingolstadt: Sartorius, 1597), 750 (disp. 4, q. 1, pu. 2). 79. See MPSI V, 61. 80. See ST Ia, q. 27, art. 2. 81. See DGC I, 4 (319b18). David Bostock, Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle’s Physics, Oxford Aristotle Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23, points out that this passage does not even represent Aristotle’s own account of the generation of blood. 82. See Collegium Conimbricense, In duos libros De generatione et corruptione (Coimbra: Anton a Mariz, 1597), 165–81 (lib. 1, c. 4, q. 23–25), followed by further questions on animal generation in particular. 83. See Collegium Conimbricense, De generatione, 175. Already noted in Francisco Suárez, Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem Diui Thomae, vol. 1 (Alcalá: P. Madrigal, 1590), 287a (disp. 15, q. 5, art. 4, s. 6). See Aristotle, Aristotelis de historia animalium, libri IX . . . . , trans. Theodorus Gaza (Basel: Cratander, 1534), 44; and above, note 70. For a likely reason for Gaza’s emendation, see the note in Aristotle, Aristoteles Thierkunde, ed. Hermann Aubert and Friedrich Wimmer (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1868), 357. 84. See Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in Pentateuchum Mosis (Antwerp: Nutius & Meursius, 1616), 703–4 (Lev. 17, 11, and 14). 85. See Collegium Conimbricense, De generatione, 168. 86. See Collegium Conimbricense, De generatione, 166. 87. See Antonius Rubio, Commentarii in libros Aristotelis Stagiritae philosophorum principis De anima: Una cum dubiis & quaestionibus hac tempestate in scholis agitari solitis (Cologne: J. Crithius, 1613), 207–21 (lib. 2, c. 3, q. 8–9). Girolamo Dandino, De corpore animato lib. VII. Luculentus in Aristotelis tres de anima libros commentarius peripateticus (Paris: Chappeletus, 1610), 122–25, 267– 69, 310–12 (lib. 2 [De humoribus], c. 14; lib. 4 [De partibus heterogeneis], c. 31 and c. 54). 88. On this literary genre with regard to De anima, see Bernhard Jansen, “Die scholastische Psychologie vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert,” Scholastik 26 (1951): 342–63. Some examples in note 91 below. 89. Reproduced in Sibylle Appuhn-Radtke, Visuelle Medien im Dienst der Gesellschaft Jesu: Johann Christoph Storer (1620–1671) als Maler der katholischen Reform, Jesuitica 3 (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2000), 316. 90. See also Ulrich Gottfried Leinsle, Dilinganae Disputationes: Der Lehrinhalt der gedruckten Disputationen an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Dillingen 1555–1648, Jesuitica 11 (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2006), 367–68. 91. Most authors give a clear verdict on these two questions; however, it often remains a matter of what is “more probable” and, of course, depends on the author’s particular notion of “being alive.” These are inevitable problems in all statistical accounts ex post. For biographical and bibliographical information, see Carlos Sommervogel, Pierre Bliard, and Augustin de Backer, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus: Nouvelle édition, 11 vols. (Brussels-Paris: Oscar Schepens and Alphonse Picard, 1890–1932), ad indicem. I rely on the following references: Suárez, In tertiam partem, 289–91 (disp. 15, q. 5, art. 4, s. 6–7); Suárez, Commentaria una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis De anima, ed. Salvador Castellote, trans. Carlos Baciero and Luis Baciero, vol. 2, Ediciones críticas de obras filosóficas 1 (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1981), 170, 254 (disp. 4, q. 2, s. 7; q. 8, s. 6). Collegium Conimbricense, De generatione, 169, 172 (lib. 1, c. 4, q. 23, art. 2; q. 24, art. 3). Gregorius de Valentia, Tertiae partis, 4:239, 744 (disp. 1, q. 5, pu. 2;

notes to pages 69–71 | 273 disp. 4, q. 1, pu. 2). Alfonsus Salmeron, De resurrectione, et ascensione Domini, Commentarii in evangelicam historiam et in Acta Apostolorum 11 (Cologne: Hierat, 1604), 34 (tr. 5). Dandino, De corpore animato, 122 (lib. 2, c. 14). Rubio, De anima, 212, 219 (lib. 2, c. 3, q. 8; q. 9). Cornelius a Lapide, In Pentateuchum, 703–4 (Lev. 17, 11). Gabriel Vázquez, Commentaria ac disputationes in tertiam partem Sancti Thomae, vol. 1 (Antwerp: Belleros, 1621), 314 (disp. 36, c. 7). Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, Universa philosophia (Lyon: L. Prost, 1624), 480–81 (DA, disp. 1, s. 6). Rodrigo de Arriaga, Cursus philosophicus (Antwerp: Moretus, 1632), 627–28 (DA, disp. 1, s. 9, subsect. 2–3). Rodrigo de Arriaga, Disputationes theologicae in tertiam partem D. Thomae, Universi cursus theologici 7 (Antwerp: Moretus, 1643), 388 (disp. 35, s. 1). Francisco de Oviedo, Complectens libros De anima et Metaphysicam, Cursus philosophicus 2 (Lyon: Philippi Borde, Laurentii Arnaud, Petri Borde & Guilielmi Barbier, 1663), 12–13 (DA, contr.1, pu. 4). Tomas Compton Carleton, Cursus philosophicus universus: Additis indicibus necessariis (Antwerp: Henricus & Cornelius Verdussen, 1697), 470–71 (DA, disp. 2, s. 3; disp. 3, s. 1). Richard Lynch, Physica sive scientia de corpore naturali, Universa philosophia scholastica 2 (Lyon: P. Borde, L. Arnaud & C. Rigaud, 1654), 358; 361 (lib. 10, tr. 2, c. 1). 92. Arraiga’s opinion, e.g., is by no means an “exception,” as Des Chene, Life’s Form, 197, claims. 93. The problem of hair is more complicated, but it also appears in theological questions. I must omit this here and refer the reader to note 78. 94. The importance of the Tridentinum is documented by the fact that freshly inaugurated Jesuit theologians received three books: the Summa of Aquinas, the Bible, and the Acts of the Tridentine Council. See MPSI V, 377, for the Ratio studiorum of 1599. 95. The same holds true for the lower faculties of the soul. See above, note 6. 96. See Compton Carleton, Cursus, 469 (DA, disp. 2, s. 3). 97. See Lynch, Physica, 360 (lib. 10, tr. 2, c. 1). 98. See Francesco Collio, De sanguine Christi Libri quinque (Milan: Collegium Ambrosianum, 1617), especially the first book. On Physica sacra, see Bernd Roling, Physica sacra: Wunder, Naturwissenschaft und historischer Schriftsinn zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 99. See Franciscus Vallesius, De iis, quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacra philosophia, liber singularis (Turin: N. Bevilacqua, 1587), 94–99 (c. 5). Vicentius Moles, Philosophia naturalis sacrosancti corporis Iesu Christi (Antwerps: H. Aertssens, 1639), 154 (c. 9, dub. 4). 100. Eckhard Kessler, “The Intellective Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 485–534, here 507. 101. See Joannes Tardinus, Disquisitio physiologica de pilis (Tours: G. Linocerius, 1609), 161–67. I could not find any biographical information on the author, except that he was enrolled at Montpellier in 1595; see Marcel Gouron, ed., Matricule de l’Université de médecine de Montpellier, 1503–1599, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance 25 (Geneva: Droz, 1957), 203. For the earliest literature on hair, see Burkard Eble, Die Lehre von den Haaren in der gesammten organischen Natur, vol. 2 (Vienna: Heubner, 1831), 416–21. 102. Roger K. French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 298. 103. See William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium quibus accedunt quædam de partu, de membranis ac humoribus uteri & de conceptione (London: Du-Gardianis, 1651), 151 and 154 (exerc. 51 and 70). 104. Thomas Wright, William Harvey: A Life in Circulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9.

274 | notes to pages 71–72 105. See as a starting point Ziller C. Camenietzki, “Jesuits and Alchemy in the Early Seventeenth Century: Father Johannes Roberti and the Weapon-Slave Controversy,” Ambix 48, no. 2 (2001): 83–101. Mark A. Waddell, “The Perversion of Nature: Johannes Baptista Van Helmont, the Society of Jesus, and the Magnetic Cure of Wounds,” Canadian Journal of Histroy 38, no. 2 (2003): 179–98. The controversy is a very complicated affair, involving many more religious, political, and philosophical aspects than those mentioned here. For brevity’s sake I shall focus on a superficial analysis of the question of blood in this debate, in order to illustrate how scholastic theological discussion influenced medical censorship. 106. On Van Helmont’s complex notion of blood and its imagination, see Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine, Cambridge Monographs on the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 120. Georgiana D. Hedesan, “Paracelsian Medicine and Theory of Generation in ‘Exterior Homo,’ a Manuscript Probably Authored by Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644),” Medical History 58, no. 3 (2014): 375–96, 392–93. See Jan Baptista van Helmont, Ortus medicinae, id est, Initia physicae inaudita: progressus medicinae novus, in morborum ultionem ad vitam longam (Amsterdam: L. Elsevier, 1652), 617, § 163: “Igitur in sanguine sua est phantasia, quae quia potentius ibidem viget, quam in rebus caeteris, ideo scriptura alto elogio [see ibid. 613, § 130], sanguinem adhuc coctum et edi promptum animatum vocat.” 107. When Van Helmont’s prosecutors asked him where he got his biblical references from, he replied “Genesis” (i.e., 9:4) and “Deuteronomium” (i.e., 12:16). See Corneille Broeckx, “Interrogatoires du Docteur J. B. van Helmont sur le magnétisme animal, publiés pour la première fois,” Annales de l’Académie d’archéologie de Belgique 13 (1856): 306–50, 318 (ad §13). In Van Helmont’s reading, the Bible also attributes life to blood after it has left the body. On the biblical prohibition of drinking animal blood or consuming bloody meat, see David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 17–28. 108. On this process, see Robert Halleux, “Le procès d’inquisition du chimiste JeanBaptiste van Helmont (1578–1644): Les enjeux et les arguments,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 148, no. 2 (2004): 1059–86. 109. See Corneille Broeckx, “Notice sur le manuscrit causa J. B. Helmontii, déposé aux Archives Archiépiscopales de Malines,” Annales de l’Académie d’archéologie de Belgique 9 (1852): 277–327, here 316–17 (ad §13–14). Although the affair originated from a conflict with the Jesuit Roberti, Jesuit theologians admittedly did not dominate the investigation itself. See above, note 10. 110. Van Helmont should renounce his views as follows: “Damno ut rusticos priscorum haereticorum errores, omnem creaturam vivere et sentire in sanguine extravenato esse phantasiam.” See Broeckx, “Notice sur le manuscrit causa J. B. Helmontii,” 306. In the censura of 1630 it is said: “Posterior de inexistentia animae in sanguine extravenato et per ignem cocto et per fotum plane putrido est in philosophia haeresis et delirium contra experientiam commentum.” See ibid., 299 (ad §13). And in 1634: “Nonne haec propositio haereseos damnata est ante 1200 annos a S. Hieronymo, lib. 1. Comment, in Cap. 8. Matth. ubi ait: Error est Haereticorum, omnia putare animantia.” See ibid., 316 (ad §9). 111. See Broeckx, “Interrogatoires,” 317 (ad § 11) and 318 (ad § 13). 112. See Broeckx, “Interrogatoires,” 325 (ad § 11 and § 14). 113. See Broeckx, “Interrogatoires,” 344. 114. See Broeckx, “Interrogatoires,” 319 (ad § 17) and 343. See Broeckx, “Notice,” 302 (ad § 22). It is beyond the scope of this epilogue to dwell on these implications in

notes to pages 72–74 | 275 more detail. It must be admitted, however, that Van Helmont also discussed Christ’s blood in some of the condemned passages. 115. See Johannes Wiggers, In tertiam partem Diui Thomae Aquinatis commentaria: A quaestione I vsque ad quaestionem XXVI (Leuven: Ioannes Oliverius & Cornelius Coenestenius, 1631), 56, § 12 (q. 5, art. 2, dub. 1). Wiggers’s own opinion remains ambiguous, but surely only with regard to blood within the body. He concludes that Christ’s blood was united with the Logos and hence is an integral part of the human body, even assuming that it was not informed by the soul. 116. See Wiggers, In tertiam partem, 56. 117. Pagel, Van Helmont, 120, fails to acknowledge this “turn.” 118. See Blas humanum, Potestas medicaminum, and De lithiasi, in Van Helmont, Ortus, 146, § 22; 385, § 57. Jan Baptista van Helmont, Opuscula Medica Inaudita: I. De Lithiasi. II. De Febribus. III. De Humoribus Galeni. IV. De Peste (Cologne: Kalcoven, 1644), 209, § 93. See also De febribus (van Helmont, Opuscula Medica Inaudita, 18, § 22). 119. Van Helmont, Opuscula Medica Inaudita, 209, § 93 (De lithiasi): “Denique nec cruor, nec ipse sanguis arteriarum, sensu, tactuque animali pollent, licet synpathetice sentiant, etiam extravenati. . . . Quaesitum ergo hactenus a Theologis, an cruor ab anima informetur? Putem ego, sub correctione melioris judicii, nil informari ab anima animantis, quod non participet de anima sensitiva. . . . Ut ergo aliquid sit ab anima informatum, necesse est, ut vivat, et sentiat, tanquam vitae ipsius subjectum.” The last sentence, as I understand it, makes clear that, for Van Helmont, in order to conceive of any animal part as “being informed by the soul,” that part must live and sense in the same way as the animal of which it is a part lives and senses. It seems that Van Helmont’s distinction between “cruor” and “sanguis” not only represents the distinction between “venous” and “arterial blood,” but also between “nutritive” and “vitalizing blood”; see Van Helmont, Ortus, 146, § 21. Guido Giglioni, Immaginazione e malattia: Saggio su Jan Baptiste van Helmont (Milan: Angeli, 2000), 50. This distinction, however, closely resembles the distinction Cajetan had read into Aristotle’s PA; see above notes 57 and 58. 120. On the “sympathy of blood,” see Brooke Holmes, “Sympathy between Hippocrates and Galen: The Case of Galen’s Commentary on Epidemics II,” in Epidemics in Context: Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates in the Arabic Tradition, Scientia Graeco-Arabica 9, ed. Peter E Pormann (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 49–70. 121. See Robert Halleux, “Le procès d’inquisition du chimiste Jean-Baptiste van Helmont.” ch a pter

4. rena issa nce psychology

1. See, for instance, the case of Renaissance disputes on the disciplinary status of psychology. About this, see: Paul J. J. M. Bakker, “Natural Philosophy, Metaphysics or Something in Between? Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pomponazzi, and Marcantonio Genua on the Nature and Place of the Science of the Soul,” in Mind, Cognition and Representation. The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, ed. Paul J. J. M. Bakker and Hans J. M. M. Thijssen (Aldershot, 2007), 151–77. 2. For an analysis of new questions and elements of novelties in Renaissance psychology see: Fernando Vidal, Les sciences de l’âme: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2006); Marco Lamanna, “On the Early History of the Psychology,” Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 38 (2010): 291–314; Davide Cellamare, “Anatomy and the Body in Renaissance Protestant Psychology,” Early Science and Medicine 19.4 (2014): 341–64; Davide Cellamare, “Psychology in the Age of Confessionalisation: A Case Study on the Interaction between Psychology and Theology c. 1517-c. 1640,” Ph.D. diss., Radboud University, Nijmegen, 2015.

276 | notes to pages 74–77 3. In the texts I examine, Vallesius and Casmann use a variety of different terms to refer, broadly speaking, to a power of the soul higher than sensation. These include, for instance: “intelligence” (intelligentia), “understanding” (intellectus), “reason” (ratio), and “mind” (mens). However, Vallesius and Casmann usually call this power “reason.” Therefore and for the sake of simplicity, I will use the term “reason” (and the related expressions: “rational”/”rationality”) throughout my study to indicate the power of the soul debated by Vallesius and Casmann. 4. On this, see José M. L. Piñero and Francisco Calero, Las “Controversias” (1556) de Francisco Valles y la Medicina Renacentista (Madrid: CSIC, 1988), 3–10. An extensive list of Vallesius’s medical and philosophical works is available in Marcial Solana, Historia de la Philosophia Española, vol. 2 (Madrid: Real Academia de ciencias exactas, físicas y naturales, 1941), 299–307. 5. Vallesius says he wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s De anima but never published it: “tametsi cum haec scribo, commentaria in libros de anima, scripta multis ante annis, nondum sunt in lucem emissa” (Franciscus Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, sive De iis quae in Libris Sacris physice scripta sunt, Editio Sexta, Lugundi, Ioannis Antonii Huguetan, et Marc. Ant. Ravaud, 1652, 348). On Vallesius’s work on Aristotle’s Meteorolog y IV, see Craig Martin, “Vallés and the Renaissance Reinterpretation of Aristotle’s Meteorologica IV as a Medical Text,” Early Science and Medicine 7,1 (2002): 1–29. 6. A passage at the beginning of the discussion in the Sacra Philosophia suggests that Plutarch’s text is Vallesius’s source of information about the different positions taken by ancient authors in the debate over animal reason: “De qua quaestione Plutarchus libello de animalium industria optime mihi videtur disputasse” (Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 273). Vallesius seems to mean a passage in Plutarch’s De sollertia animalium; the English translation is as follows: “There is, in fact, a work of Strato, the natural philosopher, which proves that it is impossible to have sensation at all without some action of the intelligence. Often, it is true, while we are busy reading, the letters may fall on our eyes, or words may fall on our ears, which escape our attention since our minds are intent on other things; but later the mind recovers, shifts its course, and follows up every detail that had been neglected; and this is the meaning of the saying ‘mind has sight and mind has hearing; everything else is deaf and blind,’ indication that the impact on eyes and ears brings no perception if the understanding is not present” (Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold, eds., Plutarch, De sollertia animalium [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957], 131–32). The passage in Greek can be found in Gregorius N. Bernardakis, ed., Plutarch, Moralia (Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), 6. Plutarch appears to refer to fragment 112 of Strato of Lampsacus (335c.-269c. BCE), which can be found in Fritz Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles (Basel: Schwabe, 1978), V, 34. As Sharples notes, Strato explains the activities of the soul with the idea of pneuma or spirit. The spirit extends throughout the body from the head. Because Strato was influenced by contemporary anatomical and medical views, he observes that the functions of the nerves always involve psychic spirit extending from the brain. From this, Strato infers that all sensation involves reasoning (Robert W. Sharples, “The Peripatetic School,” in From Aristotle to Augustine: Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. David Furley, vol. 2 [London-New York: Routledge, 2003], 162–63). On the debate on animal minds in antiquity, see: Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); especially pages 45–47 of this book devoted to Strato. 7. “Itaque, huc controversia vertitur an possit esse sensus sine mente” (Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 274). 8. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 274: “Videtur autem non posse mens separari a sensu, quandoquidem, ut Hippocrates dicit, qui parte aliqua corporis dolentes dolorem non

notes to pages 77–80 | 277 sentiunt, iis mens aegrotat. Si igitur cum mens aegrotat alienataque est, ita ut sensuum organis intenta non sit, etiamsi dolendi accedat causa, non sentitur, multo minus sentiri possit res ulla alia earum quae minus violenter sensum pulsant, nisi adsit mens, quod etiam in nobis ipsis experimur. Nam, cum re aliqua attentius cogitamus, plurima obversantur ob oculos et aures quae neque videmus neque audimus. Si igitur animantia mente praedita, cum mens non attendit, non sentiunt, multo minus sentire possent quae penitus essent amentia. Quod si amentia sentire non possunt, neque sensum possunt habere. Non potest igitur sensus esse sine mente.” 9. Aristotle, De anima II. 1, 413a21-b10, trans. W. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 10. The Greek text by Hippocrates can be found in Hipp. Aph. II, 6, in Œuvres Complètes d’Hippocrate, ed. Emile Littré (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1884), IV, 471; Galen, “Hippocratis Aphorismi, et Galeni in eos Commentarii,” in Claudii Galenii Opera Omnia, ed. C. G. Kühn (Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1965), 460. 11. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 275: “Praeterea, ad eandem facultatem pertinent bene et male aliquid facere. Non enim evenit male videre auribus, aut male audire oculis, sed utcumque videre oculorum est, et audire aurium. Igitur desipere, aut insanire, eiusdem est cuius sapere et bene ratiocinari. . . . Videntur autem bruta nonnunquam decipi, quod quidem facit artem venandi iucundissimam, quia multis modis illis imponitur, etiamsi non paucis illa utantur stratagematis ad vitandum insidias. Videntur etiam aliquando insanire, nam simiae ebrietate corripiuntur, et ut alios morbos quam plurimos, ita hydrophobiam, seu rabiem pati solent canes maxime, sed et equus, bos, et asinus, et camelus, quem morbum medici ponunt in maniae generibus. Si igitur bruta possunt delirare, possint et ratiocinari. Nam delirium laesio rationis est.” 12. “Certe rationem aliquam esse brutis negare non possumus citra proterviam” (Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 275). 13. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 276: “multis tamen constat argumentis, hanc brutorum rationem longe diversam esse ab humana mente, neque maioris vel minoris solum ratione differre, sed ipso rationis esse, atque ita ut rationis et rationalis nomen de utrisque non univoce dicatur sed analogice.” 14. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 276: “Primum quidem, quia mens humana, natura sua et ex sese nata est ratiocinari simpliciter et circa quidvis. . . . Brutorum . . . vero nullum ratiocinari natum est, nisi circa quiddam, quo scilicet naturali quodam instinctu. . . . Igitur homo simpliciter rationalis est, brutorum quocunque circa quidpiam, quapropter non simpliciter sed quodam modo et analogia quadam.” 15. Vallesius does not seem to state his opinion on the question of whether brute animals are capable of forming concepts of universals. 16. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 277: “qui ab homine tollit liberum arbitrium, nihil aliud quam belluam ipsum facit.” The conception according to which animals are analogous to men, in that they are capable of forming ideas related to essential life functions has a very long history. For instance, it is found in Aristotle, History of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 588b4–588b7: “In the great majority of animals there are traces of psychical qualities which are more markedly differentiated in the case of human beings. For just as we pointed out resemblances in the physical organs, so in a number of animals we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to sagacity.” Vallesius thinks that animals and

