Heat and moisture, rhetoric and spiritus

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Notes

1. Huarte, Examination, 42. ‘Frantic’ has a range of early-modern meanings (including mad, lunatic, delirious, attended by frenzy), and was applied frequently to the imagination and to the qualities or effects of fever. Hadrianus offers ‘Ravished; inspired; […] possessed or indued with a spirite’ (The Nomenclator, 450), and du Laurens insists that experience ‘also giveth us to understand, that if the brain have his temperature altered: as for example, if it be too hot, as it falleth out in such as are franticke; or over cold, as it falleth out in melancholick men; it corrupteth presently the imaginative facultie, troubleth the judgement, weakeneth the memorie’. (Preservation of Sight, 4). For the identification of ‘frantic’ with distraction and ‘ingrosse[d] spirits’, see Walkington, Optick Glasse, 22–23.

2. Huarte, Examination, 42–44.

3. Ibid., 44–46, 49–51. See Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems, 899a9–14, 900b15–28, 902b36–903a5, 903b8–12, 18–26, and 905b29–38, where the author treats questions related to the voice, heat, moisture, gender, age, and the passions.

4. Huarte, Examination, 42. Cf Burton, Anatomy, 1.3.1.3; 341, 1.3.1; 360: should melancholy arise from ‘choler adust’ (choler burnt by calefaction), sufferers are frequently bold, impudent, apt to quarrel, and in ‘their fits you shall hear them speak all manner of languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, that never were taught or knew them before’. After mentioning a number of case histories in which the ‘mad […] spake excellent good Latin’, Burton, like Huarte, concludes that ‘temperate heat’ is among the ‘chief causes of a good wit’.

5. Editions of Huarte were published in most vernacular European languages; the work was published three times at the turn of the seventeenth century, and a new edition in English, translated by Edward Bellamy, was issued in 1698. On Huarte, see de Iriarte, El doctor Huarte de San Juan; and Read, Juan Huarte de San Juan. A copy of Huarte, along with works by Cicero, Montaigne, Keckermann, and Bacon, was purchased by the Cavendish family, presumably for Hobbes's tutoring of the young William Cavendish; see Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’. As late as the early eighteenth century, Huarte was still popular; see Baglivi, Practice of Physick, 49.

6. See Smith, ‘Picturing the Mind’.

7. The fevers literature of the period suggests that preternatural heat ultimately derives from innate heat, but could be demonically inspired; see Keitt, ‘Miraculous Body of Evidence’.

8. Daniel Gross has used the phrase ‘physics of persuasion’ to describe Melanchthon's, and others', attention to the ways in which techniques drawn from rhetorical inquiry were distributed among the nascent human sciences; see Gross, ‘Political Pathology’.

9. On this concept, see Mendelsohn, Heat and Life; Hall, ‘Life, Death, and the Radical Moisture’; Niebyl, ‘Old Age, Fever, and the Lamp Metaphor’; Demaitre, ‘The Care and Extension of Old Age’; Bono, Word of God, esp. 108–122; Joutsivuo, Scholastic Tradition, 172–180; Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks, 26–28, 30; Hampton, ‘Strange Alteration’, 276–279; and Paster, Humoring the Body, chap. 2, in which she argues that ‘the thermal economy’ privileges masculinity (86).

10. Aristotle, De longitudine et brevitate vitae, 466a1ff.; De gen. anim., 736b35.

11. Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata, 954a14, 953b22. See van der Eijk, Medicine and Philosophy, 157–158.

12. De marasmo, quoted in Joutsivuo, Scholastic Tradition, 173.

13. Debru, ‘Physiology’, 273. See also Allbutt, Greek Medicine in Rome, 224–264, a lecture rich in allusion, which, among many other things, traces the waning of difference between heat and innate heat. Arguing that Galen held inspiration to provide maintenance of the innate heat, Wilson sees ‘a line of thought’ that leads from antiquity to ‘Hooke, Boyle, and Mayow in the seventeenth century, and which was ultimately vindicated in the studies of Lavoisier on respiration’: see Wilson, ‘Erasistratus’, 313.