278 | notes to pages 80–81 human beings differ because the former perform essential life functions as a result of their instinct, while the latter by means of deliberate thought. This idea too was very popular in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century. It is found, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Commissio Leonina, Roma 1888–1906), Ia, qu. 83, art. I. 307: “respondeo dicendum quod homo est liberi arbitrii; alioquin frustra essent consilia, exhortationes, praecepta, prohibitiones, praemia et poenae. Ad cuius evidentiam considerandum est quod quaedam agunt absque iudicio, sicut pais movetur deorsum, et similiter omnia cognitione carentia. Quaedam autem agunt iudicio, sed non libero, sicut animalia bruta. Iudicat enim ovis videns lupum, eum esse fugiendum naturali iudicio et non libero; quia non ex collatione, sed ex naturali instinctu hoc iudicat. Et simile est de quolibet iudicio brutorum animalium. Sed homo agit iudicio quia per vim cognoscitivam iudicat aliquid esse fugiendum vel prosequendum. Sed quia iudicium istud non est ex natuali instinctu in particulari operabili, sed ex collatione quadam rationis, ideo agit libero iudicio, potens in diversa ferri.” The reception of this idea in the sixteenth century is nicely illustrated by Gregor Reisch, Natural Philosophy Epitomised: Books 8–11 of Gregor Reisch’s Philosophical Pearl (1503), ed. Andrew Cunningham and Sachiko Kusukawa (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 206: “In this way a sheep eliciting an unsensed hostility from the species of a wolf, such as colour, shape, and so on, flees from it, according to Avicenna in book 6 of On natural things. This occurs either through a natural instinct, if by chance the sheep has not already experienced the deceit of the wolf; or through experience: so a donkey, approaching a trap it has recently been endangered by, fears falling in and turns away.” 17. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 277: “Praeterea, nihil eorum de quibus ratiocinatur aliorum animalium ullum est incorporeum aut aeternum, sed omnia sensibilia et caduca: nam de quaerendo victu, de ineundo coitu, de nutrienda, et conservanda prole, de fugiendo dolore, de vita valetudineque tuenda, de corporis, vero. Et divinis, aut immortalitate, nulla illis subest cogitatio. . . . Quapropter ignorantissimi sunt qui timent, si sensum cum quadam ratione brutis tribuant, ne illa donent immortalitate, et qui, quia bruta ratione quadam pollent, vocent in discrimen humanae mentis immortalitatem. Non enim quia ratiocinantur utcumque immortales esse homines cognoscuntur, sed quia de incorporeis, aeternis et divinis.” 18. Vallesius, De Sacra Philosophia, 215; my italics: “Differentia propria hominis est sapientiae esse capacem; atque quoniam sapientia cum vera virtute coniuncta necessario est et haec cum Dei timore, omnium optime definivit hominem Ecclesiastes in verbis ultimis suae concionis, dicens: Deum time et mandata eius serva, hoc est enim omnis homo; quod nihil aliud est dictu quam homo. Homo enim est animal capax sapientiae verae, quae in timore Dei et legis eius meditatione consistit. Quanto autem proprius accedat ad hominis essentiam differentia haec, quam rationale, inde intelligens, quod ut alibi indicavimus, bruta omnia rationabilia etiam quodammodo et circa quaedam sunt, et intelligentiam quandam habent; sapientiae vero nullatenus sunt capacia. Itaque, hominem esse animal sapientiae capax multo cum minori ambiguitate dicitur quam animal rationale.” 19. The Sacra Philosophia appeared in Turin in 1587; it was then published in three editions in Lyon (1588, 1592, 1595) and reprinted in 1602 in Frankfurt am Main. The Sacra Philosophia appears to have first come under the scrutiny of the Congregation for the Index in 1597. In 1599 a censura was entrusted to Luis Ystella and Vincenzo Bonincontro. The book was prohibited by the Master of the Sacred Palace in 1603 with the clause “donec corrigatur.” The Congregation criticized Vallesius for interpreting the divine spirit in terms of fire animating the primordial waters, for proposing naturalistic explanations for miraculous events, and for defending the rationality of brute animals. On this case of censorship and for an edition of the documents produced by the

notes to pages 81–83 | 279 Congregation, see Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit, eds., Church and Modern Science: Documents from the Archives of the Roman Congregation of the Holy Office and the Index (Rome: Libreria editrice vaticana 2009), vol. 1, 2435–46. 20. Melanchthon relied on Galen’s On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato for the anatomical account of the human body given in the Commentarius (1540). On Melanchthon’s use of Galen, see Jürgen Helm, “Die Galenrezeption in Philipp Melanchthons De anima (1540/1552),” Medizinhistorisches Journal 31 (1996): 298–321. In contrast, the revised edition of Melanchthon’s book (the Liber de anima of 1552) uses Vesalian anatomy. See Vivian Nutton, “The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine,” in The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. Gordon R. Dunstan (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 146; and Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 75–123. On Melanchthon’s and some of his followers’ use of anatomy in psychology, see Davide Cellamare, “Anatomy and the Body in Renaissance Protestant Psychology,” Early Science and Medicine 19.4 (2014): 341–64. 21. Philip Melanchthon’s Commentarius de anima, ex Officina Petri Seitz (Wittenberg 1540), 1v: “Itaque, haec pars non solum de anima, sed etiam de tota natura hominis inscribi debebat.” 22. Otto Casmann, Psychologia Anthropologica sive Animae Humanae Doctrina (Hannau, 1594), 1. On Casmann’s anthropology, see Uwe Kordes, “Otho Casmanns Anthropologie (1549/96). Frömmigkeit, Empirie und der Ramismus,” in Spätrenaissance-Philosophie in Deutschland 1570–1650: Entwürfe zwischen Humanismus und Konfessionalisierung, okkulten Traditionen und Schulmetaphysik, ed. Martin Mulsow (Tübingen: Niemeyer 2009), 195–210; Simone de Angelis, Anthropologien. Genese und Konfiguration einer ‘Wissenschaft vom Menschen‘ in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin 2010), 198–203. 23. Philip Melanchthon’s De anima defined the soul as follows: “Anima rationalis est spiritus intelligens, nec extinguitur cum a corpore discessit, sed immortalis est. Haec definitio non habet physicae rationes, sed sumpta est ex Sacris literis” (Melanchthon, Commentarius de anima, 15v). 24. Casmann proposes this view in the question “An hominis animam recte et perspicue dicatur spiritus, pro Melanchthone contra Scaligerum” (Casmann, Psychologia, 60). In this part of his book, Casmann defends Melanchthon’s notion of the soul against the criticisms of Julius Caesar Scaliger. In Exotericae Exercitationes 307, 49, Scaliger describes Melanchthon’s definition of the soul as follows: “Omnino vero causia digna, aut vomere definitio animae rationalis, quam talem affert. Spiritus intelligens. Videtur haec e culina quapiam monachali simul cum fumo, aut nidore erupisse in oculos nostrorum deambulatorum” (Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exotericarum Exercitationum Liber XV, De subtilitate ad Hiraronymum Cardanum [Paris 1557], 421). 25. Casmann, Psychologia, 9: “Nostra aetate, Franciscus Vallesius, in Sacra sua Philosophia, negare videtur rationale et irrationale esse differentiam bruti et hominis. Omnia bruta affirmans esse rationalia et intelligentia praedita.” 26. Casmann, Psychologia, 14: “Fallitur cum Vallesio prava versione quisquis ita legendum existimaverit. Veritas enim Hebraea sic habet: quis indidit praecordiis sapientiam, aut quis dedit menti intelligentiam. Nulla hic mentio galli. Hominis et mentis tota est.” 27. Casmann, Psychologia, 15: “Hippocratem citato in loco de hominibus loqui arbitror, ita ut generalis illa non sit animalium, sed hominum duntaxat. . . . Goclenius in contextu, inquit, Greco est non νοῦς sed γνώμη; qua voce Hippocrates hic intelligit non rationem, sed sensum communem, vel judicium de sensatione, quod sensus interioris est, qui communis dicitur. Quae sententia valde probabilis est.”

280 | notes to pages 83–86 28. Casmann refers to Goclenius’ commentary on Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes 307, 5. In his Adversaria ad Exotericas aliquot Iulius Caesaris Scaligeri, Goclenius writes: “Hippocrates quidem in Aphorism., ait: qui aliqua parte corporis dolent, et dolorem tamen non sentient, iis γνώμη laborat; sed γνώμη non recte redditum est ab interprete Mens. γνώμη enim ibi non significant animam ipsam seu mentem, sed iudicium de sensatione, quod est sensus intimi, quem communem dicimus, qui sentit et discernit, quid exteriores sensus patiantur et percipiant” (Rudolph Goclenius, Adversaria Ad Exotericas Aliquot Julii Caesaris Scaligeri acutissimi Philosophi exercitationes [Marburg 1594], 52). 29. Casmann, Psychologia, 15–16. 30. Casmann, Psychologia, 17: “Respondeo verbis Vallesii ad hoc Vallesianum argumentum, ex pag. 433. Sacrae philos. Longe abest ut, quia delirare possunt, istae beluae habent mentem humanae similem. Nam ne homines quidem delirant secundum eam mentem, quae illos separat a brutis, sed secundum internos sensus, quos cum illis habent communes, imaginationem et sensitivam, quam nonnulli vocant cogitativam et aestimativam. Nam cum phrenitis et melancholia morbi sint corporales affectiones, non possunt per se laedere nisi facultates corporales. Mentem vero laesio non attingit, nisi ex accidenti, et ratione ἐνεργείας impeditae, quia dum in corpore est sensibus utitur.” 31. Casmann, Psychologia, 7–8: “Si anima rationalis est forma homini dans suum esse, omnipotens etiam divina natura in Christo erit forma completa Christo . . . suum dans esse. Parium enim par ratio est. In duabus autem diversis naturis et earum in unam hypostasin unione pariter Christus . . . et homo . . . conveniunt. At vero omnipotentem Dei naturam esse Christi Immanuelis . . . formam plenam, confidenter asseverare non ausim, cum ad formam hanc Christi Theandricam (ut ita dicam) tam ratio humanitatis, quam divinitatis in unione personali concurrat. Satuis itaque foret mea sic ferente opinione, formam hominis in unione illa animae et corporis humani in unam hypostasin statuere.” 32. Casmann’s Christologizing psychology echoes contemporary discussions on the double nature of Christ. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Christology became central to debates over the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This theological dispute is also related to the transformation of important philosophical notions, such as “body,” “matter,” “place,” and “space.” On this, see Cees Leijenhorst and Christoph Lüthy, “The Erosion of Aristotelianism. Confessional Physics in Early Modern Germany and the Dutch Republic,” in The Dynamics of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Cees Leijenhorst, Christoph Lüthy, and Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen (Leiden: Brill 2002), 375–411. 33. Casmann, Psychologia, 8: “Animam habere bruta concedimus, sed non spiritum seu essentiam spiritualem, logicam, aeternam et per se subsistentem; neque unio hypostatica proprie est in brutorum corpore et anima; siquidem est diversarum naturarum, corporeae et spiritualis. At anima brutorum e corpore orta in corpus immersa est; non quidem proprie spiritus, sed corporeum quid e corpore ortum, non per se subsistens. Sed in corpore et cum corpore evanescens.” 34. Casmann, Psychologia, 11: “Eorum mens et intelligentia est, qui sunt ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei creati. Intellectus enim et ratio vi imaginis divinae inest animae. . . . Unde etiam videre est ratione illa tantum praedita esse quae spirituali essentia, per se subsistenti et immortali consistant. Atqui attestantibus sacris literis, homines ad similitudinem et imaginem Dei sunt conditi, non vero bruta ulla.”

notes to pages 89–92 | 281 ch a pter 5. hum a n & a nim a l gener ation in rena issa nce medica l debates

This study is based on my Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life, and the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2011). My warmest thanks go to Clare Hirai and Roberto Lo Presti for their help in its preparation. 1. See among others Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” and Eckhard Kessler, “The Intellective Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84 and 485–534, respectively. 2. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 2.3, 736b27–29: “It remains, then, that the intellect alone comes from the outside and that it alone is divine; for the bodily actuality has nothing to do with its actuality.” See Paul Moraux, “À propos du nous thurathen chez Aristote,” in Autour d’Aristote, ed. Augustin Mansion (Louvain: Publications universitaires de Louvain, 1955), 255–95; Anthony Preus, “Science and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals,” Journal of the History of Biolog y 3 (1970): 1–52, 32–34. 3. Aristotle, On the Soul, 2.1, 412a30–35: “This is why the soul is an actuality of the first kind of a natural body having life potentially in it; the body so described is a body that is organized.” 4. On the immortality of the soul in the Renaissance, see especially Giovanni Di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1963). 5. On Fernel, see Hiro Hirai, Le concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: De Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 83–103; Hirai, Medical Humanism, 46–79. 6. I have used the translation by John M. Forrester, Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2005), which is based on the second edition revised by Fernel himself, De abditis rerum causis libri duo denuo (Paris, 1551). 7. On the Hippocratic notion of divine, see Hippocrates, Prognostic, 1, in Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, Émile Littré (Paris: Baillière, 1839–1861), II: 112; Antoine Thivel, “Le ‘divin’ dans la Collection hippocratique,” in La Collection hippocratique et son rôle dans l’histoire de la médecine (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 57–76; Robert J. Hankinson, “Magic, Religion and Science: Divine and Human in the Hippocratic Corpus,” Apeiron 31 (1998): 1–34. 8. Hippocrates, On Fleshes, 1 (Littré, VIII: 584). 9. Fernel, De abditis rerum causis, 2.4 (Forrester, 450–52): “Ut autem omnis ambigendi occasio desit, audi quaeso quid libro de uteri conceptu divine pronunciet: Anima est universitatis animae defluxus e caelica regione descendens, scientiae capax; . . . terrestribus relictis omnium suprema petit, caelicae divinitatis particeps supercaelestem locum saepius contemplans, una omnium rerum moderatori assistit. Isthaec dilucide commonstrant, Galeni sententiam nihilo a Platonis et Aristotelis dogmate descivisse: sed summa illos consensione animam nostram simplicem, incorpoream et immortalem sanxisse.” See Ps.-Galen, An animal id, quod in utero est, 4, in Galeni opera omnia, ed. Karl G. Kühn (Leipzig, 1821–1833; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), XIX: 171–72. On this treatise, see Hermann Wagner, Galeni qui fertur libellus Ei zôion to kata gastros (Marburg: Noske, 1914); Konstantinos Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World (London: Duckworth, 2002), 201–13. 10. Fernel, De abditis rerum causis, 2.4 (Forrester, 448–50). 11. On Fernel’s notion of spirit, see Hirai, Medical Humanism, 67–72. 12. Fernel, De abditis rerum causis, 2.7 (Forrester, 488–92). 13. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 2.3, 736b33–737a7: “In every seed there is that which causes it to be fertile, that is, what is called ‘heat.’ This heat is neither fire nor any such faculty but the pneuma, which is enclosed in the seed and a foamlike body. Nature in

282 | notes to pages 92–95 this pneuma is analogous to the element of the stars.” This passage became the symbol of Renaissance astral medicine. See Hiro Hirai, “The New Astral Medicine,” in A Companion to Astrolog y in the Renaissance, ed. Brendan Dooley (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 267–86. 14. On Schegk, see Christoph Sigwart, “Jakob Schegk, Professor der Philosophie und Medizin,” Kleine Schriften (Freiburg: Mohr, 1889), 256–91; Sachiko Kusukawa, “Lutheran Uses of Aristotle: A Comparison between Jacob Schegk and Philip Melanchthon,” in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 169–88. 15. I have used the following edition: Jacob Schegk, De plastica seminis facultate libri tres (Strasburg, 1580). On the notion of formative power, see Hirai, Medical Humanism, 19–45 and 80–103. 16. See William B. Hunter Jr., “The Seventeenth Century Doctrine of Plastic Nature,” Harvard Theological Review 43 (1950): 197–213; Guido Giglioni, “Spiritus Plasticus between Pneumatology and Embryology (A Note about Comenius’ Concept of Spirit),” Studia comeniana et historica 24 (1994): 83–90. 17. See Walter Pagel, New Light on William Harvey (Basel: Karger, 1976), 100–103; Hiro Hirai, “Kircher’s Chymical Interpretation of the Creation and Spontaneous Generation,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (New York: Science History Publications, 2007), 77–87. 18. See Robert A. Greene, “Henry More and Robert Boyle on the Spirit of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 451–74, 460; Daniel P. Walker, Il concetto di spirito o anima in Henry More e Ralph Cudworth (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1986), 47–57; Alexander Jacob, “The Spirit of Nature as ‘Hylarchic’ Principle of the Universe,” in Alexander Jacob, Henry More’s Manual of Metaphysics (Hildesheim: Olms, 1995), i–xlix. 19. Schegk, De plastica seminis facultate, 1, sig. A1r–v. 20. See Plato, Phaedrus, 246c. 21. Schegk, De plastica seminis facultate, 1, sig. B4v–5r. On the Neoplatonic idea of the soul’s vehicle, see Eric R. Dodds, Proclus: The Elements of Theolog y (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), 315–21; Daniel P. Walker, “The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 119–33; John F. Finamore, Iamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985); Maria Di Pasquale Barbanti, Ochemapneuma e phantasia nel neoplatonismo (Catania: Cuecm, 1998). 22. See Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 2.3, 737a13–16: “Therefore we ought not to expect it always to come out again from the female or to form any part of the embryo that has taken shape from it; the case resembles that of the fig juice which curdles milk, for this too changes without becoming any part of the curdled bulk.” 23. Schegk, De plastica seminis facultate, 1, sig. B4r. 24. Schegk, De plastica seminis facultate, 1, sig. B5v: “anima autem humana quum τῷ πλαστικῶ λόγῳ non educatur de potentia materiae, sed introducatur in eam propter divinam et immortalem et non nisi creabilem non autem generabilem mentis essentiam.” 25. Schegk, De plastica seminis facultate, 1, sig. B7r: “Credo philosophos, si agnovissent Deum creatorem, nobiscum consensuros, et non prius animas, quam informent corpora humana, in semine ac genitali humore masculini sexus contineri dixissent. Nam creatorem Deum negantes, aut potius nescientes, cogerentur certe fateri: τῷ σμερματικῷ λογῷ simul animam humanam, et corpus ipsi nasci, et non θύραθεν introduci, sed educi animam humanam de potentia materiae.” 26. On Sennert, see Hirai, Le concept de semence, 401–6; Hirai, Medical Humanism, 151–72.

notes to pages 95–97 | 283 27. See William R. Newman, “Experimental Corpuscular Theory in Aristotelian Alchemy: From Geber to Sennert,” in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, ed. Christoph Lüthy et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 291–329; William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 85–153. 28. See Michael Stolberg, “Particles of the Soul: The Medical and Lutheran Context of Daniel Sennert’s Atomism,” Medicina nei Secoli 15 (2003): 177–203; Richard T. W. Arthur, “Animal Generation and Substance in Sennert and Leibniz,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 147–74. 29. I have used the text found in his Opera omnia (Lyon, 1650), 1:132–242. 30. On the doctrine of the “Giver of Forms,” see Helen Tunik Goldstein, “Dator Formarum: Ibn Rushd, Levi ben Gerson, and Moses ben Joshua of Narbonne,” in Islamic Thought and Culture, ed. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (Washington, DC: IIIT, 1982), 107–21; Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jules L. Janssens, “The Notions of Wahib al-Suwar (Giver of Forms) and Wahib al-Aql (Bestower of Intelligence) in Ibn Sînâ,” in Intellect et Imagination dans la philosophie médiévale, ed. Maria Cândila Pacheco (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 1:551–62. 31. Sennert, Hypomnemata physica, 4.2, 169–71. 32. Genesis 1:22. On the rejection of the everyday creation of souls by God in the Lutheran context, see Stolberg, “Particles of the Soul,” 190–93. By contrast, Schegk, also a Lutheran, defends it vigorously. 33. Sennert, Hypomnemata physica, 4.5, 174–75. 34. Sennert, Hypomnemata physica, 4.6, 177: “Notandum tamen hic, seminis nomen interdum latius, interdum strictius accipi. Semen late sumptum pro toto illo corpore quod propagationi et generationi viventis inservit, accipitur. Stricte vero sumptum est substantia simplicissima, seu spiritus quidam, cui anima et virtus πλαστική proxime insidet, et ideam corporis organici, a quo decisum est, in se continet, et prodinde corpus organicum simile ei, a quo decisum est, formandi, et in individuum eiusdem speciei cum generante sese perficiendi potentiam habens.” 35. On the notion of material spirit, see Hiro Hirai, “Bodies and Their Internal Powers: Natural Philosophy, Medicine and Alchemy,” in A Companion to Sixteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Henrik Lagerlund (London: Routledge, forthcoming); Hiro Hirai, “Joseph Du Chesne and the Reconciliation of Galenic and Chymical Medicine,” in The Physicians’ Stone: Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, ed. Jennifer M. Rampling et al. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, forthcoming). 36. On Fienus, see Jan Papy, “The Attitude towards Aristotelian Biological Thought in the Louvain Medical Treatises during the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century: The Case of Embryology,” in Aristotle’s Animals in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carlos Steel (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1999), 317–37; Hiro Hirai, “Imagination, Maternal Desire and Embryology in Thomas Fienus,” in Festschrift for Nancy Siraisi, ed. Gideon Manning et al. (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 37. Sennert, Hypomnemata physica, 4.7, 188. 38. See Hiro Hirai, “The World-Spirit and Quintessence in the Chymical Philosophy of Joseph Du Chesne,” in Chymia: Science and Nature in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1450–1750), ed. Miguel Lopez-Perez et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 247–61.

284 | notes to pages 97–102 39. On the idea of the female seed, see Wolfgang Gerlach, “Das Problem des ‘weiblichen Samens’ in der antiken und mittelalterlichen Medizin,” Sudhoffs Archiv 30 (1937–1938): 177–93; Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, “Albert le Grand et les problèmes de la sexualité,” History and Philosophy of Life Sciences 3 (1981): 73–93. ch a pter

6. “ r ationa l surgery ” by building on tr a dition

1. On Paré’s life, see L. Willaume, Recherches biographiques, historiques et médicales sur Ambroise Paré (Epernay: Warin-Thierry et fils, 1837); S. Paget, Ambroise Paré and His Times, 1510–1590 (London-New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897); C. S. Le Paulmier, Ambroise Paré: D’après de nouveaux documents découverts aux Archives nationales et des papiers de familles (Paris: Charavay Frères, 1884); F. R. Packard, The Life and Times of Ambroise Paré (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1926), 2nd ed.; W. B. Hamby, Ambroise Paré, Surgeon of the Renaissance (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1967); P. Dumaître, Ambroise Paré, chirurgien de quatre rois de France (Paris: Perrin/Fondation SingerPolignac, 1986). Dumaître in particular clearly explains the difficulty of assessing certain aspects of Paré’s biography. Finally, see the virtual exhibition on Paré’s life and work at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de medicine de Paris: http://www.biusante.parisdescartes .fr/pare/. For a general overview of the history of surgery from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, see F. Malgaigne, Histoire de la chirurgie en Occident depuis le Vle jusqu’au XVIe et histoire de la vie et des travaux d’Ambroise Paré (Paris: Baillière, 1870); M. D. Grmek and P. Huard, La Chirurgie moderne; Ses débuts en Occident: XVIe-XVIIe-XVIIIe (Paris: R. Dacosta, 1968); M. G. Grmek, “La main, instrument de la connaissance et du traitement,” in Histoire de la pensée médicale en Occident, vol. 2, De la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. M. D. Grmek (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), 225–51. 2. Benjamin L. Gordon, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). 3. The fact that Paré maintained some basic ideas about medical knowledge and practice throughout his life made my task easier. My analysis takes into account Paré’s practice of constantly rewriting, amending, and improving his Œuvres. 4. Ambroise Paré, La Méthode de traicter les playes faites tant par hacquebutes et aultres bastons à feu et de celles qui sont faictes par fleches, dardz et semblables, aussy des combustions spécialement faictes par la pouldre à canon, composée par Ambroise Paré, maître Barbier Chirurgien à Paris, was published by V. Gaulterot in Paris, 1545. In this chapter, I quote the second edition of this work, published in 1552 by Veuve Jean de Brie in Paris as printed in the modern edition La manière de traiter les plaies, ed. M.-M. Fragonard (Paris: PUF/Fondation Martin Bodmer, 2007). 5. Jean de Vigo (circa 1450–60?-1525), surgeon of Pope Julius II, wrote a treatise on this topic, discussing wounds in general, in his Practica in chirurgia (1514). It was subsequently translated into French (De Vigo en francoys. S’ensuit la practique & cirurgie de . . . maistre Jehan de Vigo, Imprimé à Lyon par Benoist Bounyn imprimeur aux despens dudit Bounyn et de Jehan Planfoys, 1525). Paré knew of this French translation of de Vigo’s treatise. He disagreed with de Vigo’s explanation of the cause of firearms wounds. 6. M. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages (Florence: Sismel—Edizioni del Galluzzo, Micrologus’ Library, 2006), 241. 7. Ambroise Paré, Cinq livres de chirurgie, Par Ambroise Paré, premier Chirurgien du Roy et juré à Paris (Paris: André Wechel, 1572), 17: “Mais pour ce que cependant il pourra servir aux jeunes Chirurgiens, je me suis fort étudié à me faire entendre de ceux-ci, ce que je procure en tous mes écrits: car c’est à eux que ces pièces se rapportent, et non pas aux doctes, lesquels je révère et honore uniquement: qui est cause que j’ai usé de langage familier, et non fardé, sachant bien que leur but et intention est plutôt d’apprendre la méthode de

notes to pages 102–103 | 285 bien curer, que de parler élégamment, car le parler ne guérit pas les malades (comme dit Galien) mais l’œuvre de main et les remèdes dûment appliqués.” All English translations of Paré are my own. 8. Paré, Cinq livres de chirurgie, letter to Charles IX, 5: “En quoi je ne peut assez émerveiller de la misérable condition de ce temps, auquel les Chirurgiens, méprisant cette partie tant salutaire à la vie des hommes, l’on laissée aux vulgaires et imposteurs, qui se nomment renoueurs: comme prêtres, moines, artisans, charlatans, bourreaux, exécuteurs de haute justice, ladres, femmes et paysans des champs: lesquels font cent mille fois plus de mal que de bien, rendant les pauvres malades impotents, voire souvent leur ôtant la vie: d’autant que telle manière de gens ne savent aucunement l’architecture, ou composition de l’homme, qui s’acquiert par l’anatomie, laquelle est très nécessaire, principalement aux fractures et luxations.” 9. Paré, Traicté de la peste, verolle et rougeolle, avec une brefve description de la peste (Paris: A. Wechtel, 1568), 6: “il semble que chaque siècle se renouvelant apporte toujours quelque nouvelle espèce de maladie inconnue et quelque déguisement et diversité à celles qui étaient auparavant: tant est la nature féconde à produire du mal, comme dit le Poète, dont vient que selon les nouvelles maladies qui surviennent, il faut aussi inventer nouveaux remèdes.” See also Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine, avec les portraicts des instruments nécessaires pour la curation d’icelles, par M. Ambroise Paré, Chirurgien ordinaire du roi et juré à Paris (Paris: Jehan le Royer, 1561), 8–13. In his first anatomical treatise, Paré stresses that he personally checked the information reported by the ancients about the human body (Briefve collection de l’administration anatomique, avec la manière de cojoindre les os, et d’extraire les enfants tant mors que vivans du ventre de la mère, lorsque la nature de soi ne peult venir a son effect, composée par Ambroise Paré (Paris: G. Cavellat, 1550). 10. Ambroise Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie avec le Magasin des Instruments nécessaire à icelle, par Ambroise Paré, premier chirurgien du Roy (Paris: Jean Le Royer, 1564). 11. Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie, 10. See also Paré, Cinq livres de chirurgie, 6–7. 12. F. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). French translation: Du progrès et de la promotion des savoirs, livre I, trans. M. Le Doeuff (Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1991). 13. Paré, Traicté de la peste, verolle et rougeolle, 8: “Et si en cette œuvre j’ai imité les doctes qui en ont écris les uns après les autres, ce n’a été avec intention de dérober leur peine et me parer de leurs plumes, en quoi je ne leur fais ni ne veux faire aucune injure: car la clarté du soleil ne s’amoindrit point pour la chandelle qu’on allume de jour.” Paré uses both metaphors again in the section “Au lecteur” of his Deux livres de chirurgie. 1. De la génération de l’homme, et manière d’extraire les enfants hors du ventre de la mère, ensemble ce qu’il faut faire pour la faire mieux, et plus tôt accoucher avec la cure de plusieurs maladies qui lui peuvent survenir. 2. Des monstres tant terrestres que marins, avec leur portrait. Plus un petit traité des plaies faites aux parties nerveuses. Par Ambroise Paré, premier Chirurgien du Roy, et juré à Paris (Paris: chez André Wechel, 1573). 14. H. Blumenberg, La légitimité des Temps modernes (1966) trans. M. Sagnol, J.-L. Schlegel and D. Trierweiler, with M. Dautrey (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1999); M. Gaille, “‘Ce n’est pas un crime d’être curieux de l’anatomie’: La légitimation de la connaissance médicale du corps humain dans l’Europe catholique et protestante des XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in La mesure du savoir, Etudes sur l’appréciation et l’évaluation des savoirs, ed. P. Hummel and F. Grabriel (Paris: Philologicum, 2007), 217–42. 15. Ambroise Paré, “Dédicace au très chrétien roi de France et de Pologne Henri III,” Oeuvres complètes d’Ambroise Paré, revues et collationnées sur toutes les éditions, avec les variantes; ornées de 217 planches et du portrait de l’auteur; accompagnées de notes historiques et critiques et précédées d’une introduction sur l’origine et les progrès de la chirurgie en Occident du sixième siècle au seizième siècle et sur la vie et les ouvrages

286 | notes to pages 103–106 d’Ambroise Paré, ed. J.-F. Malgaigne (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1840–1841), 2 (from the fifth edition of Paré’s complete works, with variants). 16. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, 66–67. 17. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, 10–11. 18. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, 67. 19. Paré, “Adresse au roi Henri II,” La manière de traiter les plaies: “Il ne se trouve point, Sire, par histoires des guerres qui ont été menées de toute antiquité usage aucun en celles-ci d’instruments tant terribles et dommageables, comme font canons, harquebuses et autres bâtons à feu puis naguère inventés: lesquels comme tonnerres ou foudres artificielles mis en la puissance des hommes, abattent ce qu’ils rencontrent, faisant résistance, tuent, brisent, et blessent nombre des hommes en très grande distance: laquelle action et violence plus que humaine ou naturelle, a non seulement troublé les gens de guerre . . . mais aussi les chirurgiens voulant traiter et guérir les plaies faites par lesdits bâtons à feu, lesquels étonnés (comme j’estime) de la nouveauté de telles machines, ont beaucoup travaillé à trouver les moyens de les curer.” 20. Paré’s own hypothesis about the cause of firearms wounds was that the bullet breaks the bones and nerves. He opposed the idea of the poisonous nature of gunpowder. 21. Ambroise Paré, Discours de la Licorne (1582), in Des monstres et des prodiges (Paris: L’œil d’or et Jean-Louis André d’Asciano, 2003), 241. 22. Ambroise Paré: “Car [Dieu m’est témoin, SIRE, et les hommes ne l’ignorent point], il y a plus de quarante ans que je travaille et me peine à l’éclaircissement et perfection de la Chirurgie,” in Oeuvres complètes d’Ambroise Paré, 2. 23. Paré: “Car [Dieu m’est témoin, SIRE, et les hommes ne l’ignorent point],” 3. 24. Most studies on this subject begin later than the sixteenth century (see F. Duchesneau, La physiologie des Lumières: empirisme, modèles et théories (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982); C. Licoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique—le discours de l’expérience en France et en Angleterre, 1630–1820 (Paris: La découverte, 1996); Fr. Pépin, La philosophie expérimentale de Diderot et la chimie: philosophie, sciences et arts (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2012). This concept of “experienced reason” suggests that the history of experimental science should commence at an earlier point. 25. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. M. Martelli, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2006). See on the Machiavellian conception of political knowledge: Cl. Lefort, Le travail de l’œuvre Machiavel (Paris, Gallimard, 1972); M. Gaille, Liberté et conflit civil—La politique machiavélienne entre histoire et médecine (Paris: Champion, 2004). 26. Paré, Cinq livres de chirurgie, 9 and 11. 27. Paré, Cinq livres de chirurgie, 17–18: “Pour ce que m’adressant à toi, je présuppose (ami Lecteur) que tu n’es du nombre de je ne sais quels empiriques impudents, qui sous la main hasardeuse de fortune, s’ingèrent à la guérison des plaies, fractures, dislocations, & autres pareils accidents du corps humain, mais au contraire, de l’école qui par préceptes et disputations prises de bons auteurs, enseigne la méthode artificielle de sûrement guérir ces survenantes affections.” 28. Paré, Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine, 14–15. 29. Ambroise Paré, Anatomie universelle du corps humain, composée par A. Paré, Chirurgien ordinaire du Roy & Iuré à Paris: reveue et augmentée par le dit auteur, avec l. Rostaing du Bignosc provençal aussi Chirurgien Iuré à Paris (Paris: Jehan Le Royer, Imprimeur du Roy ès Mathématiques, 1561), 23. 30. Paré, Anatomie universelle du corps humain, 301. 31. Paré, Anatomie universelle du corps humain, 323. 32. Paré, Anatomie universelle du corps humain,, 49: “Comme l’âme donc, qui est perfection

notes to pages 106–110 | 287 du corps et principe de toutes ses actions, selon la commune opinion de tous, est divisée en trois facultés premières et universelles: c’est à savoir l’animale, vitale et naturelle; et derechef l’animale en principal, sensitive et motive comme aussi une chacune de celles-ci en plusieurs autres, c’est à savoir la principale en l’imagination, raisonnable et mémorative. La sensitive, en la faculté visive, auditive, odorative, gustative et tactive. La motive, en progressive ou ambulative et appréhensive. La vitale, aussi en faculté dilatative et constrictive du cœur et des artères qui sont entendues par la faculté pulsative. Et la naturelle, en la faculté nutritive, augmentative et générative.” 33. For example, Anatomie universelle du corps humain, III, Du cuir musculeux de la tête, 290: “Or pour conclusion, faut que le Chirurgien sache le nombre des sutures et leur situation: afin qu’il sache discerner les fractures fissurées d’avec les commissures: de peur qu’il n’applique son Trépan sur celles-ci (tant qu’il lui sera possible) à raison qu’il romprait les veines et artères, et quelques fibres nerveuses, qui communiquent des parties intérieures aux extérieures, dont s’en pourrait ensuivre flux de sang qui découlerait entre le Crâne et la Duremère, et plusieurs pernicieux accidents.” We may find the same view in his Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine, 39–40. 34. On Vesalius’s illustrations, see the recent works by J. Vons, “Entre art, science et illusion: les illustrations anatomiques dans les ouvrages de Vésale,” and J. van Wijland, “La Fabrique du corps humain de Vésale: la matérialité à l’oeuvre,” Péristyles, 42, Actes du colloque “La representation du corps à la Renaissance,” December 2013, 33–40 and 41–48. On Paré’s iconography, see Cl. Menges, “Images et figures de l’anatomie et de la chirurgie: les editions illustrées d’Ambroise Paré,” in E. Berriot-Salvadore (ed.), Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), Pratique et écriture de la science à la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2003), 89–105. 35. N. G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter 6 “Surgeons and Surgery,” 153–86. 36. Paré, Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine, Epître à Charles IX, in which he mentions the Hippocratic and Galenic “fountain” as the source of anatomical knowledge, 6. 37. Paré, Methode curative des playes et fractures de la tete humaine, 6–7, and “Au très illustre et débonnaire Roi de Navarre,” 10. 38. Paré, Anatomie universelle du corps humain, 25. See also “Au lecteur,” in Oeuvres complètes d’Ambroise Paré. 39. E. Berriot-Salvadore, “L’ordre de l’anatomie,” in E. Berriot-Salvadore (ed.), Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), Pratique et écriture de la science à la Renaissance, 73–87. 40. Paré, Cinq livres de chirurgie; and Anatomie universelle du corps humain, 39–40. The same opinion appears earlier in regard to Hippocrates and Galen, 36. The series of words describing the practice of medicine is mentioned in: De l’invention et excellence de médecine et chirurgie (1575), preface, published in Oeuvres complètes d’Ambroise Paré, 23. 41. De l’invention et excellence de médecine et chirurgie. 42. De l’invention et excellence de médecine et chirurgie, 24. 43. Paré, Anatomie universelle du corps humain, 41–42. 44. R. Rey, Histoire de la douleur (1993) (Paris: La Découverte, 2000), “La douleur renaissante,” 61–84. 45. On one hand, he has affirmed that pain was sometimes unavoidable if the cure was to be efficient and called for the patient’s understanding and collaboration. On the other hand, he paid attention to substances that could alleviate pain and the comfort necessary to heal from a wound or a disease. 46. His name is not mentioned in A. Carlino’s La Fabbrica del corpo—libri e dissezione (Torino: Einaudi, 1960); English translation: Books of the Body—Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance

288 | notes to pages 110–118 Learning (Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Paré is mentioned several times, but not in a significant way, by R. Mandressi, Le regard de l’anatomiste—Dissections et invention du corps en Occident (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003). 47. G. Canguilhem, “Puissances et limites de la rationalité en medicine,” in Médecine, science et technique. Recueil d’études rédigées à l’occasion du centenaire de la mort de Claude Bernard (1813–1878) (Paris: CNRS, 1984), 111–12. ch a pter 7. diseases of the br a in seen through giova nni battista morgagni ’s eyes

I wish to thank the participants to the Berlin conference for their comments and suggestions. 1. Du Verney junior, or Christophle, “Observations sur un cerveau petrifié,” Memoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 1703 (1705), 261–71, 262–63. 2. Du Verney, “Observations,” 266–67. The observation referred to by Bartholin was the ninety-first of the sixth Centuria, in Historiarum anatomicarum & medicarum centuria V & VI (Copenhagen, 1661), 357–59. On Du Verney see David Sturdy, Science and Social Status, The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), 191, 291– 92. Mechanism, Experiment, Disease. Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 114–15. 3. Du Verney, “Observations,” 269–70. 4. Giovanni Battista Morgagni, De sedibus et causis morborum, per anatomen indagatis, 2 vols. (Venice: ex typographia Remondiana, 1761); XXXVI.15, XXXIX.30. I cite Morgagni’s work by letter and paragraph of the Latin edition, followed by the pagination of the English translation, The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy, trans. Benjamin Alexander, 3 vols. (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1769), 2:196, 396. Antonio Vallisneri, Considerazione, ed esperienze intorno al creduto cervello di bue impietrito, vivente ancora l’animale (Padua: Giovanni Manfrè, 1710), 4–8. Henry S. Schutta, “Morgagni on Apoplexy in De Sedibus: A Historical Perspective,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 18 (2009): 1–24. 5. On Morgagni see the entry by Giuseppe Ongaro in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1961-) accessed 18 March 2014: http://www .treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-battista-morgagni_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/. Vincenzo Cappelletti and Federico di Trocchio, eds., De sedibus et causis. Morgagni nel centenario (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1986), contains a valuable collection of essays; see especially Marta Cavazza, “L’impegno del giovane Morgagni per la riforma dell’Accademia degli Inquieti e in difesa della tradizione malpighiana,” 91–103. Marta Cavazza, Settecento inquieto (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990). 6. Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “The Archive and Consulti of Marcello Malpighi,” in Archives of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 109–20; Mechanism, Experiment, Disease, 326–30. Marcello Malpighi, Opere scelte, ed. Luigi Belloni (Torino: UTET, 1967), 42, 44–45. Ladislao Münster, “Anatomica sive in cadaveribus sectis observations,” in Università di Bologna, Celebrazioni malpighiane. Discorsi e scritti (Bologna: Azzoguidi, 1966), L’Archiginnasio 60 (1965): 170–228. 7. Maria Pia Donato, Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 67. Lettere di Lancisi a Morgagni, e parecchie altre dello stesso Morgagni, ora per la prima volte pubblicate, ed. Alfredo Corradi (Pavia: Bizzoni, 1876), 3–9. A case of apoplexy is discussed in Valentina Gazzaniga and Elio de Angelis, Giovanni Battista Morgagni. Perizie medico-legali (Rome: Carocci, 2000), 89–96. 8. Théophile Bonet. Sepulchretum; sive anatomia practica, ex cadaveribus morbo denatis (Geneva:

notes to pages 118–124 | 289 Leonard Chouët, 1679), 76–123; 2nd ed. (Lyon and Geneva: Cramer et Perachon, 1700), 77–148. Henry S. Schutta and Herbert M. Howe, “Seventeenth-Century Concepts of ‘Apoplexy’ as Reflected in Bonet’s Sepulchretum,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 15 (2006): 250–68. Donato, Sudden Death, 91. 9. Morgagni, De sedibus, X.15; Seats, 1:224. Johann Jakob Wepfer, Observationes anatomicae, ex cadaveribus eorum, quos sustulit apoplexia: cum exercitatione de eius loco affecto. 2nd ed. (Schaffhausen: Onophrius a Waldkirch, Alexander Riedingius, 1675). Edwin Clarke, “Apoplexy in the Hippocratic Writings,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 301–14. Henriette Bruun, “Sudden Death as an Apoplectic Sign in the Hippocratic Corpus,” Classica et mediaevalia 50 (1999): 1–24. Axel Karenberg, “Reconstructing a Doctrine: Galen on Apoplexy,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 3 (1994): 85–101. Schutta, “Seventeenth-Century Concepts of ‘Apoplexy’ as Reflected in Bonet’s Sepulchretum,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 15 (2006): 250–68. Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease, 70. Clarke and O’Malley, The Human Brain, 769–75. 10. Morgagni, De sedibus, II.6; Seats, 1:20. 11. Morgagni, De sedibus, I.2–3 and L.1; Seats, 3–4 and 3:34 (for the quotation). Owsei Temkin, “The Role of Surgery in the Rise of Modern Medical Thought,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 25 (1951): 248–59. 12. Morgagni, De sedibus, VII.6–7 and 13–14; Seats, 148–50 and 156–68. Giovanni Maria Lancisi, De sede cogitantis animae, in Giovanni Battista Fantoni, Observationes anatomicomedicae (Venice: Andrea Poleti, 1713), 145–65. 13. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers, “Our Animal Natures,” The New York Times Sunday Review, 10 June 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/opinion/sunday/ our-animal-natures.html?_r=1&emc=eta1. See also Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers, Zoobiquity. The Astonishing Connection between Human and Animal Health (New York: Vintage, 2013). 14. Morgagni, De sedibus, I.6; Seats, 5–6. 15. Morgagni, De sedibus, IX.3; Seats, 188. 16. Morgagni, De sedibus, IX.11 and 21; Seats, 200, 208. 17. Morgagni, De sedibus, IX.3; Seats, 188. 18. Morgagni, De sedibus, II.21, VIII.13, 33; Seats, 32, 157, 183. 19. Morgagni, De sedibus, XVI.33; Seats, 403. 20. Morgagni, De sedibus, VIII.33, XVI.33; Seats, 183, 403. 21. Morgagni, De sedibus, XVI.33; Seats, 403. See for example the Hippocratic treatise The Sacred Disease, section 14. 22. Morgagni, De sedibus, IV.3; Seats, 66. 23. Morgagni, De sedibus, V.21–3; Seats 112–14. 24. Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease, 120, 298–300. Edwin Clarke and Charles D. O’Malley, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord. A Historical Study Illustrated by Writings from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1996, 2nd ed.), 416–18. 25. Morgagni, De sedibus, II.13; Seats, 27. Domenico Mistichelli, Trattato dell’apoplessia (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1709), 57–59. Clarke and O’Malley, The Human Brain, 281–83. Donato, Sudden Death, 129. 26. Morgagni, De sedibus, VII.18; Seats, 143. Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease, 79. Clarke and O’Malley, The Human Brain, 458–74. 27. Morgagni, De sedibus, XI.12; Seats, 237. Daniel Langhans, Dissertatio inauguralis medica de consensu partium corporis humani (Göttingen: Abram Vandenhoeck, 1749). 28. Morgagni, De sedibus, XI.23; Seats, 243. 29. Morgagni, De sedibus, II.24, III.22; Seats, 33–34, 57. 30. Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-

290 | notes to pages 125–130 Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 184–85, 234–36. Karin Ekholm, “Fabricius’s and Harvey’s Representations of Animal Generation,” Annals of Science 67 (2010): 329–52. 31. Morgagni, De sedibus, I.20, III.4, X.17, X.19; Seats, 32, 38–39, 226, 228. 32. See for example Morgagni, De sedibus, XIII.5, XIV.17, XV.17; Seats, 282, 330, 369. 33. Morgagni, De sedibus, XIV.14 (Willis), Seats, 326; XIV.30 (Highmore), Seats, 343; XXIII.12 (Cowper), Seats, 690. 34. Morgagni, De sedibus, V.9; Seats, 101. 35. Morgagni, De sedibus, XII.11; Seats, 260. 36. See for example Robert Hooper, The Morbid Anatomy of the Human Brain (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826). Richard Bright, Reports of Medical Cases, 2 vols, (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, and Green, 1827–31), vol. 2. Rolando F. Del Maestro, A History of Neuro-Oncolog y (Montreal: DW Medical Consulting, 2006), 20–21. 37. Schutta, “Morgagni,” 21–3, quotation at 23. Del Maestro, A History of NeuroOncolog y, 18–19. ch a pter

8. bet w een l a nguage , music, & sound

1. Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, “Foreword: A Bird’s-Eye View of Human Language and Evolution,” in Birdsong, Speech, and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain, ed. Johan J. Bolhuis and Martin Everaert (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), ix-xii, ix. 2. For a thorough treatment of an analogous earlier split in philosophical debates about birdsong in medieval European philosophy, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), especially chapter 2, “Birdsong and Human Singing.” For an impressive treatment of birdsong by a recent philosopher, but from a principally ornithological rather than philosophical perspective, see Charles Hartshorne, Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 [1973]). 3. René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, revised ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1964–1976), 10:219. 4. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, in Werke, ed. the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (A A) (Berlin: 1902), 5:243. “Natur, die keinem Zwange künstlicher Regeln unterworfen ist . . . Selbst der Gesang der Vögel, den wir unter keine musikalische Regel bringen können, scheint mehr Freiheit und darum mehr für den Geschmack zu enthalten, als selbst ein menschlicher Gesang, der nach allen Regeln der Tonkunst geführt wird: weil man des letztern, wenn er oft und lange Zeit wiederholt wird, weit eher überdrüssig wird.” 5. Aristotle, Historia animalium (hereafter HA), 504a35–504b3; 536b, 14–20. 6. HA 536a, 1–4. 7. HA 536a, 20–21. 8. HA 536b, 1. 9. HA 536b, 2. 10. HA 536b, 12–13. 11. HA 536b, 19–20. 12. For an excellent treatment of the problem of animal language in early modern philosophy, see Richard Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540– 1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 62, 3 (2001): 425–44. 13. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 216.

notes to pages 130–136 | 291 14. Pliny, Natural History, trans. and ed. H. Rackham, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 3:272. 15. Pliny, Natural History, cited in Leach, Sung Birds, 72. 16. Pliny, Natural History, cited in Leach, Sung Birds, 72–73; see Natural History 3, 3:344–47. 17. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis, sive Ars magna consoni et dissoni, in X. libros digesta: qua universa sonorum doctrina, & philosophia, musicaeque tam theoricae, quam practicae scientia, summa varietate traditur (Rome: Corbelleti, 1650). 18. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 29. “At ubi auditores vicinos nacta fuerit, tum veluti vocis suae divitias exponens, varietate admirabili, innumeros fingit sonos, nunc enim in longum aequabiliter eos producit, nunc eosdem inflectit, iam minutius & concisius canit; nunc intorquet & quasi crispat vocem, nunc intendit. . . . Praeterea meditantur secum aliae iuniores, imitarique tentant, quae ab adultioribus percipiunt: audit discipula attentione magna, intelligitur emendata correctio & in docente quaedam reprehensio.” 19. Daines Barrington, “Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds,” Philosophical Transactions 63 (1773–1774): 249–91, 252. 20. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 252. 21. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 254. 22. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 256–57. 23. This feature of avian intelligence remains important for the neuroscientific study of learning in general. See, e.g., Eliot A. Brenowitz and Michael D. Beecher, “Song Learning in Birds: Diversity and Plasticity, Opportunities and Challenges,” Trends in Neurosciences 28, no. 3 (2005): 127–32. “The neural system that regulates song learning in songbirds has become a prominent model for studying the neural mechanisms of learning” (127). 24. G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, in God. Guil. Leibnitii Opera philosophica quae exstant latina gallica germanica omnia, ed. Eduardus Erdmann (Berlin: Sumtibus G. Eichleri, 1840), 1:297: “Commes les orangs-outangs et autres singes ont les organes sans former des mots, on peut dire que les perroquets et quelques autres oiseaux ont les mots sans avoir de langage, car on peut dresser ces oiseaux et plusieurs autres à former des sons assez distincts; cependant ils ne sont nullement capable de langue.” 25. Edward Tyson, Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, Or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie, compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (London: T. Bennet and D. Brown, 1699). 26. Tyson, Orang-Outang, 52. 27. Tyson, Orang-Outang, 54f. 28. Pierre Belon, L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux, avec leurs descriptions, & naïfs portraicts retirez du naturel (Paris, 1555), 49. “entant que touts oyseaux ont poulmons, & langues libres, peuvent exprimer leurs voix hautaines, ou basses, ainsi que font touts animaux, & l’homme. Il n’en y’a aucun qui puisse mieux proferer les paroles articulees, que l’oyseau: & entre autres ceux qui ont la langue tenüe & large, le sçavent beaucoup mieux faire.” 29. Belon, L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux, 48. “[T]outs animaux qui ont poulmons ne sçavent chanter, & faire voix. Car les Serpents, dont y en a de plus de trente differentes especes, ont poulmons, qui toutesfois ne sçavent faire autre voix que sifler. . . . [C]e n’est pas le seul poulmon en plusieurs animaux qui fait que la voix est articulee, ainsi c’est la langue, les levres, les dents, & le palais, par le benefice des nerfs recurrents de la sixiesme coniugation, moderants les muscles qui serrent, & ouvres le gavion, ou siflet des animaux: lesquels d’autant qu’ils sont plus sains, d’autant en est la voix plus entiere. Or les oyseaux qui ont le sifflet assez longuet, & la luëtte bien proportionee, & sont douëz de membres propres à cest effet, ce n’est merveille s’ils sçavent changer, & ont leurs chansons particulieres differentes les uns aux autres.”

292 | notes to pages 136–141 30. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 25. “Animalia triplicis generis hic considerari possunt, quadrupedia, volatilia, & insecta, quorum nullum modulationis & loquelae capax est, si volucria nonnulla (quae & dulci modulatione aures mulcent auscultantium, & balbutitione humanae loquelae aemula in stuporem rapiunt audientes) exceperis; cum enim lingua eorum non respondeat Laryngi, nec ullam habeat ad vocales consonantesque pronunciandas.” 31. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 28. “Quaeritur igitur quamnam haec avis ad verba formanda habitudinem nacta sit? Quis inquam Psittaco suum expedivit khaire? certe nil aliud nisi mirifica animalis constitutio & affinitas membrorum ad membra hominis maxima, tenet ipsam conspicuam capitis magnitudinem, os capax & magna concavitate imbutum, rostrum superius mobile, maxillas hominum more, turgentes; Linguam crassam latamque & quasi carneam.” 32. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 31–32. “Et certe si organum vocis in Cygno attendamus, nullum inter omnia animalia eo mirabilius occurrit . . . Unde hunc cantum Cygnaeum prorsus fabulosum existimo, ac Nympharum quas ob candorem Cygnos dicebant occasione a Poëtis introductum. Neque enim natura semper organa vocis in animalibus ad pulchram vocis formationem, sed in alios usus vitae animantis necessarios, ut in hoc Cygni organo patuit, ordinat. Alias enim Porcus, qui pulcherrimam Laryngem naturae beneficio sortitus est, omnium optime & dulcissime caneret, quod ridiculum ne dicam stolidum esset afferere.” 33. David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (New York: Perseus, 2005). 34. See Matthew Head, “Birdsong and the Origins of Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (1997): 1–23. 35. Titus Carus Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), V, vv. 1379–1381. “At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore / Ante fuit multo, quam laevia carmina cantu / Concelebrare homines possent, cantuque juvare.” 36. Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, 1048–54. “Proinde putare aliquem tum nomina distribuisse / Rebus et inde humines didicisse vocabula prima, / Desiperest. Nam cur hic posset cuncta notare vocibus et varios sonitus emittere linguae, / tempore eodem alii facere id non quisse putentur?” 37. See Markus Wild, Die anthropologische Differenz: Der Geist der Tiere in der frühen Neuzeit bei Montaigne, Descartes und Hume (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007). 38. Cyrano de Bergerac, L’autre monde, ou, Les états et empires de la Lune et du Soleil, ed. Frédéric Lachèvre (Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, 1900), 192. “Je vois votre esprit tendu à comprendre comment il est possible que je m’explique à vous d’un discours suivi, vu que, encore que les Oiseaux contrefassent votre parole, ils ne la conçoivent pas; mais aussi, quand vous contrefaites l’aboi d’un chien ou le chant d’un rossignol, vous ne concevez pas non plus ce que le chien ou le rossignol ont voulu dire. Tirez donc conséquence de là que ni les Oiseaux ni les Hommes ne sont pas pour cela moins raisonnables.” 39. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 223. 40. Belon, Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, 49. “Parquoy l’homme curieux de sçavoir l’harmonie tant des corps celestes que vivants, ne doit prendre moindre estimation d’iceux, les oyant avoir divers tons de leurs siflets, que de l’accord des corps celestes, & concurrences d’iceux avec les substances terrestres: Car qui vouldra prendre garde aux oyseaux, & les ouïr attentivement, recevra un parfait sentiment de la douceur de leurs chansons gratieuses, non moins armonieuses que le ronflement des nerfs d’animaux estenduz sur divers instruments de musique.”

notes to pages 142–145 | 293 41. PA I 5, 644b22–645a36. 42. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 28. “Merito totius Musicae veluti Ideam quandam in Luscinia sive Philomela natura exhibuit, ut quomodo perfecta cantus ratio ordinanda, ac in gutture moduli formandi sint.” 43. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 31. “Merula omnium optime differentias harmonicas exprimit.” 44. Wolfgang Caspar Printz, Satirische Schriften und Historische Beschreibung der Sing- und KlingKunst (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979 [Dresden, 1690]), 248. “Anleitende Anreitzungen die Music zu erfinden seyn gewesen 1. Die unterschiedliche Accente der menschlichen Stimme 2. Der Vogel Singen 3. Der von denen Winden bewegten Bäume Pfeiffen.” 45. Printz, Satirische Schriften und Historische Beschreibung, 249. “Was der Vogel singen anlanget ist es gläublich dass die Menschen bey müssigen Stunden dasselbige durch eine Nachahmung vorstellen wollen; und weil es dem Gehöre eine Wollust verursachet; kan es leichtlich Gelegenheit gegeben, den menschlichen Gesang zu erfinden.” 46. Printz, Historische Beschreibung, 450. “Singen doch die unvernünfftigen Vögel ihrem Schöpfer zu Ehren so wohl Abends als Morgens: Warum nicht mehr ein vernünfftiger Mensch?” 47. Jean-Baptiste-Louis Grasset, Discours sur l’harmonie (Paris: Jacques-Nicolas Le Clerc, 1737), 5–6. “l’aimable compagne du premier mortel fut l’inventrice des premiers sons mesurés; . . . des qu’elle eut entendu les gracieux accens des oiseaux, devenuë leur rivale elle essaya son gozier; . . . bientôt elle y trouve une flexibilité qu’elle ignoroit, & des graces plus touchantes que celles des oiseaux même; . . . enfin s’appliquant chaque jour chercher dans sa voix des mouvemens plus légers & des cadences plus tendres, instruite par les Amours déja nés avec elle, bientôt elle si fit un Art du Chant, présent des Cieux, par lequel après sa disgrace, elle sçut souvent adoucir & charmer les peines de son Epoux exilé du divin Elizée.” 48. Head, “Birdsong and the Origins of Music,” 3. 49. For some interesting recent anthropological work that returns to speculative accounts of the origins of music, see Christopher Scarre and Graeme Lawson (eds.), Archaeoacoustics (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006). 50. See Marie-Élisabeth Duchez, “Principe de la mélodie et Origine des langues. Un brouillon inédit de Jean-Jacques Rousseau sur l’origine de la mélodie,” Revue de Musicologie 60, nos. 1–2 (1974): 33–86, 61. “Je n’examinerai pas avec Lucrèce si l’invention du chant ets due à l’imitation de celui des oiseaux, ou selon Diodore à l’inspiration du vent dans les roseaux du Nil, ni si l’écho même après avoir longtemps effrayé les hommes put enfin contribuer à les amuser et à les instruire. Ces conjectures incertaines ne sauroient contribuer à la perfection de l’art et je n’aime des recherches de l’antiquité que celles dont les modernes peuvent tirer quelque fruit. Il est d’ailleurs fort inutile de recourir à des causes étrangères dans les effets qu’on peut déduire de la nature des choses mêmes, et telle est cette modification de la voix qu’on appelle chant, modification qui dut naturellement naître et se former avec la langue.” See also Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Languages: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 51. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 27. “Porro inter caetera animalia, maxime cantandi loquendique sortem nacta sunt volucria; adeo ut, quod prudentia & memoria elephas, fidelitate cervi, gesticulatione simiae, doloso vulpes astu, hoc loquela cantuque inter animalia praestent volucria Psittacus & Luscinia.” 52. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 27. “Musica Haut sive Pigritiae Animalis Americani.” 53. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 265. 54. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 269–70.

294 | notes to pages 145–151 55. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 287. 56. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, A A V, 229. “Viele Vögel (der Papagei, der Colibrit, der Paradiesvogel) . . . sind für sich Schönheiten, die gar keinem nach Begriffen in Ansehung seines Zwecks bestimmten Gegenstande zukommen, sondern frei und für sich gefallen.” 57. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, A A V, 243. “Marsden in seiner Beschreibung von Sumatra macht die Anmerkung, dass die freien Schönheiten der Natur den Zuschauer daselbst überall umgeben und daher wenig Anziehendes für ihn haben.” 58. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, A A V, 378. 59. Barrington, “Experiments and Observations,” 284–85. 60. For a more comprehensive elaboration of the argument here merely limned, see Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). ch a pter

9. bounda ry crossings

Epigraph: David R. Boullier, Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes (Amsterdam: Changuion, 1737), preface, xxix. 1. John Toland, Letters to Serena (London: B. Lintot, 1704), C3, 165. 2. John Toland, Letters to Serena, 160. 3. Denis Diderot, “Animal,” Encyclopédie, I, 474a, quoting Buffon, Histoire naturelle (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749), II: Histoire générale des animaux, “Comparaison des animaux et des végétaux,” 17. (Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine.) 4. Léger-Marie Deschamps, “La Vérité ou le Vrai Système,” in Œuvres philosophiques, ed. B. Delhaume (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 404. 5. Abraham Gaultier, Réponse en forme de dissertation à un théologien, Qui demande ce que veulent dire les sceptiques, qui cherchent la vérité par tout dans la Nature, comme dans les écrits des philosophes; lors qu’ils pensent que la Vie et la Mort sont la même chose (Niort: Jean Elias, 1714), 86. 6. Denis Diderot, “Observations sur Hemsterhuis, ” Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Dieckmann et al. (Paris: Hermann, 1975–2004), 24:258. 7. Anon., L’Âme Matérielle (approx. 1725–1730), ed. A. Niderst, third edition (Paris: Champion, 2003), 56; Louis de Jaucourt, “Sens Internes (Physiol.),” Encyclopédie, 15:31b (this sentence may be taken from La Mettrie’s 1740 free translation of and commentary on Boerhaave’s Institutiones medicae). 8. Guillaume Bougeant, Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes (Paris: Gissey, Bordelet & Ganeau, 1739), 52, 53. 9. Denis Diderot, article “Droit naturel,” Encyclopédie, 5:155b. 10. A.-J. Chaumeix, Préjugés légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie et essai de réfutation de ce dictionnaire, avec un Examen critique du livre De L’Esprit (Paris: Hérissant, 1758), 1:200. 11. John Locke, Second Reply to Bishop of Worcester, in Works, III (London: Rivington, 1824), 460–61 (defending the superaddition passage, i.e., Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], IV.iii.6). 12. Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d’Argens, La philosophie du bon-sens ou réfléxions philosophiques sur l’incertitude des connoissances humaines, à l’usage des cavaliers et du beau-sexe (Londres: aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1737), 382–83; Anton Matytsin, “Of Beasts and Men: Debates about Animal Souls in Eighteenth-Century France” (ms.). 13. Collins to Locke, letter of 15 March 1704; Locke to Collins, 21 March 1704, Correspondence, ed. E. S. De Beer, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Overall, Locke granted animals sensitive memory and the ability to compare ideas, but not the power

notes to pages 151–153 | 295 of abstraction (Essay, II.xi.5, 7, 11), although he noted that this did not make them “bare Machines” (§ 11), for they have reason to some degree, but in particulars. Later, in the admittedly more agnostic context of his discussion of species and kinds, he allowed that “There are some Brutes, that seem to have as much Knowledge and Reason, as some that are called Men” (III.vi.12); “if we will compare the understanding and abilities of some men and some brutes, we shall find so little difference, that it will be hard to say, that that of the man is either clearer or larger” (IV.xvi.11). See also II.x.10, xi.5. 14. John Locke, Œuvres philosophiques, vol. II (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1821), 329 (a footnote to Essay II.xi.5). See Jean-Luc Guichet, “Enjeux de la question de l’animal sous les Lumières: Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau” (ms.). That Locke was not of one mind on the question of human and animal minds, and the boundary between them, is also evidenced by his notebook entries on Gassendi, where he mentions Gassendi, Willis, and Bacon on the topic (John P. Wright, “Locke, Willis, and the Seventeenth-Century Epicurean Soul,” in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. M. J. Osler [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 239n., 243n.]). It is this side of Locke that Priestley would doubtless have liked to have seen more of, as he expressed disappointment, given his overall admiration for Locke, with the latter’s weak position on animal minds in his reflection on the “analogy between men and brutes” (Essay IV.xvi.12). Priestley surmises that Locke was just following the opinion of his times; he argues in contrast that animals have general and abstract ideas, without which they could not distinguish a man from a hare (Disquisitions, 239)—in another echo of the “animal syllogism” I discuss in section 3. 15. Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh, eds., The New Unconscious: Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 16. Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 17. ‘Epicurean tradition’ here refers to a line of development comprising, successively and cumulatively, Epicurean, then humoral, then chimiatric, and finally materialist elements, from Epicurus and Lucretius to Robert Burton, Francis Glisson, Thomas Willis, Guillaume Lamy, anonymous clandestine manuscripts such as the aptly titled L’âme matérielle, and La Mettrie. It is also, then, a ‘humoral materialism.’ On early modern Epicureanism see Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz, eds., Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009). 18. Philip van der Eijk, Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19. Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul”; Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). There are multiple strands of these naturalistic reinterpretations of Aristotle; thus the anonymous manuscript of 1659 Theophrastus redivivus tries to restate Aristotle’s Prime Mover in these terms (see Gianni Paganini, “L’anthropologie naturaliste d’un esprit fort. Thèmes et problèmes pomponaciens dans le Theophrastus redivivus,” XVIIe siècle 149 [1985]). 20. Henrik Lagerlund, “John Buridan and the Problems of Dualism in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42(4) (2004): 369–70. 21. Pierre Bayle, “Pereira,” remark E, in Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), 4 vols., 5th edition (Amsterdam-Leiden-The Hague: Pierre Brunel et al., 1740), 3:653, and discussion in Paganini, “L’anthropologie naturaliste.” 22. Pierre Bayle, Nouvelles de la république des lettres (March 1684), art. II, 32, cit. in Alain Mothu, “La pensée en cornue: considérations sur le matérialisme et la ‘chymie’ en

296 | notes to pages 153–154 France à la fin de l’âge classique,” Chrysopoeia 4 (1990–1991): 430. Lamy’s most relevant works here are the 1675 Discours anatomiques (revised 1679) and the 1677 Explication méchanique et physique des fonctions de l’âme sensitive, as well as the earlier De Principiis rerum (1669). 23. Guillaume Lamy, Discours anatomiques, ed. Anna Minerbi Belgrado (Paris: Universitas / Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), VIth Discourse, 104; Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 88, 160, 170. 24. The manuscript circulated in 1712, was printed once in 1719 and then in 1721 by Prosper Marchand and his friends; d’Holbach published an edition in 1777. The portion of the text that circulated as L’esprit de Spinosa (including the first French translation of a portion of Spinoza’s Ethics) is today attributed to the Dutch diplomat Johan Vroesen, although this is sometimes contested, and another prime candidate for authorship is Jean-Maximilien Lucas. 25. Traité des trois imposteurs (1716; Yverdon: De Felice, 1768), 85; The Three Impostors, trans. Alcofribas Nasier (Cleveland: n.p., 1904), § VII, 99. This is an ancient Hellenistic theme (found in Peripatetic, Epicurean and Stoic writings). 26. “Je conviens que la suite naturelle de ce dogme est de dire que l’âme des bêtes est de la même nature que celle de l’homme” (Bayle, “Rorarius,” remark D, in Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4:77b). For a good discussion of the animal souls problem in Bayle’s “Rorarius” (which focuses on its relation to Descartes’s and Leibniz’s positions) see Dennis Des Chene, “Animal as Category. Bayle’s ‘Rorarius,’” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 27. Guillaume Lamy, Discours anatomiques, VIth Discourse, 104, 106. 28. Pierre Bayle, “Dicéarque,” remark L, in Dictionnaire, 2:287; “Rorarius,” remark E, 4:79, and, for the formulation “du plus au moins,” the article “Péreira,” remark E, 3:652. Gassendi had retorted to Descartes that the difference between brutes and men was merely a “more or less (magis et minus)” issue (AT VI, 271). In his commentary on the Dutch philosopher Hemsterhuis’ Lettre sur l’homme, Diderot wrote that the case of man and beast is the same: “il n’y aura que du plus ou du moins” (Observations sur Hemsterhuis, 258, 299). Priestley ridiculed the purely stipulative claim that the souls of men be immortal while those of brutes are not, which he identified as a condition for Christian faith rather than any empirically based claim. Rather, he claimed, brutes “differ from us in degree only, and not in kind” (Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit [London: J. Johnson, 1777], § XVIII, 235). 29. Traité des trois imposteurs, 85; The Three Impostors, § VII, 99. 30. Niderst first suggested Du Marsais as the author, who is now considered to have been the priest Etienne Guillaume (Gianluca Mori and Alain Mothu, “‘L’Âme matérielle’; ‘De la conduite qu’un honnête homme doit garder pendant sa vie’; ‘Préface du traité sur la religion de M.***’: trois manuscrits, un seul auteur?” La Lettre clandestine 12 [2003]: 311-39), but this has been contested (Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 157, who does not say why). The text, as Niderst has shown, is an ingenious patchwork of Spinoza via Bayle (particularly the article “Buridan,” the Pensées diverses sur la comète, but also the Réponse aux questions d’un provincial), Malebranche’s psychophysiology, the doctrine of the (material) soul as a “fiery soul” from Gassendi as mediated through François Bernier, Epicurean physiology (particularly borrowed from Guillaume Lamy), travel narratives, and various materialist prodromes from Lucretius to Vanini and Hobbes, typically using the analyses and summaries given in antimaterialist works. See Niderst’s introduction to his new edition of L’Âme Matérielle, 13, 16–17.

notes to pages 154–157 | 297 31. For further discussion of “clandestine” strategies of naturalization of the mind see Wolfe, “Determinism/Spinozism in the Radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot,” International Review of Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (2007): 37–51. 32. Recall Bayle’s comment in “Péreira,” remark E that animal and human souls were taken to differ only in degree (“du plus au moins”), so that “it was believed that the disposition of organs alone was the cause” (Dictionnaire, 3:652). 33. L’Âme matérielle, 96–106, with more details supplied after the criticism of Descartes, 106–22, including an elegant combination of Bayle and Lahontan on beavers. As regards the reception of the animal-machine (which is not the topic of the present chapter), one should note that Descartes was taken to literally be asserting that animals were machines, while he tended to stress instead the absence of empirical or otherwise visible indicators of a thinking animal nature (irreducible to instinct), so that, on the basis of our human minds, it would be difficult to reliably claim that animal minds exist—given that, again, he held that we can only infer the existence of interiority in other beings through external signs (AT V 276–277, AT IV 573–576). Thanks to Cinzia Ferrini for reminding me of this important nuance. 34. David R. Boullier, Traité des vrais principes qui servent de fondement à la certitude morale, ch. V, § viii, in Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes, I, 151–52 (the Traité is not paginated sequentially with the Essai). 35. Traité, ch. V, § xiii, in Essai philosophique, I, 159–60. 36. Traité, ch. VI, § xi, I, 177–78; also Essai philosophique, I, i, 19–20. 37. Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises. In the one of which, The Nature of Bodies; in the other, The Nature of Mans Soule; is looked into: In way of discovery, of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules (Paris: Gilles Blaizot, 1644), 306. For Digby, the ingenious behavior of the fox could just as well result from its passions, environment, memory, and chance, as from any discursive processes, including the syllogism (308–14). The “doublings backward and foreward” of a hare pursued by dogs may just be produced by fear (315). As for language, Digby finds it is absurd to think that “beasts have complete languages” like humans, because their sounds are caused by passions (317, 318). 38. G. F. Meier, Metaphysik. Dritter Theil: Die Psychologie (1757; 2nd edition, Halle: J.J. Gebauer, 1765). VI. Von den denkenden Substanzen, welche ausser der menschlichen Seele noch in der Welt angetroffen werden. Meier also refers to his 1749 Versuch eines neuen Lehrgebäudes von den Seelen der unvernünftigen Thiere (original title: Versuch eines neuen Lehrgebäudes von den Seelen der Thiere). His sources include G. H. Ribov, Dissertatio historico philosophica de anima brutorum, included in his 1728 edition of Rorarius, and J. H. Winckler, Untersuchung von dem Seyn und Wesen der Seelen der Thiere (Leipzig, 1742–1745). I am indebted to Paola Rumore for sharing her work on Meier with me. 39. G. F. Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften (Halle: Hemmerde, 1748), I, iv: Von der aesthetischen Wahrscheinlichkeit der Gedanken, § 109, p. 231. In the Neues Lehrgebäude Meier also gives examples of what may be language in ants. 40. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (London: Dring, Harper and Leigh, 1683), ch. VII, “The Corporeal Soul, or that of the Brutes, is Compared with the Rational Soul,” 40. See in this volume Claire Crignon’s chapter, “How Animals May Help Us Understand Men,” which relates Willis’s analysis in the Cerebri anatome to that of the Animi brutorum. 41. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses, 2. 42. Boullier, Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes, I, i, 16 (not paginated sequentially with the Traité des vrais principes qui servent de fondement à la certitude morale included in the volume). 43. Two Discourses, ch. VII, 43.

298 | notes to pages 157–160 44. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses, ch. VII, 39. 45. I am indebted to Michaela van Esveld’s analysis of Willis here in the context of earlier collaboration. 46. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses, ch. VI, “Of the Science and Knowledge of Brutes,” 36. 47. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses, ch. VI, 37. For additional remarks on Willis on foxes see Crignon, “How Animals May Help Us Understand Men.” 48. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeolog y of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 127f.; Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 102; Luciano Floridi, “Scepticism and Animal Rationality: The Fortune of Chrysippus’ Dog in the History of Western Thought,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 79 (1997). For a more nuanced account of the anecdote of Chryssipus’s dog see Cinzia Ferrini, “Kant, Reimarus and the Problem of the Aloga Zoa,” Studi Kantiani 15 (2002): 31–63. 49. Michel de Montaigne, Essais [1588, 1595], ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: PUF, 1992), II, xii (Apologie de Raimond Sebond), 120. Kenelm Digby attributes the tale of Chrysippus’s hound to Montaigne (“Montague”); Montaigne takes over a good deal of the story from Sextus or Plutarch (Floridi, 47), and Boyer d’Argens gives a distinctive spin to it in Letter 33, vol. I of his Lettres juives (The Hague: Pierre Paupie, 1742), 347, sounding a bit like Diderot will later on (the mastiff is capable of performing the three operations of logic, just as much as the Sorbonne doctor). I am obviously not attempting an exhaustive overview of the versions of the hound and the hare story in Western, or even early modern thought. 50. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch, 127–29. 51. Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 103. 52. I discuss these attitudes in my “Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biolog y 46 (2013). One possible rhetorical strategy was to insist that the “problem” of animal souls was a modern one, as it were invented by Descartes with his animal-machine, while the ancients had no such difficulties: thus Priestley observed that “The souls of brutes, which have very much embarrassed the modern systems, occasioned no difficulty whatever in that of the ancients” (Disquisitions, 233), and cited Bacon and Willis approvingly, against Descartes. 53. Michel de Montaigne, Essais [1588, 1595], ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: PUF, 1992), II, xii (Apologie de Raimond Sebond), 108; Guillaume Bougeant will comment sarcastically that “one cat was enough to disturb all of philosophy” (Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes, 108). See also Montaigne’s essay “Of Cruelty” (II, xi), which discusses our relationship and mutual obligation to animals: their suffering should matter to us. 54. Spinoza, Ethics IVP37S (although he also considers that animals feel, first stated at IIIP57S; Luciano Floridi notes the presence of the same duality in Chrysippus: “Scepticism and Animal Rationality,” 37); Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 101. 55. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Sur l’instinct (1660s), in Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Niderst, vol. VII (Paris: Fayard, coll. “Corpus,” 1996), 474, 473. 56. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism, ed. and trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22. 57. Michel de Montaigne, Essais II, xii, 125–26. 58. Julia Annas, “Epicurus on Agency,” in Jacques Brunschwig and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.), Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70. 59. Cureau first addressed the issue in his 1645 Des passions courageuses, de la connoissance des bêtes (the second volume of Les caractères des passions), and gave a more extended treatment of

notes to pages 161–163 | 299 animal intelligence in the 1648 Traité de la connoissance des animaux, où tout ce que a esté dict Pour, & Contre Le Raisonnement des Bestes, est examiné. 60. On religious grounds, the Jesuit Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673) presented a related anti-Cartesian position in his 1672 Discours de la connoissance des bestes. While animals did not possess “the spiritual knowledge that only belongs to reasoning souls, and to pure spirits,” they nonetheless possess “sensory knowledge [connoissances sensibles],” well suited “to all animals that Nature has equipped with diverse sense organs” (Pardies, Discours de la connoissance des bestes [Paris: Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1672], 148). In The Courtiers’ Anatomists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), Anita Guerrini discusses how these positions are taken up in the Académie des Sciences, e.g., by Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel, the academy’s secretary, who argued similarly that the existence of sense organs must imply the existence of feeling in his De corpore animato. 61. Justin E. H. Smith, “‘A Corporall Philosophy’: Language and ‘Body-Making’ in the Work of John Bulwer (1606–1656),” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. C. T. Wolfe and O. Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010). 62. Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Traité de la connoissance des animaux, où tout ce que a esté dict Pour, & Contre Le Raisonnement des Bestes, est examiné, quoting from the 1662 edition (Paris: Jacques Allin), Avant-Propos, 4. 63. Cureau de La Chambre, Traité de la connoissance des animaux, Epitre (n.p.). Here I am indebted to the discussion of Cureau de la Chambre in Anita Guerrini, The Courtiers’ Anatomists, which the author was kind enough to share with me in manuscript. 64. See Reimarus’s Die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürilchen Religion (1754), ed. Günter Gawlick (2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985) and the discussion in John Zammito, “Herder between Reimarus and Tetens: The Problem of an Animal-Human Boundary” (ms., 2014). The status of instinct was central in Reimarus’s debate with Johann Gottfried Herder. The former’s various writings on animal drives and instincts partly took off from Georg Friedrich Meier’s earlier works, discussed above (again with a Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason in the background). Contra Condillac, Reimarus insisted on the innateness of instinct (also referring to Chrysippus’s dog). 65. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des animaux (1755), ed. M. Malherbe (Paris: Vrin, 2004), I, ch. iv. 66. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des animaux, II, viii, 182. 67. Richard Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62(3) (2001): 442. 68. “Il ne tient pas aux organes que les singes n’articulent des sons, et n’établissent entre eux une langue, il tient à ce qu’ils n’ont pas assez d’esprit” (Fontenelle, Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences, 1674, cit. in Boullier, Essai philosophique, II, 213n.). (In the Histoire des animaux, Perrault had argued that even though monkeys had larynxes and other anatomical parts that could form human speech, they could not speak because they were not human.) Less speculatively, Diderot also rejected the idea of distinguishing between humans and animals in terms of the faculty of speech: “Speech is not a distinctive feature for me” (Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, § 49, in Œuvres complètes, 17:77; see Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 2:429–44). 69. Justin E. H. Smith, “Language, Bipedalism, and the Mind-Body Problem in Edward Tyson’s Orang-Outang (1699),” Intellectual History Review 17(3) (2007): 291-304. 70. James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. 1 (2nd revised edition, Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1774), Bk. II, Ch. 4, 270. 71. Burnet, Origin and Progress of Language, 311; see Aaron Garrett, “Human Nature,” in

300 | notes to pages 164–168 The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 180. 72. Aaron Garrett, “Human Nature,” 183. 73. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’Homme-Machine, in Œuvres philosophiques, 1987, 1:77–78, emphasis mine. 74. Benoit de Maillet, Telliamed (The Hague: Pierre Gosse, 1755), reprint (Paris: Fayard-Corpus, 1984); versions of the text date back to the 1690s. De Maillet argued that the Earth is several billion years old, on the basis of sedimentation in the Nile valley (thus current geological conditions are produced by long-duration processes). An ocean once covered the entire Earth and has been in gradual retreat for an incredibly long time. Telliamed is often understood to be an “anticipation” of evolutionary thought; however, Maillet does not formulate any idea of species-transformation, because he holds that all species already existed in the sea, and simply generated analogs on earth. 75. Benoit de Maillet, Telliamed, 202, new edition, 270. 76. Benoit de Maillet, Telliamed, 203, new edition, 271. 77. La Mettrie, L’Homme-Machine, 78. 78. Diderot, Réfutation d’Helvétius, in Œuvres complètes, 24:583. 79. William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, A General System of Horsemanship in all its Branches (1658; translation, London: John Brindley, 1743; reprint, ed. by William C. Steinkraus and E. Schmit-Jensen, North Pomfret, Vermont: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2000), 12. 80. Denis Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, in Œuvres complètes, 24:270. 81. Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, 24:270. A similar point is made at 325: the dog slaughters another dog for a bone, the Sorbonne doctor would do the same over an opinion. 82. Guillaume Bougeant, Amusement philosophique, 52, 53. 83. Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, in Three Dialogues (1st ed. 1711), 2nd corrected ed. (London: Tonson, 1730), 52. 84. Anthony Collins, An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions, The Evidence whereof depends upon Human Testimony (London: s.n., 1707; reprint, New York: Garland, 1984), 16. Pliny considered religion to be among the virtues possessed by elephants (Natural History, book VIII, ch. 1), as discussed by Boullier (Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes, I, book I, ch. iii, 57, note 11). Montaigne also plays on the trope of elephants “participating in religion,” with their raised trunks . . . (Essais [1588, 1595], ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: PUF, 1992), II, xii [Apologie de Raimond Sebond], 126). 85. Georges-Louis-Leclerc de Buffon, “Discours sur la nature des animaux,” Histoire naturelle, 4:89. 86. Henri Busson, “Introduction historique” in Jean de La Fontaine, Discours à Mme de la Sablière (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 35. 87. Etienne de Condillac, Traité des animaux, Préface. 88. Denis Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, in Œuvres complètes, 24:258. 89. Hassin, Uleman, Bargh, eds., The New Unconscious; J. F. Kihlstrom, “The Cognitive Unconscious,” Science 237 (1987): 1445–52. 90. Charles T. Wolfe, “Determinism/Spinozism.” 91. “I have look’d over the Article Rorarius in Mr Bayles dictionary which is a very long one but very entertaining. It allmost all relates to the question Whether brutes have reason? on the occasion of a book of Rorarius’s . . .” (Collins, Letter of March 21, 1704, n° 3495 in Locke, Correspondence, 249–50). 92. Anthony Collins, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (London: Robinson, 1717; reprint, New York: Garland, 1978), 54.

notes to pages 168–173 | 301 93. Richard Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language,” studies this in earlier forms in Rorarius, Montaigne, and Charron. 94. Anthony Collins, A Letter to the Learned Mr. Henry Dodwell; Containing Some Remarks on a (pretended) Demonstration of the Immateriality and Natural Immortality of the Soul, in Mr Clarke’s Answer to his late Epistolary Discourse (1707), in The Works of Samuel Clarke, 4 vols. (1738; reprint, New York: Garland, 1978), 3:753. 95. Collins, Inquiry, 55–56. 96. Collins, Inquiry, 57, 67. It is well known that challenges to human/animal boundaries often were presented together with analyses of other liminal cases such as feral children, mentally ill individuals, and indeed children per se. La Mettrie also uses human infants as an example, with the topos of their weakness compared to young animals: “what Animal would die of hunger in the midst of a river of milk?” (L’Homme-Machine, 86). 97. Thomas Hobbes, Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656), § viii, EW V, 95. 98. Collins, Letter to Dodwell, 752–53. 99. Samuel Clarke, “Remarks on a book, entitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Liberty” (1717), in Clarke, Works, 4:729. 100. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (2nd Boyle Lecture, 1705), in Works, 2:624. 101. Collins, Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty, 55, 56. 102. Collins, Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty, 54–57. 103. However, in Diderot’s focus on the socioculturally sculpted human brain, he betrays a residual anthropocentrism and/or humanism; see my “‘The brain is a book which reads itself.’ Cultured Brains and Reductive Materialism from Diderot to J. J. C. Smart,” in Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind, ed. H. Groth and C. Danta (London: Continuum, 2014). (This relativizes the claim found in the Diderot scholar Lester Crocker: “Materialism, Diderot has come to realize, is a useful philosophy, the only possible philosophy for investigation of the material world. It is disastrous when applied tel quel to the inner, subjective world of human thought and emotion. When materialism is used to deny the reality of human experience and to dehumanize man, it has overstepped its bounds. Man’s place in nature, his humanity, are defined not by his animality, Diderot proclaims, but by his humanity” (Crocker, Diderot’s Chaotic Order [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], 42.) But it is possible that this anthropocentrism reduces to a notion of embodiment (proper to all living beings). 104. Paul-Henri Thiry D’Holbach, Système de la Nature (1781; 1st edition 1770); reprint, ed. J. Boulad-Ayoub (Paris: Fayard, coll. “Corpus,” 1990), I, viii, 135; Diderot, Eléments de physiologie, 296f. 105. Denis Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, in Œuvres complètes, XXIV, 340; article “Droit naturel,” 155b. 106. Louis de Jaucourt, “Sens Internes,” 31b. 107. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Le Philosophe ignorant (1766), Premier doute, VI: Les bêtes, in Complete Works, vol. 62 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1987), 36–37. 108. Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, 299. ch a pter

10. how a nim a ls m ay help us understa nd men

For the wider context in which we can read and interpret Willis’s thought, see in this volume Charles Wolfe, “Boundary Crossings: The Blurring of the Human/Animal Divide as Naturalization of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy.” 1. William F. Bynum, “The Anatomical Method, Natural Theology, and the Functions of the Brain,” Isis 64 (1973): 447.

302 | notes to pages 174–176 2. Thomas Willis, “The Preface to the Reader,” The Anatomy of the Brain, in Dr Willis’s Practice of Physick, Being the whole Works of that Renowned and Famous Physician, trans. Samuel Pordage (London: T. Dring and J. Leigh, 1684), hereafter Anatomy of the Brain: “For the Province, which I hold in this Academy, requiring that I should comment on the Offices of the Senses, both external and also internal, and of the Faculties and Affections of the Soul, as also of the Organs and various provisions of all these. . . .” 3. Thomas Willis, “The Authors Epistle Dedicatory to his Grace Gilbert Archbishop of Canterbury,” Anatomy of the Brain. 4. André Du Laurens, Histoire Anatomique, in Toutes les Œuvres de M. André Du Laurens, trans. Théophile Gelée (Rouen: Raphael du Petit Val, 1621), 1–2. 5. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 64. Willis refers here to Plato, Timaeus, 45a. See also Lo Presti’s contribution in this volume. 6. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 56: “That the perfect knowledge of the Brain and its parts may be gained, it is necessary not only to dissect and look into mens Heads, but all other kind of other Creatures heads: for besides, that the humane Heads or Bodies are not so readily to be had, that one may from day to day, behold the Brain and its frame, and carefully consider the situation of the parts, and search one after another their respects, habitudes and dependencies; besides also, the immense bulk of an humane Head is in itself an hindrance, whereby its most intricate frame and various recess and Appendices are the less accurately discerned and investigated: all which being reduced into an Epitomy, are plainly represented more commodiously in the dissection of Beasts.” 7. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 56. About this argument and its use in the Aristotelian tradition, see Lo Presti above in this volume. 8. Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis, 1621–1675: Doctor and Scientist (New York-London: Hafner, 1968), 102. 9. For the use of this notion, see also Marcus Aurelius Severinus, Zootomia democritaea (Nuremberg: Lietris Endterianis, 1645). On the use of comparative anatomy at this time, see Charles Webster, “The College of Physicians: Salomon’s House in Commonwealth England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41, no. 5 (1967): 393–412. 10. For the similarity of structures between men and animals, see René Descartes, Description du corps humain, in Œuvres de Descartes (Paris: Adam & Tannery, 1996), 9:226; “Lettre à Morus,” 5:277. See also “Lettre à Elisabeth,” 31 January, 48, Œuvres de Descartes, 5:112. The distinction between Descartes’s and Willis’s approaches is borrowed from Georges Canguihem, La Formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Vrin, 1955), 74. 11. See for example the description of the cortex, the seat of the faculty of memory: Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 76. 12. Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soules of Brutes, Which is that of the Vital and Sentitive of Man. The First is Physiological, shewing the Parts, Powers, and Affections of the same. The other is Pathological, which unfolds the Diseases which affect it and its Primary Seat, to wit the Brain and Nervous Stock, and treat of their Cures, trans. S. Pordage (London: Ch. Harper and J. Leigh, 1683), hereafter Two Discourses, in Works, 4. 13. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 75. 14. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 74. 15. Descartes, Passions de l’âme, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam & P. Tannery, vol. 11 (Paris: Vrin, 1996), art. 31, 351–52. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 58. See also ibid. 87: “Animals, which seem to be almost quite destitute of Imagination, Memory, and other superior Powers of the Soul, have this glandula or kernel large and fair enough.” On the use of comparative anatomy and Willis’s opposition to Descartes, see also Domenico

notes to pages 177–180 | 303 Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 76–88. 16. Nicholas Tulp, Observationum Medicarum libri tres (Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1641), ch. 56, “Satyricus Indicus,” 274–79. 17. Edward Tyson, “To the Right Honourable John Lord Sommers, Baron of Evesham . . . and President of the Royal Society,” Orang-Outang sive Homo Sylvestris (London: Thomas Bennet, 1690). 18. Tyson, “To the Right Honourable John Lord Sommers.” 19. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). 20. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 132. 21. On this question, see also John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding III, VI, 22. 22. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 132. 23. Bynum, 456. See also Walter Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas (Basel-New York: S. Karger, 1966). 24. On this quotation of Bacon and the relationship between the heart and the brain, see Milad Doueihi, Histoire perverse du cœur humain (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), 86 and 166. 25. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 132: “Hence both the ancient Divines and Philosophers placed wisdom in the Heart. Certainly the Works of Prudence and Vertue depend very much on the mutual commerce which happens to the Heart with the Brain. . . . We might say more Pathology or the Doctrine of the Passions of the Soul, in the mean time, we may refer hither one or two Observations taken from Anatomy.” 26. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 158. 27. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 18. 28. According to the Galenic tradition, the brain is the center of perception and the use of the cognitive faculties. However, followers of Aristotle (like Willis himself) adhered to the idea of a cardiocentric body. Since anatomy plainly demonstrates the centrality of the brain, Willis must face and resolve this contradiction, like many followers of Aristotle during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. See William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 29. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 133. 30. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 158. 31. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 31: “[The] whole soul suffers (sometimes) various Metamorphoses or Changes, and puts in strange species, as it often happens in Melancholy diseases, or to mad men.” 32. Ignace Gaston Pardies, Discours de la connoissance des bestes (Paris: Sebastien MabreCramoisy, 1672; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972), § 85, 147. 33. Willis, Soul of Brutes, “The Preface to the Reader”: “And indeed I know not, whether it will be pleasing to all, that instituting the something Paradoxical Doctrine of the Animal Soul, . . . I should form this, which is meerly Vital, and different from the Rational, and subordinate to it, and so Man, a Two-soul’d Animal, and as it were a manifold Geryon.” 34. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 41. The same characterization appears in Pomponazzi; see Lo Presti in this volume. 35. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 2. On these doctrines see Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals. The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca-New York: Cornell University Press, 1993). 36. Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008). 37. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 2. 38. Willis, Soul of Brutes, “Preface to the Reader.”

304 | notes to pages 180–182 39. John P. Wright, “Locke, Willis, and the Epicurean Soul,” in Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquillity, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 244– 46. Wright refers here to Descartes’s response to Gassendi’s fifth objections. Willis (Soul of Brutes, 3) represents Descartes’s position as follows: “The most illustrious Cartesius, unfolding all things by matter and motion, asserting the Souls of Brutes to consist altogether of round and highly moveable Atoms, which he calls the Elements of the first kind, affirms, That nothing else is requisite for all its acts to be performed, than that the fibres and nervous parts being struck by a stroke of a sensible thing, they receive a motion after this or that kind of manner, and transfer it by a Continued affection of the sensitive parts, as it were by a certain undulation or wavering, into the respective parts.” 40. Descartes to Morus, 5 February 1649, in Correspondance avec Arnaud et Morus, ed. G. Lewis (Paris: Vrin, 1953), 127. 41. As George Canguilhem stresses, Descartes also attributes a corporeal soul to animals in the same letter to Morus, but for him it is a purely mechanical principle. See also Canguilhem, La formation du concept de réflexe (Paris: Vrin, 1977), 73. 42. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 3. 43. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 2. See Nemesius, On the Nature of Man, trans. R. W. Sharples and P. J. van der Eijk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 38–40. 44. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 4: “Peter Gassendus . . . in his late Experimental Philosophy, when he had enumerated very many Instances, by which the Cunning and Wonderful Sagacity of brute Animals were declared. . . . From these we may easily understand, what dignity, and beyond the powers of any Machine, causing its Efficacy, he affirms to be in the Souls of Beasts.” 45. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 132. 46. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 3. 47. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 22. 48. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 33. On this broad sense of mechanism, see Justin E. H. Smith, “Machines, Souls and Vital Principles,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Early Modern Europe, ed. D. M. Clarke et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 96–115. 49. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 4. 50. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 7. 51. Joëlle Proust, Comment l’esprit vient aux bêtes, Essai sur la représentation (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 14: “L’idée d’étudier l’esprit de l’animal est évidemment solidaire de la tentative de ressaisir ce qui forme ce qu’on pourrait appeler le noyau de l’esprit humain.” 52. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 6. 53. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 3. 54. In his Medical-Philosophical Discourse of Fermentation. Or, of the Intestine Motion of Particles in Every Body (London, 1659, Works, 1684), Willis expresses his preference for the renewal of atomism and for a mechanical explanation in natural philosophy. See “Of the principles of natural things,” in Of Fermentation, 2. But like many early modern philosophers, he is “attracted by the use of particles as carriers of sympathetic, dynamic . . . and other expansive qualities.” See Christoph Lüthy et al., eds., Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 16. See also Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, Corpuscules. A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). 55. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 94. 56. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 33. 57. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 33. 58. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 35: “For Secondly, besides the natural Instincts, living Brutes are wont to be taught by sensible species, to wit, to profit in the Knowledge of several things, and to acquire certain habits of practice. . . .”

notes to pages 182–187 | 305 59. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 37. 60. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 38. 61. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 43. On this moral dimension of the conduct of the mind, see Stephen Gaukroger, The Soft Underbelly of Reason. The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London–New York: Routledge, 1998); Susan James, Passion and Action. The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). More recently, see Sorana Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind. Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 62. Willis, Anatomy of the Brain, 70. 63. Willis, Soul of Brutes, “Preface to the Reader.” 64. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 42. 65. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 31. On this question, see Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul. Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007). 66. Thomas Willis’s Oxford Lectures, ed. K. Dewhurst (Oxford: Sanford Publications, 1980), “Occasional Melancholy,” 125. On “occasional melancholy,” see Jeremy Schmidt, “Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth Century Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 592–601. 67. Willis describes two tendencies in these transformations of the “animus sensitivus” (Thomas Willis’s Oxford Lectures, 125): “Furthermore this Genius of ours sometimes expands beyond our body, as in joy, eagerness and boldness; other times it contracts so as not to be coextensive with our body or is removed into a smaller sphere of activity, and occasionally changes its shapes, undergoing metamorphoses, as it were, and taking on various forms.” See Jackie Pigeaud, “Délires de metamorphose [Deliria of Metamorphosis],” in Melancholy and Material Unity of Man 17th-18th Centuries, ed. C. Crignon and M. Saad, Gesnerus, Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Science, 63, 1/2 (2006): 73–89. 68. As Jeremy Schmidt (“Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth Century Thought,” 594) has shown, “occasional melancholy” is more than a simple disorder of the body: “Willis represented it . . . [as] a disorder relating to the soul as the locus of a self possessed of the typical features of conscious human life, including the passions.” 69. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 132: “An Oxford Gardiner being sick of a Feavour, about the height of the Disease, instead of a Crisis he fell into a continual Sleep. . . . But at length, his Head being shaven, Blistering Plasters were applied all over his Head, and many running sores left open, and awaking he recovered the use of his senses a little: But his Memory being almost wholely lost, he became so stupid, that he remembered the name of no Man, nor their words, and remained like a Brute.” 70. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 188: “Fabulous antiquity scarce ever thought of so many metamorphoses of men, which some have not believed really of themselves; whilst some have believed themselves to be Dogs or Wolves, and have imitated their ways and kind by barking or howling; others imagining that their bodies were made of glass, were afraid to be touched left they should be broke to pieces.” 71. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 3. ch a pter 11. politica l a nim a ls in sev enteenth- century philosophy

The text printed in this volume is a modified version of the paper “Political Animals in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: Some Rival Paradigms.” In Ethical Perspectives on Animals in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. C. Muratori and B. Dohm, “Micrologus’ Library” (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013), 285–98. 1. P. Gassendi, Commentary on Epicurus’ Ratae Sententiae, in Animadversiones in decimum librum

306 | notes to pages 187–197 Diogenis Laertii, Lyon 1649, Rata Sententia XXXII, 2:300–302. See G. Paganini, “SeventeenthCentury Political Neo-Epicureanism. Gassendi and His Dialogue with Hobbes,” in Oxford Handbook of Epicureanism, ed. J. Fish and K. Sanders (Oxford, forthcoming). 2. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, I, 1169 b 18. 3. Aristotle, Politica, I, 2, 1253 a. 4. T. Hobbes, De cive, Liberty I, 2: De Cive. The Latin Version. A critical edition by H. Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 90–92; De Cive. The English Version. A critical edition by H. Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 42–44. 5. T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, I, vii, 1, edited with a preface and critical notes by F. Tönnies (London, 1889), 28. 6. Hobbes, Elements, I, ix, 16, 43. 7. Hobbes, Elements, I, xiv, 4, 71. 8. Hobbes, Elements, I, xix, 4, 102. 9. Hobbes, De cive, Libertas I, ii (Latin 90; English 42). 10. Hobbes, De cive, Libertas I, ii (Latin 90; English 42). 11. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium, V, v (Latin 132; English 87). The same phrasing appears in Elements, I, xix, 5, 102. 12. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium, V, iii, (Latin 131; English 86). 13. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium, V, v (Latin 132; English 87). 14. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium, V, v (Latin 132; English 87): “It is very true that in those creatures, living only by sense and appetite, their consent of minds is so durable, as there is no need of any thing more to secure it, and (by consequence) to preserve peace among them, than barely their naturall inclination.” 15. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium, V, v (Latin 132–33; English 87–88). 16. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium V, v (Latin 132–33; English 87–88). 17. Hobbes, Leviathan, XVI. 18. We find the words “interest” and “common good” in De cive Imperium, V, iv (English 87); Latin: “bonum . . . privatum”/“commune” (Latin 132). 19. Hobbes, De cive, Imperium, V, iv (English 87; Latin 132). 20. Since the ten tropes of Enesidemus related by Sextus Empiricus, comparison with animals had played an important part in casting doubt on and diminishing the supposedly privileged status of the human condition. In particular, expanding upon the first trope (which declares that “we cannot prefer our sensitive representations to those of animals”), Sextus develops the theme of animal virtues and expounds the famous example of the “skeptical dog” (Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes, I, 78). 21. What is more, many of the faults listed in Hobbes’s description of the state of nature and his comparison of animal society are already well represented in the portrait of humanity outlined in Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond. 22. M. de Montaigne, Essais, I, xii, ed. P. Villey (Paris, 1999), 460. 23. Montaigne, Essais, I, xii, 483. 24. See G. Paganini, “‘Passionate Thought’: Reason and the Passion of Curiosity in Thomas Hobbes,” in Emotional Minds. The Passions and the Limits of Pure Enquiry in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. S. Ebbersmeyer (Berlin, 2012), 227–56. 25. See in this regard: G. Paganini, “Thomas Hobbes e la questione dell’umanesimo,” in L’umanesimo scientifico dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, ed. L. Bianchi and G. Paganini (Naples, 2010), 135–58. 26. Hobbes, De homine, X, 1–4. 27. See G. Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanicismo,” in Hobbes oggi, ed. A. Pacchi, A. Napoli, and G. Canziani (Milan, 1990), 351–445. On the role

notes to pages 197–213 | 307 played by seventeenth-century “anthropological medicine” in naturalizing man see Stephen Gaukroger’s chapter in this volume. 28. In this respect Hobbes is at variance with other early modern materialist thinkers, on whose theories see Charles Wolfe’s chapter in this volume. ch a pter 12. degrees & forms of sensibilit y in h a ller’s physiology

1. See Guido Giglione, “What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth Century Irritability,” Science in Context 21 (2008): 465–93; Mirko D. Grmek, “La notion de fibre vivante chez les médecins de l’école iatrophysique,” Clio Medica 5 (1970): 297–318. 2. Albrecht von Haller, “De partibus corporis humani sentientibus et irritabilibus,” Commentarii Societatis Regiæ Scientiarum Gottingensis 2 (1753): 114–58. 3. Albrecht von Haller, Mémoires sur les parties sensibles et irritables du corps animal (Lausanne: M. M. Bousquet [- S. d’Arnay], 1756–60). 4. Albrecht von Haller, Elementa physiologiæ corporis humani. 8 vol. (Lausannæ: Sumptibus M. M. Bousquet; Bernæ: Sumptibus Societatis Typographicæ, 1757–1766). 5. For a more extensive study of Haller’s physiology, see François Duchesneau, La Physiologie des Lumières: Empirisme, modèles et théories (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982). 6. Haller, Elementa, I, i. All translations are my own. 7. Haller, Elementa, I, vi. 8. Haller, Elementa, I, v. 9. Albrecht von Haller, Primæ lineæ physiologiæ (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1974), 1: “ . . . circa simplicia corpora, quæ facillimæ definitionis sint, unice versari, ut utroque modo a Geometra differat, qui suæ artis principia ab ipsa arte sumat, lineas punctaque, aliaque miræ simplicitatis elementa tractanda nactus sit.” 10. Haller, Elementa, I, 2: “Fibra enim physiologo id est, quod linea geometrae, ex qua nempe figurae omnes oriuntur.” 11. Haller, Elementa, I, 7. 12. Haller, Elementa, I, 2: “Fibra, quo nomine multiplex genus elementorum comprehendimus, & cujus discrimina continuo exponemus, communis toti humano corpori materies est, etiam, ut alibi ostendemus, cerebro et medullæ spinali. . . . Fragilis aut mollis, elastica, aut penitus pultacea, longa absque fere latitudine, vellata, ut longitudine par fere latitudo sit, ossa, cartilagines, membranas, vasa, ligamenta, tendines, musculos, nervos, cellulosum textum, viscerum parenchymata, pilos et ungues sola constituit.” 13. Haller, Mémoires, I, 7–8. 14. Haller, Mémoires, IV, 92. 15. See Hubert Steinke, Irritating Experiments: Haller’s Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90 (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2005), 93–124. 16. Steinke, Irritating Experiments, 109. 17. Haller, Elementa, VII, xi. 18. Haller, “Irritabilité,” Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (Amsterdam: Rey, 1776–1777), III, 663, quoted in Steinke, Irritating Experiments, 122n88. 19. Haller, Mémoires, I, 297. 20. Duchesneau, La Physiologie, 238. 21. See Robert Whytt, An Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour and Neill, 1751).

308 | notes to pages 213–228 22. G. Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 94. 23. Canguilhem, La Formation, 98. 24. Haller, Elementa, IV, 298. 25. Haller, Elementa, IV, 337. 26. Haller, Elementa, IV, 338. 27. Haller, Elementa, IV, 352. 28. Haller, Elementa, IV, 321. 29. Haller, Elementa, IV, 321–22. 30. Steinke, Irritating Experiments, 111. 31. Steinke, Irritating Experiments, 112; Haller, “Fluide nerveux,” Supplément à l’Encyclopédie, III, 58. 32. See Elementa, IV, 557: “Voluntatem impellere in nervos, inque musculos adeo, elementum subtile, vulgo recipitur. Sed ut impellatur, vis requiritur, & Entelechia, cujus effectus est motus in fluido nerveo nuper enatus, quo id fluidum præter priorem modum potentius in musculos irrumpit. Nunc potest quæri, quænam ejus potentiæ causa sit.”  33. Haller, Elementa, IV, 558. 34. Haller, Elementa, IV, 558. 35. Stephanie Eichberg, “Constituting the Human via the Animal in EighteenthCentury Experimental Neurophysiology: Albrecht von Haller’s Sensibility Trials,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 44 (2009): 274–95, 295. 36. Pierre-Simon Tissot, “Discours préliminaire” to Haller, Mémoires, xx. 37. Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: Brosson, Gabon et Cie, An VIII, 1801). ch a pter 13. a nthropologica l medicine & the natur a lization of sensibilit y

1. See Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 4. 2. Etienne Bonnet de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Amsterdam: Chez Pierre Mortier, 1746) and Traité des sensations (Paris: Chez de Bure l’aîné, 1754). 3. Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Patholog y (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 38. 4. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, VII.iii. 2.7: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. 6 vols. (Oxford, 1976–1983), 1:320. 5. “De l’Influence de la Révolution,” Œuvres de Condorcet (Paris, 1847–1849), viii. 5–6. 6. Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy, “Mémoire sur la faculté de penser,” Mémoires de l’Institut national des sciences et arts. Classe de sciences morales et politiques, 1 (1798), 283–451, 344–45. 7. Théophile de Bordeu, Œuvres completes, ed. A. Richerand. 2 vols. (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1818), 2:668. 8. This work was presented in his comprehensive notes on Boerhaave’s lectures: Albrecht von Haller, Hermanni Boerhaave Praelectiones academicae in proprias institutiones rei medicae edidit . . . , 7 vols. (Göttingen, 1739–44), 2:13–100. 9. Œuvres de Condillac, revues, corrigées par l’auteur, 23 vols. (Paris: Ch. Houel, 1798), 1:502–3. 10. “Observation,” Encyclopédie, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Chez Pellet, 1777–1779.), 23:294. 11. Abraham Trembley, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce (Leiden: Gebr. Verbeek, 1744).

notes to pages 228–236 | 309 12. Théophile de Bordeu, Recherches sur le tissu muqueux (Paris: Didot Le Jeune, 1767). 13. Encyclopédie, 23:301–2. 14. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Amsterdam: n. p., 1762), Book I, chs. 6 and 7. 15. Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’ame (Copenhagen: Freres Cl. & Ant. Philibert, 1760), 370. 16. Vila, Enlightenment and Patholog y, 38. 17. “Hygiène,” Encyclopédie, 17:919. 18. La Caze, Idée de l’homme physique et moral (Paris: H. L. Guerin & L. F. Delatour, 1755), 363–67. 19. Elizabeth Williams, The Physical and the Moral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45. 20. Pierre J. G. Cabanis, Oeuvres philosophiques de Cabanis, ed. C. Lehec and J. Cazeneuve. 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1956), 2:70–75. ch a pter

14. ca ba nis & the order of inter action

1. For Cabanis’s bibliography and publications, see Jean Louis Hippolyte Peisse, Notice historique et philosophique sur la vie, les travaux et les doctrines de P.-J.G. Cabanis (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1844); Emil Schiff, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis der Arzt und Philosoph (1757–1808): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der neueren Medicin und Philosophie (Berlin: Hermann, 1886); Georges Poyer, Cabanis: Choix de textes et introduction (Paris: Michaud, n.d. [1910]); Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Serge Besançon, La philosophie de Cabanis: Une réforme de la psychiatrie (Le-PlessisRobinson: Institut Synthélabo, 1997); and Enrico Marco Cipollini, Analisi dei Rapports cabanisiani. Antropologia filosofica (Padua: Libraria Padovana Editrice, 1998), 13–18. 2. See Paul Thiry de Holbach, Système de la nature. 2 vols. (London [Amsterdam]: [Marc-Michel Rey], 1770), vol. 1, 2: “On a visiblement abusé de la distinction que l’on a fait si souvent de l’homme physique et de l’homme moral. L’homme est un être purement physique; l’homme moral n’est que cet être physique considéré sous un certain point de vue, c’est-à-dire, relativement a quelques-unes de ses façons d’agir dues à son organisation particulière”; and Jean-Luc Guichet, “La question de l’animalité, pivot du matérialisme et de la définition de l’humain chez Cabanis,” Dix-huitième siècle 42 (2010). 3. For the different sensibility debates, see Hubert Steinke, Irritating Experiments: Haller’s Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90 (Amsterdam-Baltimore: Editions Rodolpi, 2005); Tobias Cheung, Res vivens: Agentenmodelle organischer Ordnung 1600– 1800 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2008) and Organismen: Agenten zwischen Innen- und Außenwelten 1780–1860 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014); and Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal, eds., The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (New York: Springer, 2010). 4. For the role of a soul-like entity in Cabanis’s model of human beings, see André Joussain, “Le spiritualisme de Cabanis,” Archives de philosophie 21 (1958); Karl M. Figlio, “Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 13 (1975); and Bernard Baertschi, “Diderot, Cabanis and Lamarck on Psycho-Physical Causality,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 27 (2005). 5. See Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Œuvres complètes de Cabanis, 5 vols. (Paris: Bossagne Frères & Firmin Didot, 1823–1825), 1:274: “On commence a reconnaître aujourd’hui, que la médecine et la morale sont deux branches de la même science, qui, réunies, composent la science de l’homme. L’une et l’autre reposent sur une base commune; sur la connaissance physique de la nature humaine. C’est dans la physiologie qu’elles

310 | notes to pages 236–237 doivent chercher la solution de tous leurs problèmes, le point d’appui de toutes leur vérités spéculatives et pratiques. De la sensibilité physique, ou de l’organisation qui la détermine et la modifie, découlent, en effet, les idées, les sentiments, les passions, les vertus et les vices. Les mouvements, désordonnés ou réguliers, de l’âme, ont la même source que les maladies ou la santé du corps: cette véritable source de la morale est dans l’organisation humaine, dont dépendent et notre faculté et notre manière de sentir”; and Cabanis, Œuvres complètes, 3:66–67: “La sensibilité physique est le dernier terme auquel on arrive dans l’étude des phénomènes de la vie, et dans la recherche méthodique de leur véritable enchaînement: c’est aussi le dernier résultat, ou, suivant la manière commune de parler, le principe le plus général que fournit l’analyse des facultés intellectuelles et des affections de l’âme. Ainsi donc, le physique et le moral se confondent à leur source; ou pour mieux dire, le moral n’est que le physique considéré sous certains points de vue plus particuliers.” 6. Cabanis examined the problem of first causes in a letter to Charles Claude Fauriel (1824). See Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Lettre posthume et inédite de Cabanis à M. F*** sur les causes premières, avec des notes par F. Bérard (Paris: Chez Gabon et Compagnie, 1824). 7. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:235: “Les circonstances qui déterminent l’organisation de la matière sont couvertes pour nous d’épaisses ténèbres: vraisemblablement il nous est à jamais interdit de les pénétrer. Quand même nous parviendrions à lever quelques coins du voile, c’est-à-dire, à faire dépendre une partie des phénomènes propres aux corps organisés d’autres phénomènes plus généraux déjà connus, nous nous retrouverions toujours dans le même embarras relativement au fait principal, qui ne peut reconnaître pour cause que les forces actives et premières de la nature, desquelles nous n’avons ni ne pouvons avoir aucune idée exacte. Cette considération ne doit cependant pas nous empêcher de multiplier les observations et les expériences: efforçons-nous au contraire d’éclaircir, dans les mystères de l’organisation, tous les points qui peuvent être du domaine des unes et des autres”; Cabanis, Œuvres, 236, footnote 1: “Encore une fois, la cause générale des propriétés de la matière, en vertu desquelles certaines circonstances données déterminent toujours certaines combinaisons, n’en resterait pas moins inconnue; mais éclaircir les circonstances des phénomènes, est presque toujours ce que nous appelons les expliquer”; and Cabanis, Œuvres, 259: “Mais, quoique cette conclusion soit incontestable; quoique la sensibilité développe dans les corps des propriétés qui ne ressemblent en aucune manière à celles qui caractérisoient leurs élémens avant qu’elle leur eût fait éprouver son influence vivifiante: il faut cependant se garder de croire que la tendance à l’organisation, la sensibilité que l’organisation détermine, la vie, qui n’est que l’exercice ou l’emploi régulier de l’une et de l’autre, ne dérivent pas elles-mêmes des lois générales qui gouvernent la matière.” For vitalistic and mechanic explanations in Cabanis’s writings, see Joussain, “Le spiritualisme de Cabanis”; Martin S. Staum, “Cabanis and the Science of Man,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 10 (1974); and Aram Vartanian, “Cabanis et la Mettrie,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 155 (1976). For the relations between Cabanis and the Idéologues, see Antoine Guillois, Le Salon de Mme. Helvétius. Cabanis et les Idéologues (Paris: C. Lévy, 1894); Sergio Moravia, “Logica e psicologia nel pensiero di D. de Tracy,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 19 (1964); Sergio Moravia, “Aspetti della ’Science de l’homme’ nella filosofia degli ‘Idéologues,’” Rivista critica della storia della filosofia 21 (1966); Sergio Moravia, Il pensiero degli idéologues: Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780–1815) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974); and Marie Gaille, Cabanis. Anthropologie médicale et pensée politique (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2014). 8. See Xavier Bichat, Anatomie générale appliquée à la physiologie et à la médecine, 4 vols. (Paris: Brosson & Sarrazin, 1801), 1:115–16; and Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: Brosson & Gabon, 1802), 2–4.

notes to pages 237–238 | 311 9. See Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort. 10. For the relationship between medicine, natural history, and anthropology around 1800, see Claude Blanckaert, “Le ‘circuit’ de l’anthropologie. Figures de l’homme naturel et social dans le système méthodique des savoirs (1782–1832),” in L’encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832): Des lumières au positivisme, ed. Claude Blanckaert et Michel Porret (Geneva: Droz, 2006). 11. In his essay on the guillotine (1795), Cabanis still relied on Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility. See Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, “Note adressée aux auteurs du Magasin encyclopédique, sur l’opinion de Messieurs Oelsner et Soemmering, et du citoyen Sue, touchant le supplice de la guillotine,” Magasin encyclopédique ou Journal des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts 5 (1795); and Jacques Chazaud, “Cabanis before the Guillotine,” Histoire des sciences médicales 32 (1998). For Haller’s physiology of muscle fibers and nerves, see François Duchesneau’s essay in this volume. 12. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:115; and 4:272: “Les recherches les plus attentives de l’anatomie moderne n’ont pu faire découvrir de nerfs ni d’appareil cérébral dans quelques animaux imparfaits, tels que les polypes et les insectes infusoires: cependant, ces animaux sentent et vivent; ils reçoivent des impressions qui déterminent en eux une suite analogue et régulière de mouvements.” 13. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:87, 115: “En portant la sensibilité dans les muscles, les nerfs y portent la vie; ils les rendent propres à exécuter les mouvements que la nature leur attribue . . .”; and 4:464: “Expérience. Quand on lie, on coupe tous les troncs des nerfs d’une partie, au même instant elle devient entièrement insensible, et la faculté de tout mouvement volontaire s’y trouve abolie: celle de recevoir quelques impressions et de produire de vagues mouvements de contraction subsiste encore quelque temps; et bientôt arrivent la cessation totale de la vie, et la décomposition. Conséquence. Les nerfs sont le siège particulier de la sensibilité. Ce sont eux qui la distribuent dans tous les organes, dont ils forment le lien général et alimentent la vie. Les impressions isolées, les mouvements irréguliers qui subsistent encore quelques instants après la section, tiennent à des restes d’une sensibilité partielle qui ne se renouvelle plus. L’irritabilité n’est qu’une conséquence de la sensibilité, et le mouvement un effet de la vie: car les nerfs sentent, mais ne se meuvent pas. Ils sont l’âme du mouvement des muscles, mais ne sont point irritables directement.” For the role of sensibility within a field of competing naturalizing strategies of human faculties in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Stephen Gaukroger’s essay in this volume. 14. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:303. 15. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:274: “Quoiqu’il soit très-avéré, sans doute, que la conscience des impressions suppose toujours l’existence et l’action de la sensibilité, la sensibilité n’en est pas moins vivante dans plusieurs parties où le moi n’aperçoit nullement sa présence; elle n’en détermine pas moins un grand nombre de fonctions importantes et régulières, sans que le moi reçoive aucun avertissement de son action. Les mêmes nerfs qui portent le sentiment dans les organes, y portent aussi ou y reçoivent les impressions d’où résultent toutes ces fonctions inaperçues; les causes par lesquelles ils sont privés de leur faculté de sentir, paralysent en même temps les mouvements qui se passent sans le concours, quelquefois même contre l’expresse volonté de l’individu.” 16. See Cabanis, Œuvres,4:408. 17. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:311–14 and 465: “Quoi qu’il en soit, il est certain que nous recevons des impressions qui nous viennent de l’extérieur, et d’autres qui viennent de l’intérieur. Nous avons ordinairement la conscience des unes: le plus souvent nous ignorons les autres, et par conséquent la cause des mouvements qu’elles déterminent.

312 | notes to pages 238–242 Les philosophes analystes paraissent avoir souvent négligé ces dernières, et donné exclusivement aux autres le nom de sensations.” For the relationship between Cabanis and Condillac, see Cipollini, Rapports cabanisiani, 39–46. 18. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:465. 19. Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:449–50: “Dans ce sens restreint du mot sensation, il est hors de doute que toutes nos idées et nos déterminations ne viennent pas des sensations; car beaucoup sont dues à des impressions internes, résultantes du jeu des différents organes.” See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:225–26, 273–76, and 465. 20. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:305. 21. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:133. 22. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:260. 23. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:284; and 291–92, footnote 1. 24. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:289–91. 25. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:289–91. 26. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:292–93. 27. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:271. 28. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:423. 29. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:16–17. 30. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:399: “Les organes ne sont susceptibles d’entrer en action, et d’exécuter certains mouvements, qu’en tant qu’ils sont doués de vie, ou sensibles: c’est la sensibilité qui les anime; c’est en vertu de ses lois qu’ils reçoivent des impressions, et qu’ils sont déterminés à se mouvoir. Les impressions reçues par leurs extrémités sentantes sont transmises au centre de réaction; et ce centre, partiel ou général, renvoie à l’organe qui lui correspond les déterminations dont l’ensemble constitue les fonctions propres de cet organe”; and Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:405: “Nous avons reconnu, dans les Mémoires précédents, qu’une suite d’impressions reçues, et de réactions opérées par les différents centres sensitifs, sollicitent les organes, et déterminent les opérations propres à chacun de ces derniers.” 31. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:160–61. 32. Cabanis, Œuvres, vol. 3:160–61: “Dira-t-on que les mouvements organiques par lesquels s’exécutent les fonctions du cerveau nous sont inconnus? Mais l’action par laquelle les nerfs de l’estomac déterminent les opérations différentes qui constituent la digestion, mais la manière dont ils impreignent le suc gastrique de la puissance dissolvante la plus active, ne se dérobent pas moins à nos recherches. Nous voyons les aliments tomber dans ce viscère avec les qualités qui leur sont propres; nous les en voyons sortir avec des qualités nouvelles, et nous concluons qu’il leur a véritablement fait subir cette altération. Nous voyons également les impressions arriver au cerveau par l’entremise des nerfs: elles sont alors isolées et sans cohérence. Le viscère entre en action; il agit sur elles, et bientôt il les renvoie métamorphosées en idées, que le langage de la physionomie et du geste, ou les signes de la parole et de l’écriture, manifestent au-dehors. Nous concluons, avec la même certitude, que le cerveau digère en quelque sorte les impressions; qu’il fait organiquement la sécrétion de la pensée.” See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:318 and 324. 33. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:446. 34. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:15. 35. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:411–12, trans. George Moral, modified by T. Cheung: “Dans cette chaîne non interrompue d’impressions, de déterminations, de fonctions, de mouvements quelconques, tant internes qu’externes, tous les organes agissent et réagissent les uns sur les autres; ils se communiquent leurs affections; ils s’excitent, ou se répriment; ils se secondent, ou se balancent et se contiennent mutuellement: liés par des rapports

notes to pages 242–244 | 313 de structure, ou de situation et de continuité, en tant que parties du même tout, ils le sont bien plus encore par le but commun qu’ils doivent remplir, par l’influence que chacun d’eux doit exercer sur tous les actes qui concourent à la conservation générale de l’individu. Ainsi, la nutrition peut être regardée comme la fonction la plus indispensable relativement à cet objet. Mais, pour que la nutrition s’opère, il faut que l’estomac et les intestins reçoivent l’influence nerveuse nécessaire à leur action; que le foie, le pancréas et les follicules glanduleux y versent les sucs dissolvants: il faut donc, d’une part, que l’organe nerveux soit convenablement excité par les impressions sympathiques qui déterminent cette influence; de l’autre, que la circulation des liqueurs générales et la sécrétion des sucs particuliers s’exécutent avec régularité dans leurs organes respectifs. Or, pour que l’organe nerveux soit convenablement excité, il a besoin d’être soutenu par la circulation; il faut, en outre, que la chaleur animale épanouisse les extrémités sentantes les plus essentielles; et la marche de la circulation est à son tour soumise à la respiration, qui contribue ellemême très-puissamment à la production de cette chaleur. Si l’on considère successivement, de cette manière, toutes les fonctions importantes, on verra que chacune est liée à toutes les autres par des relations plus ou moins directes; qu’elles doivent s’exciter et s’appuyer mutuellement; que, par conséquent, elles forment un cercle dans lequel roule la vie, entretenue par cette réciprocité d’influence.” See Cabanis, Œuvres, 400–401; and PierreJean-Georges Cabanis, On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, ed. George Moral, 2 vols. (Baltimore, New York: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 2:656. 36. For Cabanis’s medicine, see Otmar Keel, “Cabanis et la généalogie épistémologique de la médecine clinique,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 1994). 37. For the relations between Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Cabanis, see Moravia, Il pensiero, 63–74; Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment, 185–87; Léon Szyfman, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck et son époque (Paris–New York: Masson, 1982); and Baertschi, “Diderot, Cabanis and Lamarck.” 38. Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:101. 39. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:376; and 4:140–41. 40. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:248. 41. Cabanis, Œuvres, 3:8. 42. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:161–62. 43. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:12–13. 44. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:430. 45. Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:12–13, trans. Mora, modified Cheung: “Nous avons donc reconnu que l’expression générale régime embrasse l’ensemble des habitudes physiques; et nous savons, d’ailleurs, que ces habitudes sont capables de modifier et même de changer non seulement le genre d’action des organes, mais encore leurs dispositions intimes et le caractère des déterminations du système vivant. En effet, il est notoire que le plan de vie, suivant qu’il est bon ou mauvais, peut améliorer considérablement la constitution physique, ou l’altérer et même la détruire sans ressource. Par cette influence chaque organe peut se fortifier ou s’affaiblir; ses habitudes, se perfectionner ou se dégrader de jour en jour. Les impressions par lesquelles se reproduit l’ordre des mouvements conservateurs, impressions qui tendent sans cesse à introduire de nouvelles séries de mouvements, sont elles-mêmes susceptibles d’éprouver des changements notables. Si, par l’effet avantageux, ou nuisible du régime, les organes acquièrent de nouvelles manières d’être et d’agir, ils acquièrent également de nouvelles manières de sentir. Enfin, le changement primitif ne fut-il que circonscrit et local, ces modifications de la sensibilité sont le plus souvent imitées, en quelque sorte, par tout le système vivant.” See Cabanis, On the Relations, 2:368–69. 46. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:146–47: “Mais l’empire des habitudes ne se borne pas à

314 | notes to pages 244–248 ces profondes et ineffaçables empreintes qu’elles laissent chez chaque individu, elles sont encore, du moins en partie, susceptibles d’être transmises par la voie de la génération. Une plus grande aptitude à mettre en jeu certains organes, à leur faire produire certains mouvements, à exécuter certaines fonctions; en un mot, des facultés particulières, développées à un plus haut degré, peuvent se propager de race en race . . .”; and Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:449: “Si donc les causes de certaines impressions agissent assez fréquemment, ou durant un temps assez long, sur le système, elles pourront changer ses habitudes et celles des organes; elles pourront conséquemment introduire les dispositions accidentelles, ou les tempéraments nouveaux, que ces habitudes constituent. Telle est la véritable source des tempéraments acquis.” 47. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:6–8, 161–62, and 248–50. For the influence of Lacépède on Cabanis, see Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment, 187–88. 48. Cabanis discussed also the effects of breeding. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:8–9. 49. See Cabanis, Œuvres, 4:430. ch a pter

15. self-feeling

1. See, for instance, the enumeration of sense faculties in the section on psychology in Baumgarten’s 1739 Metaphysica. 2. Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 1811, 4:103 f.: “Der Sinn, welches eigentlich das Sehen bedeutet, hernach von der Fähigkeit zu sehen, in weiterer Bedeutung aber auch von der Fähigkeit zu empfinden, und dann figürlich von fast den meisten Fähigkeiten der Seele gebraucht wurde.” 3. Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (Leipzig: Dyck, 1772). Henceforth cited as Anthropolog y. 4. Udo Thiel notes the first occurrence of the term in Johannes Bernhard Basedow, Philathelie, 1764. Thiel also gives a detailed presentation of the debate on the self in the context of Wolffian philosophy. See Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 9 and 10. Platner himself cites Sulzer, Irwing, Meiners, and Michael Ignaz Schmidt, who published a Geschichte des Selbstgefühls in 1772. 5. As Manfred Frank has shown, Platner exerted a major influence on philosophers such as Novalis and Fichte, who both may have become acquainted with Platner’s ideas during their studies in Leipzig. Fichte devoted a whole series of lectures to Platner’s Philosophical Aphorisms: these are contained in the Fichte Gesamtausgabe II, 4. See Manfred Frank, Selbstgefühl: eine historisch-systematische Erkundung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). 6. See Aristotle, De Anima, book III, ch. 2, 425a27, in On The Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breaths, ed. William S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard University Press, 1957). 7. Platner, Anthropolog y, § 74ff. 8. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadolog y, trans. George Macdonald Ross (Leeds: 1999), § 7. 9. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 156 [Akademieausgabe IV, 44ff]. See also the chapter on aesthetics and anthropology in my recent book, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 152–77. 10. See Christian Wolff, Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, ed. Charles A. Corr, 11th ed., Gesammelte Werke, 1.2 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997 [1754]), §§ 377 and 872. Henceforth cited as German Metaphysics.

notes to pages 248–253 | 315 11. Leibniz was involved in a broader debate with both Hieronymus Rorarius and Pierre Bayle and answered their skeptical claims that “animals use reason better than men.” Hieronymus Rorarius published a treatise on this subject in 1648: Rorarius, quod Animalia bruta rationis utantur melius homine, which Pierre Bayle discussed in great detail in the entry on Rorarius in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, 5th ed. (Amsterdam, 1734). 12. Wolff, German Metaphysics, § 794. 13. German Metaphysics, § 892. 14. German Metaphysics, § 892. 15. See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry. Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954). See my study The Founding of Aesthetics, 165–77. 16. Simone de Angelis is a noteworthy exception to this general tendency in philosophy: see Simone de Angelis, “Unbewußte Perzeptivität und metaphysisches Bedürfnis. Ernst Platners Auseinandersetzung mit Haller in den Quaestiones physiologicae (1794),” in Ernst Platner (1744–1818). Konstellationen der Aufklärung zwischen Philosophie, Medizin und Anthropologie, ed. Guido Naschert and Gideon Stiening (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007) (special issue, Aufklärung. 19), 243–74. Generally speaking, literary historians have paid far more attention to the medical background of Enlightenment anthropology than the philosophers. See for example the volumes published by Nowitzki, Schings, and Zelle: Hans-Peter Nowitzki, Der wohltemperierte Mensch. Aufklärungsanthropologien im Widerstreit (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 2003); Hans-Jürgen Schings, ed., Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994); Carsten Zelle, “Vernünftige Ärzte.” Hallesche Psychomediziner und die Anfänge der Anthropologie in der deutschsprachigen Frühaufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001). 17. See Albrecht von Haller, Von den empfindlichen und reizbaren Teilen des menschlichen Körpers (De partibus corporis humani sentientibus & irritabilibus), in Sammlung kleiner Hallerischer Schriften, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1772), 3–45 and 49–103 (1752), 59. 18. See Platner, Quaestionum physiologicarum libri duo (Leipzig: Crusius, 1794); “Über einige Schwierigkeiten des Hallerischen Systems,” in Vermischte Aufsätze über medicinische Gegenstände (Leipzig, 1796), 142–61. For a discussion of the Letters, see the detailed study by Hans-Peter Nowitzki, Der wohltemperierte Mensch, especially 165–250. 19. Platner, Briefe eines Arztes an seinen Freund über den menschlichen Körper, Preface, xiii. 20. Christian Wolff, Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere, ed. J. Ecole, 3rd ed., Gesammelte Werke, II, 1.1, Hildesheim: Olms, 1983 [1746], § 29. 21. Platner, Anthropolog y, preface. 22. See Hans-Peter Nowitzki, “Platner und die Wolffsche Philosophietradition,” in Ernst Platner (1744–1818). Konstellationen der Aufklärung, ed. Naschert and Stiening, 69–104. 23. See the chapter on rational psychology in the German Metaphysics, § 730ff. 24. See also the beginning of the German Metaphysics, § 1: “We are conscious of ourselves and of other things; no one can doubt this fact, unless completely deprived of his senses.” 25. Platner, Anthropolog y, § 45. 26. For the distinction between clear and distinct forms of self-feeling, see Platner, Philosophical Aphorisms, § 127. 27. Moses Mendelssohn expounds a similar idea of the soul in his 1767 Phaedon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. 28. Platner, Anthropolog y, § 194. Since the soul cannot think unless it perceives at least one object or feeling (Empfindung) of its body, the soul of an embryo, newborn child, or dying person cannot be conscious of its existence (§ 201).

316 | notes to pages 253–257 29. Platner, Anthropolog y, § 47. 30. On the simplicity of consciousness, see Platner, Anthropolog y, § 286. 31. See Platner, Philosophical Aphorisms, § 186. 32. See Platner, Philosophical Aphorisms, § 111. 33. Platner, Anthropolog y, § 287. 34. Samuel Thomas Sömmerring, Über das Organ der Seele (1796), ed. Manfred Wenzel and Sigrid Oehler-Klein (Basel: Schwabe, 1999), § 1. 35. Platner, Philosophical Aphorisms, § 200. 36. Platner, Philosophical Aphorisms, § 202. 37. On animal industry, see Herrmann Samuel Reimarus, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe (Hamburg, 1754).

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Contributors

Domenico Bertoloni M eli teaches the history of science and medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (2006) and Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy (2011). He is currently working on a project on the history of the visual representation of disease. Stefanie Buchenau is Maître de conférences in German studies, Université Paris 8 Saint-Denis. Her research areas are eighteenth-century German philosophy, aesthetics, history of anthropology, and philosophy of medicine. Current research projects: book project on human dignity in the German Enlightenment. Key publications: The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment. The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Médecine et philosophie de la nature humaine, de l’Âge classique aux Lumières. Antholog y, coedited with Raphaële Andrault, Claire Crignon, and Anne-Lise Rey (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). Davide Cellamare is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen. He does research in Renaissance and early modern philosophy and science, with a focus on the tradition of Latin texts, which illustrates the interaction between philosophy, science, and other aspects of sixteenthand seventeenth-century European culture (e.g., theology and academic institutions). The latest result of this research is Cellamare’s doctoral thesis Psycholog y in the Age of Confessionalisation. A Case Study on the Interaction between Psycholog y and Theolog y, c. 1517-c. 1640 (Nijmegen, Radboud University 2015). Cellamare’s publications include: Davide Cellamare and Paul Bakker, “Libertus Fromondus’ Christian Psychology. Medicine and Natural Philosophy in the ‘Philosophia Christiana De anima’ (1649),” Lias 41.1 (2015): 36–66; Davide Cellamare, “Anatomy and the Body in Renaissance Protestant Psychology,” Early Science and Medicine 19.4 (2014): 341–64. Tobias Cheung is associate professor of the history of knowledge and culture at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt University, Berlin. He is author of The Organization of the Living: The Role of Cuvier’s, Leibniz’s and Kant’s Notions of Organismic Order in the History of Biolog y (2000); Charles Bonnet’s System Theory and Philosophy of Organic Order (2005); Res vivens: Agent Models of Organic Order 1600–1800 (2008); Organisms: Agents between Inner and Outer Worlds 1780–1860 (2014); and editor of Transitions and Borders between Animals, Humans and Machines 1600–1800 (2010). C l a ire C rignon is a lecturer in the history of British philosophy at Paris-Sorbonne University. Working in the field of seventeenth-eighteenth century history of British philosophy and philosophy of medicine. She has published Lettre sur l’enthousiasme, Shaftesbury: Traduction, présentation, dossier et notes par C. Crignon-De Oliveira (Paris: Livre de poche, 2002); De la

343

344 | contributors mélancolie à l’enthousiasme: Burton et Shaftesbury, “travaux de philosophie” (Paris: H. Champion, 2006); Médecine et philosophie de la nature humaine de l’âge classique aux Lumières (Paris, 2014); and Locke médecin: manuscrits sur l’art médical (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016). S imone D e A ngelis is professor of the history of science at Karl-Franzens-University, Graz (Austria). He studied comparative literature and history of science at the University of Berne (Switzerland). As a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) he studied the Aristotelian tradition of De Anima at the University of Padua, the tradition of Melanchthon’s textbooks at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, and the history of early modern medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. His main research areas are the history of science and medicine, the history of the human sciences, Renaissance and Enlightenment studies, integrated history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Anthropologien: Genese und Konfiguration einer “Wissenschaft vom Menschen” in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010); Von Newton zu Haller: Studien zum Naturbegriff zwischen Empirismus und deduktiver Methode in der Schweizer Frühaufklärung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003). He coauthored Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2008); “Natur,” Naturrecht und Geschichte: Aspekte eines fundamentalen Begründungsdiskurses der Neuzeit (1600–1900) (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010). F r a nçois D uchesne au is emeritus professor in the Department of Philosophy of the Université de Montréal and associate member of the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques of the Université Paris-I. He is known for his scholarly contributions on the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century to the present. Among his more recent publications: Leibniz: Le vivant et l’organisme (Paris: Vrin, 2010) and La Physiologie des Lumières, 2nd ed. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012). M a rie G a ille is a senior researcher in philosophy in the National Center for Scientific Research. She is affiliated with SPHERE (CNRS-University Paris Diderot). Her main areas of research are the philosophy of medicine and the history of its connection with medical knowledge and anthropology; medical decisions and their ethical, political, and legal aspects; and the notion of health and its relationship with environmental issues. Her most recent publication is Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis: Pensée politique et anthropologie médicale (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2014). She is currently working on a book project on the notion of solidarity in health care relationships in the contemporary French context. S tephen G aukroger is emeritus professor of the history of philosophy and history of science at the University of Sydney. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a corresponding member of l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for contributions to the history of philosophy and history of science. His research is centered on a long-term project on the emergence and consolidation of scientific culture in the West in the modern era. Three volumes have appeared: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford, 2006); The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford, 2010); and The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (Oxford, 2016). H iro H ir a i is a research fellow at Radboud University (Netherlands). He has published widely in early modern natural philosophy, medicine, and chymistry, including Le concept

contributors | 345 de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance (2005) and Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life and the Soul (2011). He also edited Cornelius Gemma in Renaissance Louvain (2008), Justus Lipsius and Natural Philosophy (2011), and Jacques Gaffarel between Magic and Science (2014). R oberto L o P resti is a lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institut für Klassische Philologie). His research and teaching covers a broad spectrum of disciplinary fields (classics, ancient philosophy, history of ancient medicine, Renaissance and early modern Aristotelianism). He has had visitorships and research fellowships from the Universities of Sorbonne-Paris IV, Newcastle, Lausanne, the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Library, the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science of Utrecht University, and the Fondation Hardt pour l’étude de l’antiquité classique. He has recently edited “Teleology and Mechanism in Early Modern Medicine,” Gesnerus 71.2 (2014). G i a nni Paga nini (Università del Piemonte Orientale), now attached at the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome), edited, with G. Canziani, the first and foremost philosophical clandestine manuscript: Theophrastus redivivus (1659). 2 vols. (Florence, 1981–1982), pp. cxxii-998. He is also the author, among many other works, of Skepsis. Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme (Paris: Vrin, 2008), awarded La Bruyère Prize for Philosophy and Literature by the Académie Française in 2009. In 2010 the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome) awarded him a prize for his philosophical work. Among his other works are: Les philosophies clandestines à l’âge classique (Paris: PUF, 2005) and Hobbes, Moto, luogo e tempo (Turin: UTET, 2010). He is currently working at a new volume: Du Scepticisme au Naturalisme: Bayle-Hume-Diderot (Paris, forthcoming). C hristoph S a nder is a doctoral student at TU Berlin and RU Nijmegen, working on conceptions of magnetism in the early modern period. His second field of research is the history of early modern Jesuit philosophy, particularly the idea and practice of censorship in Jesuit colleges. His publications on Jesuits deal with Benet Perera and Diego de Ledesma, and with medical learning among Jesuits. Furthermore, he has contributed to a project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, exploring the history of early modern editions of and commentaries on Johannes de Sacrobosco’s astronomical classic De sphaera mundi. Justin E. H. S mith is a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris 7—Denis Diderot. A recent publication is The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton University Press, 2016). C h a rles T. Wolfe is a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences and Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, and an associate member of the IHPST (CNRS-UMR 8590, Paris). He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He has edited volumes, including Monsters and Philosophy (2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (2010, with O. Gal), Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science (2013, with S. Normandin), and Brain Theory (2014). His current project is a monograph on the conceptual foundations of Enlightenment vitalism. He is also coeditor of the Springer series “History, Philosophy, and Theory of the Life Sciences.”

index

aesthetics, 127, 131, 143, 250, 314n9, 343 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 19, 27, 29, 35 analogon rationis, 248–50 analogy, 11, 66, 79, 133, 140, 145–46, 164, 175, 205, 209–10, 212, 214, 218, 248, 295n14 anatomy: animated, 205; comparative, 1, 4, 8, 10, 151–56, 173, 175–77, 185, 204, 259n8; of the brain, 3, 156, 173–78, 182; of the soul, 3 animality, 12, 160, 166, 236, 238, 301n103 animals: behavior of, 2, 34–35, 39, 76– 78, 86–87, 128, 155, 159–60, 162–63, 168, 185, 189–90, 196; body, 56–57, 59, 63–64, 66, 69, 70–73, 202, 205, 248; brain of, 116, 154, 175–76, 197; cognition of, 1–6, 37–39, 41–42, 47, 49, 51–54, 148–49, 151, 158–59, 163, 167, 171, 197, 257; experimentation on, 105, 120, 132, 206; intelligence of, 49, 82, 86, 129, 155, 164, 169, 179, 181, 263n4, 277n16, 291n23, 299n59; kingdom of, 46, 120, 135; language of, 156, 158, 163, 190, 290n12; life of, 2, 84–85, 87, 203, 209, 219, 237, 240; mind of, 149–51, 154, 162, 166–68, 170, 218, 276n6, 295n14, 297n33; nature of, 4, 287n33; political, 187, 189; rationality of, 84–88, 159–61, 163, 249, 278n19; soul of, 7, 11, 47, 59, 71–72, 74, 76, 86–87, 93, 147, 149, 151–57, 160–62, 167, 172, 179, 207, 210, 248, 296n26, 297n32, 298n52, 303n33; as species, 2, 9, 37, 39–40, 47, 49, 165; and syllogism, 149, 152, 158, 163, 167, 170, 295n14 anthropological medicine, 224, 232, 234–35, 307n27 anthropology, 2, 4, 6–7, 11–13, 17–18,

20–21, 26–30, 33, 35–36, 38, 82, 85–86, 100, 146, 197, 219–20, 232, 236–37, 245–47, 251–52, 255, 257, 259n10, 311n10, 314n9, 315n16, 343–44 ape. See orang-outang Apollo, 55–56, 251 apoplexy, 118–20, 122–24, 126, 288n7 Aristotelianism: early modern, 5, 38, 345; Jesuit, 6; medical, 37; neo-, 43, 250; Paduan, 6, 17, 19, 29, 35, 53; Renaissance, 13, 17, 19–20, 27, 152, 345; Scholastic, 19, 30; secular, 6, 37 Aristotle 2, 3, 5–9, 18–19, 21–22, 25, 27–28, 30, 35, 38–41, 43–44, 48, 50–54, 56–58, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70–71, 75, 77, 82, 89, 90–93, 95, 98, 108, 128–30, 132–36, 141, 146, 152, 187–91, 193–94, 247–49, 256 artificiality, 187, 197 atheism, 174, 180 attraction, 145, 212 autopsy, 19–20 Averroës, 28–29, 41, 48, 50–51 avian vocalization, 127, 129, 133, 138, 140, 144, 146. See also animals: language of; bird; voice Avicenna, 95, 118, 152, 278n16 Bacon, Francis, 103, 175, 178, 295n14, 298n52, 303n24 Baglivi, Giorgio, 201, 208 baptism, 66, 272n78 Barrington, Daines, 132, 144–46 Barthez, Paul-Joseph, 11, 219, 233, 236 Bartholin, Thomas, 113–14, 288n2 Bayle, Pierre, 9, 152–53, 155, 160, 167–68, 170–71, 296n26, 296n30, 297nn32–33, 300n91, 315n11 beaver, 9, 162, 297n33

347

348 | index Belon, Pierre, 9, 135–36 Bernard de Chartres, 103, 155 Bible: Book of Genesis, 76; Book of Revelation, 76 ; Job, 76, 80, 82; Leviticus, 67, 70; Maccabees, 76; Matthew, 76; New Testament, 59, 76; Old Testament, 71 Bichat, Xavier, 11, 124, 219, 237, 240, 245 bird, 9, 127–46, 159, 162–63, 166, 169, 182, 290n2. See also avian vocalization blood, 30–31, 33–34, 36, 39, 41, 57, 59–73, 114, 118, 120–22, 154, 181, 197, 214, 225, 240, 242, 270n58, 272n81, 274n105, 274nn106–7, 275nn114–15, 275n119 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 11, 219 Boerhaave, Hermann, 201, 203, 205–6, 208, 210, 217 Bologna, University of, 28, 116–17 Bonet, Théophile, 117–20, 125 Bordeu, Théophile de, 224, 227–28, 230–31, 236, 238, 245 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, 8, 118, 122, 205 Borgia, Franciscus, 57, 68 Bougeant, Guillaume, 161, 163, 166, 170–71, 298n53 Boullier, David, 147, 154–56, 162, 166 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 162, 166 Bynum, William, 173, 178 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, 12, 219, 233–34, 236–45, 259n10, 309n1 Cambridge, University of, 92, 158 Canguilhem, Georges, 110, 213, 304n41 Cartesianism, 1–2, 18, 20, 31–33, 119, 148, 155–56, 159, 162, 184, 186, 209, 216–17, 228, 299n60 Casmann, Otto, 7, 30, 33, 74, 79, 81–88, 276n3, 279n22, 279n24 Catholicism, 55–57, 60, 63, 70–72, 81, 233, 235, 267n12 Cavendish, Margaret, 159, 165 Cavendish, William, 151, 165 censorship, 55, 57–59, 62–64, 69, 274n105, 278n19, 345

chemistry, 95, 233, 235 Christianity, 90, 98 Christology, 59, 61, 88, 280n32 Chrysippus, 149, 158, 165 Clarke, Samuel, 168, 170 Collins, Anthony, 9, 149, 151, 154, 160, 166–71 common good, 191–92, 306n18 commonwealth, 189–92, 194, 196 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 12, 159, 161–62, 167, 170, 221, 226–27, 238– 39, 245 consciousness, 170, 186, 215, 247, 249, 251, 253–54, 256 contract, 10, 186–87, 190, 193–94, 196, 229 contractility, 208–9 Copernicanism, 20, 31 Cornelius a Lapide, 67–68 Council: of Barcelona (1350), 61; of Ephesus (431), 60, 65; of Trent (1551), 60, 65; of Vienne (1311), 56, 267n9 creation, 7, 24, 26, 67, 94, 96, 98, 107–8, 174, 187 Cudworth, Ralph, 92, 170 Cumberland, Richard, 18, 20, 31, 33–35 curiosity, 103, 132, 196–97 d’Argens, Boyer, 150–51, 167, 172 damage, 78, 91, 122, 214, 243, 256. See also pathology Darwin, Erasmus, 127, 242, 313n37 De Vio, Tommaso, 27, 62 death, 2, 55, 59, 90–91, 93–94, 137, 153, 256. See also immortality Descartes, René, 33, 123, 128, 133, 148, 155, 159–60, 165, 175–76, 179–81, 184, 186, 248, 297n33, 298n52, 304n39, 304n41, 345 development, 2, 5, 17, 20, 31, 33, 101, 109, 128, 144, 146, 155, 218, 222–25, 230, 234, 239–40 Diderot, Denis, 9, 11, 147–49, 151, 154, 160, 165, 167, 171–72, 219, 229. See also Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers Digby, Kenelm, 155, 157, 180

index | 349 disease, ix, 8, 77–78, 80, 84, 102, 107–8, 113, 116–18, 120, 122, 124–26, 166, 178, 184, 230–31, 234, 256 dissection, 20, 28, 117, 120, 124–26, 177 dog, 9, 78, 120, 130, 141, 158–59, 165, 169, 171–72, 175–77, 249 Donato, Girolamo, 18–19, 28 education, 3, 67, 70, 75, 81, 99, 131, 155, 164–65, 232 embryology, 4, 7, 30, 34, 92 empiricism, 19, 131, 209 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Diderot), 149, 155, 202, 216, 222, 227, 229, 231 energy, 181–82, 222, 238, 240 Epicureanism/Epicurus, 9–10, 139, 149, 152–53, 155, 157, 160, 162, 179–80, 186–87, 193–94 epistemology, 3, 221 existence (inner), 239–40 experience, 20, 32, 34, 40, 43, 71–72, 77, 80, 99–101, 104–5, 109, 114, 118, 130, 138, 141, 143, 158, 165, 170, 181–82, 189, 206, 208, 210, 212, 237, 240, 252, 254 experiment, 11, 66, 120–21, 177–78, 201, 204, 206, 208–9, 215–17, 233, 237 Eucharist, doctrine established at the Council of Trent, 59–61, 65, 69 Fabrici d’Aquapendente, Girolamo, 19, 28, 125 faculty: estimative, 41–42, 249; imaginative, 40–41, 43, 49, 51, 71; plastic, 92–96; rational, 10, 22, 28, 35, 37, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 53, 78–80, 89, 151, 156, 161, 170, 183, 249–250, 256–57; sensitive, 51, 72. See also power feeling, 12, 25, 34, 61, 65, 104, 148, 151, 159, 172, 184, 223, 228–30, 244, 246–47, 252–55, 257, 299n60, 315n26, 315n28 Fernel, Jean, 7, 67, 90–93, 96, 98, 281n5 fiber, 11, 204–13, 215, 218–19, 225–28, 230, 240, 311n11 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 247, 314n5

Fienus, Thomas, 97, 283n36 Fifth Lateran Council (1513), 6, 55 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 159, 163 force: inherent, 11, 211, 218; moving, 24, 211; nervous, 210–12, 215–16; vital, 202, 212–14, 219, 222 forms, giver of, 95, 283n30 fox, 9, 144, 158–59, 169–71, 176–77, 181–82, 297n37, 298n47 freedom, 128, 138, 171, 223, 249 function: brain, 9, 122–24; life, 79, 91, 156–57, 277n16; organic, 136, 204, 207; vital, 77, 175, 178, 180, 203, 205 Galen, 3, 5, 7–8, 18–19, 22, 25–26, 40, 43, 54, 67, 69, 75, 90–93, 97–98, 101–2, 107–8, 118, 134, 230–31, 279n20 Gassendi, Pierre, 10, 152, 154, 156–57, 160, 171, 179–80, 186–87, 193–94, 197, 295n14, 296n28, 296n30, 304n39 Gaultier, Abraham, 148, 150–51, 167, 172 generation, 7, 67, 90, 92–93, 96–97, 116, 123, 125, 166, 181, 218, 244, 272nn81–82 Glisson, Francis, 201, 295n17 Goclenius, Rudolph, 29–30, 81, 83, 279n27, 280n28 God, 7, 13, 20, 23–26, 31–33, 36, 45–46, 55, 57, 60, 62, 76, 80, 85–88, 91, 93–96, 98, 103–4, 142–43, 150, 161, 166, 174, 180, 196–97, 216, 225, 254, 257, 283n32 gregariousness, 188, 192, 194, 196 habit, 136, 162, 182, 231, 243–44, 304n58 hair and fingernails, 61, 65, 67, 70 Haller, Albrecht von, 11–13, 201–19, 225– 26, 251, 254, 256 hand, 10, 61, 65, 93, 105, 108, 124, 185 harmony (preestablished), 217, 248, 254 Harvey, William, 28, 30, 34, 70, 92, 124–25, 178 heat, 39, 61, 91, 121, 153, 233, 242, 256, 281n13

350 | index heaven, 46, 90–91, 96, 174 Helmont, Jan Baptist van, 57, 71–73, 274nn106–107, 275n119 Hemsterhuis, Franz, 171, 296n28 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 12, 35, 247, 257, 263n83, 299n64 Hieronymus Fabricius. See Fabrici d’Aquapendente, Girolamo Hippocrates, 18, 25, 75, 77, 80–83, 87, 90–91, 101, 120, 276n8, 277n10, 279n27, 280n28, 287n40 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 35, 170, 186–198, 296n30 humans: body of, 8, 11, 20, 25–28, 34, 56–57, 59, 61, 64, 66, 69, 85, 100–1, 105–7, 109–10, 120, 175, 177, 179, 197, 207, 212, 222, 237, 275n115, 279n20, 285n9; brain of, 1, 8–9, 28, 31, 42, 116, 173, 175–77, 197, 237; cognition of, 1–6, 41–42, 49, 51–53, 149–50, 159, 197; nature of, ix, 2, 4, 8, 20–21, 26, 34, 37–38, 46, 60–61, 81, 85, 87, 194, 197, 230 Hume, David, 19, 170 humors, 22, 58–60, 64–66, 68–69, 153, 202, 204, 230, 268n16 hylomorphism, 95, 246, 254 hypothesis, 70, 100, 142, 148, 179, 210, 212–13, 286n20 ideology, 223, 234 imagination, 40–43, 45, 47, 49–51, 53, 71–72, 84, 106, 164, 183, 186, 195, 229, 248–49, 264n7, 274n106, 274n110 immortality, 6, 27, 38–39, 48, 55–56, 80, 90, 98, 152, 179, 197, 248, 267n12, 281n4. See also death incarnation, 60–61, 64–65, 69, 72–73, 86 industry, 197, 257, 316n37 instinct, 50, 79–80, 130, 133, 151, 157–59, 161–62, 165, 167, 182–83, 190, 239–40, 243, 249, 257, 278n16, 297n33, 299n64, 304n58 intellect: active, 48; divine, 45–46, 51; human, 5, 43–46, 49, 53, 157; universal, 46, 49. See also reason

intelligence, 30, 39–40, 44–45, 47, 49, 76, 82, 86, 89, 93, 109, 129, 155, 164, 179, 181, 263n4, 276n3, 276n6, 277n16, 291n23 interaction, 5, 12, 18, 20–21, 24, 27–28, 49, 151, 215, 229, 236–45, 255, 275n2, 343 irritability, 11–12, 201–2, 207–9, 211–12, 214–16, 218–19, 225–28, 238, 251. See also sensibility James I, King, 159, 162 Jesuits, 6, 55–57, 59, 62–64, 66–71, 96, 131, 179, 266n6 John of Jandun, 48, 60 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 12, 128, 131–32, 145–46, 246–48, 255 Kentmann, Johann, 122, 125 Kircher, Athanasius, 9, 92, 131, 136–38, 142, 144 knowledge: anatomical, 21, 26, 100, 104–10, 287n36; medical, 22, 35–36, 75, 81, 87, 100–101, 105–6, 108–9, 284n3, 344 La Caze, Louis de, 230, 231–33 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 9, 149, 153, 155, 162, 164–65, 167, 171–72, 254, 294n7, 296n17, 301n96. See also materialism Lacépède, Étienne de, 244, 314n47 Lamy, Guillaume, 9, 153, 155, 157, 295n17, 296n22, 296n30 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria, 117, 119 language, 9–10, 18, 24, 31, 67, 75, 82, 101–2, 108, 127–35, 138–46, 148–49, 155–56, 158, 161–65, 170, 185, 187– 88, 190–91, 193, 195–197, 226, 241, 252, 290n1, 290n12, 297n37, 297n39. See also animals: language of; logos; speech; voice Ledesma, Diego de, 57–65, 68, 268n18, 268n26, 269n31, 269n43, 271nn62– 63 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 9, 93, 95, 133–34, 138, 152, 155–56, 168,

index | 351 210, 217–18, 246, 248, 254, 296n26, 299n64, 315n11 libertine, 154, 166 living system, 12, 236–39, 242–45 Locke, John, 12, 19, 150–51, 160, 167–68, 170, 184, 221–22, 226–27, 238–39, 294n13, 295n14 logos, 10, 24–25, 60, 62, 66, 70, 187, 190, 250, 275n115. See also language; reason Lucretius, 9, 128, 139, 143, 295n17, 296n30 Lutheranism. See Protestant Reformation Lynch, Richard, 68, 70 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 105, 109, 286n25 machine, 124, 128, 148, 155–56, 158–59, 168, 172, 180–81, 184–86, 203, 206– 7, 209–10, 213, 217–18, 236, 286n19, 297n33, 298n52, 304n44. See also mechanism Maillet, Benoît de, 164–65, 300n74 Malebranche, Nicolas, 254, 296n30 Malpighi, Marcello, 8, 34, 116–19, 121– 25, 263n78 materialism, 9, 147–49, 153, 162, 171–72, 254, 295n17, 301n103, 346. See also La Mettrie, Julien Offray de mechanism, 8, 128, 210, 212, 215–18, 225, 238, 291n23, 304n48. See also machine médecins philosophes, 12, 221–22, 232–33 Meier, Georg Friedrich, 154–56, 162, 170, 250, 297n38, 299n64 Melanchthon, Philipp, 18, 20–26, 30–32, 81–82, 87, 279n20, 279nn23–24 memory, 2, 25–26, 40–41, 50, 106, 144, 160, 165, 172, 186, 195, 229, 248–49, 294n13, 297n37, 302n11, 302n15, 305n69 Mendelssohn, Moses, 250, 315n27 metaphysics, 12, 27, 30, 33, 38, 40, 46, 76, 93, 96, 130, 146–47, 151–52, 154– 57, 160, 162, 171, 185–86, 196, 210, 216, 222, 224, 233, 235–36, 248, 250–52, 254–55 modernity, 101, 130

Montaigne, Michel de, 109, 154–55, 158– 60, 163, 165, 171, 195–96, 298n49 Montpellier, medical faculty of, 11–12, 224, 227, 231, 236 morals, 168, 178 More, Henry, 92, 148, 159, 180 Morgagni, Giovanni Battista, 8, 113, 116– 26, 205, 288nn4–5 muscle, 11, 25, 136, 164, 203, 208–9, 211–14, 216–17, 225, 228, 238, 240, 251, 291n29, 311n11, 311n13 music, 9, 127–28, 131–32, 138–45 natural history, 130, 146, 170, 197, 244 naturalization, 151–52, 154, 165, 167, 196–97, 221–22, 232–35 Nemesius of Emesa, 50, 180 nerves, 11, 24–25, 28, 31, 36, 106, 114, 121, 123, 136, 141, 157, 177, 178, 197, 208–11, 213–16, 225, 228, 238, 241, 251, 256, 276n6, 286n20, 311n11 Nifo, Agostino, 6, 37–39, 42–43, 47–53, 265n33 Nijmegen, 31, 345 Novalis, 247, 314n5 observation, 2, 19, 35, 41–42, 76, 78 orang-outang, 9, 52, 133–35, 138, 144, 146, 149, 155, 159, 163–65, 167, 171– 72, 176–77, 182, 291n24 organization (organic), 28, 93, 136, 165, 196, 203, 205–7, 211, 219, 228, 237, 239, 241, 243–45 ornithology, 135, 142, 146 Oxford, University of, 174, 184 Padua, University of, 19, 27–28, 48, 344 pain, 11, 25–26, 43, 75, 77–78, 109, 119, 121, 164, 170, 172, 174, 182, 187–88, 190, 207–9, 215–17, 231, 287n45 paralysis, 122–24, 213 Pardies, Ignace Gaston, 179, 299n60 Paré, Ambroise, 8, 99–110, 284n1, 284n3, 284n5, 285n13, 286nn19–20, 286nn22–23, 286n27, 287n34 parrot, 9, 133, 136, 138, 144–46 particulars, 42, 49, 53, 160, 249, 295n13

352 | index pathology, 116, 118–19, 121, 178, 185, 233– 34, 303n25. See also damage Paul of Venice, 60 Paul the Apostle, 23, 26 Pendasio, Federico, 19, 27–29, 261n59 perception, 2, 5, 19, 31, 38, 40, 42, 56, 65, 109, 121, 152, 157, 163, 172, 180, 210, 216–18, 222–23, 229, 241, 248– 49, 253–55, 276n6, 303n28 Perera, Benito, 57–59, 63, 71, 267n16, 268n26, 271n63 Perrault, Claude, 8, 163, 299n68 petrification ,113–14, 116, 122 phantasia/phantasma. See imagination Philoponus, Johannes, 19, 40–41 philosophy (experimental), 180, 203, 220, 304n44 physiology, 1, 11–13, 34–35, 37–38, 40, 54, 57, 73, 135–36, 138, 177, 201–3, 205–6, 219–20, 224–25, 227–28, 230, 247, 251, 254–55, 272n78, 296n30, 307n5, 311n11 pineal gland, 119, 125, 176 Platner, Ernst, 12–13, 35, 246–47, 250– 57, 263n83, 314n5 Plato, 7, 25, 40, 48, 90–93, 98, 140, 281n9, 282n21 pleasure, 11, 25, 104, 142, 170, 172, 182, 187–90, 217, 231 Pliny the Elder, 128, 130–31, 300n84 Plutarch, 76, 82, 87, 158, 276n6 politics, 10–11, 186–87, 189–91, 193–94, 196–98, 223, 235 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 6, 19, 27, 38–39, 42–49, 52–53, 55, 70–71, 152–53 postmortem, 116–17, 119, 121 potentiality, 93–96 power: corporeal, 48, 211, 218; formative, 92, 96, 282n15; intellectual, 42, 44– 46, 48, 50–53, 79, 83, 87, 93, 156, 183; plastic, 92–94; sensitive, 45, 182, 184, 230. See also faculty practice, 1, 8–9, 18–19, 27, 38, 57, 64, 99, 101, 103–9, 120, 131, 231–32, 234, 264n3, 284n3, 287n40, 304n58 Priestley, Joseph, 154, 171, 295n14, 296n28, 298n52

primate. See orang-outang process (organic), 202, 204, 206 property (physiological), 210, 219 Protestant Reformation, 75, 95, 280n32 psychology, 3–6, 8, 10, 12–13, 21, 24–25, 27, 35, 37, 40, 53, 74–75, 81, 85–86, 168, 195–96, 223, 230, 246–48, 250, 252, 255, 275nn1–2, 279n20, 280n32 Pufendorf, Samuel, 18, 20, 31–33 reaction center, 12, 219, 236–37, 239–40, 244–45 reason: animal, 75–76, 79, 85, 87, 149, 151, 161, 276n6; divine, 139; human, 42, 75, 87, 139–40; natural, 27, 56, 59, 61, 63; practical, 40, 182; theological, 64, 69. See also intellect recollection, 50–52 reflex, 213, 216, 249, 251 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 162, 170 Renaissance Platonism, 7, 90, 98 respiration, 2, 22, 181–82, 225, 233, 242 resurrection, 59, 61–62, 64, 69, 73, 268n26, 270n47, 270n57 rete mirabile, 22, 121 Roberti, Jean, 71, 274n109 Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore de, 234–35 Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 27, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 143–44, 229 Royal Society, 33–34, 132, 177, 201 scala naturae (scale of beings), 4, 6, 8, 13, 37, 42–43, 47, 49, 52–53 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 29–30, 279n24 Schegk, Jacob, 7, 90, 92–96, 98, 282n14 Schmidt, Jeremy, 184, 305n65, 305n68 science: Aristotelian, 56, 66; moral, 32–33, 346; natural, 17, 32, 34, 62, 146, 170 self-feeling, 12, 247, 252–55, 315n26 Sennert, Daniel, 7, 90, 92, 95–98, 282n26 sensation, 10–11, 51–52, 73, 76–78, 80, 83, 87, 109, 118, 141, 148, 157–58, 172, 180, 186–88, 195, 203, 208–11,

index | 353 213, 215–16, 218–19, 221–23, 226–27, 231, 238–40, 276n3, 276n6 sensibility/sensitivity, 4, 10–13, 109, 136, 159, 181, 186, 201–2, 207–31, 233–34, 236, 238–40, 244–46, 248–51, 254–57, 309n3, 311n11, 311n13. See also irritability Sextus Empiricus, 158, 306n20 sheep, 9, 78, 120, 149, 169, 171, 175–76, 278n16 sleep, 2, 230, 256, 305n69 sociability, 10, 33, 187, 189–90, 195, 222 Society of Jesus, 56; Coimbra Jesuits, 67; Collegio Romano, 57; Ratio studiorum (1599), 56, 67, 267n10, 273n94 song, 9, 127–33, 136–39, 141–46, 159, 161, 163, 166, 290n2, 291n23. See also animals: language of; voice soul: corporeal, 10, 156–57, 173, 176, 179, 180, 183–85; immaterial, 22, 155, 184, 229; immortality of the, 6, 27, 38–39, 48, 55–56, 152, 281n4; intellective, 25, 28, 44, 89; material, 149, 151–52, 154, 171, 184, 296n30; philosophy of, 13, 56, 69, 270n47; physiological, 204, 210, 216; rational, 10, 25, 38–39, 41–42, 45, 48, 56, 59–60, 62, 85, 89–90, 96–98, 119, 153, 156–57, 176, 178, 182–84; seat of the, 22, 54, 119, 135, 176, 213, 247, 256; sensitive, 6, 10, 40–41, 43–44, 49–50, 58–60, 73, 89, 96–97, 153, 156–58, 160, 178–79, 182–84, 209, 248; tripartition of, 25, 39, 43; vegetative, 30, 45, 58, 65, 89, 97; unity of, in Jesuit philosophy, 64, 269n37 speech, 9, 123, 129, 132–41, 143–44, 161, 163–64, 188, 192–93, 249, 299n68. See also language; voice Spinoza, Baruch, 159, 296n24, 296n30 spirit, 22, 24–26, 30, 41, 67, 72, 82, 85–87, 91–92, 97, 121, 123, 153–54, 156–57, 174, 183–84, 197, 223, 232, 251, 253–54, 256–57, 276n6, 277n16, 278n19, 281n11, 283n35, 299n60 state of nature, 10, 183, 189, 191, 193

Steinke, Hubert, 211, 216 stomach, 12, 237, 241–42 Strato of Lampsacus, 76, 276n6 Suárez, Francisco, 33, 35 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 12, 250 surgery, 99–108, 110, 284n1 sympathy, 63, 73, 171, 229 taste 47, 128, 246 temperament, 230, 243–44 Themistius, 19, 50 theology, 6, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 31, 35, 56–58, 62, 64–65, 67, 69, 81–82, 94, 222, 224 Thomas Aquinas, 19, 22, 48, 56–57, 60, 62, 96–97 Tissot, Pierre-Simon, 201, 207, 218–19 tissues, 206, 208, 216, 225 Toletus, Franciscus, 57, 64–67, 271n61 Tracy, Destutt de, 223, 234 tradition: ancient, 4, 8, 101, 118, 120; Aristotelian, 19, 37–38, 69, 141, 187–88, 248; commentary, 3, 28, 38, 54, 81; Epicurean, 9, 193, 295n17; Galenic, 5, 7, 69, 303n28; medical, 74, 100, 102, 107, 109–10; philosophical, 9, 251 Tübingen, University of, 90, 92 Tyson, Edward, 9, 134–35, 138, 163–64, 167, 177 union, 10, 59–61, 82, 85–87, 91, 190, 194, 205, 253–54 universals, 53, 161, 277n15 Unzer, Johann August, 11, 216, 219 upright posture, 10, 39 Vallesius, Franciscus, 7, 70, 74–87, 276nn3–4, 277nn14–16, 278n19 Vallisneri, Antonio, 116, 124 Valsalva, Antonio Maria, 116–22 Varolio, Costanzo, 28, 261n59 Venice, 18–19, 60, 117 Vesalius, Andreas, 26, 100, 107, 118, 121, 287n34 Vila, Anne, 222, 230 visualization, 123–24

354 | index vitalism, 11, 212 voice, 26, 91, 128–37, 142–43, 163, 188, 192, 193. See also language; song; speech way of life, 239, 243, 245 Whytt, Robert, 11, 202, 209–11, 213, 215, 219, 225 Wiggers, Johannes, 72–73, 275n115 Willis, Thomas, 8–10, 31, 120, 122, 125, 155–58, 160–61, 171, 173–85, 295n14, 303n28, 304n54, 305n67 Wittenberg, University of, 21, 95 Wittich, Christoph, 31–32 Wolff, Christian, 13, 246, 248–54 zoology, 4, 142