14. As Valentinus (Petrus Pomarius) puts it, succinctly: ‘There is also another naturall humor, and is Primogenius, the first and chiefe humor, called Humidum radicale, which is ingendred in the similer parts or insited in nature: for from the first beginning the members of the whole body are filled with a certain dewy humor, or oily moistnesse: truely the first thing that is ingendred, having its beginning from the blood menstruall. This humor yeeldeth nourishment to the naturall heat; and therefore by the same it is consumed, and needeth restauration; which is performed by the accession of nourishment’: Enchiridion medicum, 9–10. This is a late translation of the collection of medical texts known as the Articella; see Arrizabalaga, The Articella.

15. Avicenna, Liber canonis (1507), 53r, quoted and translated in McVaugh, ‘“Humidum Radicale”’, 259. This ‘similitude’ is frequently repeated; see, for example, Willis, Five Treatises, 32; Two Discourses, 86. As Nancy Siraisi points out, ‘a whole cluster of elaborations and interweavings of Galenic and Aristotelian ideas’ was available from Avicenna and others in the thirteenth century; ‘such echoes and repetitions from one work to another, one author to another, and one discipline to another were often taken as providing corroboration and confirmation from independent sources’: Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 103.

16. There are innumerable examples of this metaphor; Robert Basset, for instance, mentions a ‘certain humor, which the Physicians cal the Humidum radicale, the Radical moysture, because it is, as it were the roote of life; which preserveth in them naturall heate, even as oyle in a Lampe nourisheth the […] fire’: Curiosities, 183. The metaphor is ultimately drawn from Galen; see Wilson, ‘Erasistratus, Galen, and the Pneuma’, 312. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 168–169, mentions several instances of the metaphor in books concerned with regimen, but does not, to my knowledge, explore its infrastructure.

17. Fernel, Physiologia, 297–299.

18. Ibid., 281.

19. Ibid., 287.

20. Brooke, Hygiene, 77. On Fernel's influence, his Platonism, and his adherence to occult causes, see Sheridan, Endeavour of Jean Fernel; Herpin, Jean Fernel; and Laurence Brockliss, ‘Seeing and Believing’, 69–73.

21. Sennert, Institutions or Fundamentals, 10–11. The comment on Sennert's fame is from Daniel Sennertus his Meditations, sig. A4r. For pan-European attention to his work, see Michael, ‘Daniel Sennert on Matter and Form’.

22. Du Laurens, Discourse, 5; and Cuffe, Differences in the Ages of Mans Life, 77; misquoted in Joutsivuo, Scholastic Tradition, 177.

23. Cuffe, Differences, 76–79. Cuffe also mentions the corruption of radical moisture: ibid., 79.

24. Ibid., 92.

25. Brooke, Hygiene, 27.

26. Huarte, Examination, 139.

27. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 215–220; see also Wallace, Francis Bacon, esp. 22–39.

28. Bacon, De viis mortis, 271–277.

29. Bacon, Works, 5.323–324, 330 (cf. 5.268); 2.381. For Bacon's complex thought on these issues, see Rees and Upton, Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy, esp. 145ff.

30. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1.84. Distinguishing calor innatus from all other forms of (non-life-giving) heat was common until the late sixteenth century.

31. Ibid., 1.103, 1.282.

32. Ibid., 1.318.

33. Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks, 29, 31.

34. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1.139.

35. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations, 19.

36. Floyer, Preternatural, 209.

37. For example, Croone, in De ratione motus musculorum, 6, argues that the agitation of the ‘native heat […] [caloris nativi] […] we call life [Vitam appellamus]’.

38. Willis, Five Treatises, 24. The essay on the ‘enkindling’ of the blood was first published as ‘De sanguinus accessione’ in March 1670; see also his Practice of Physick, 30–37.

39. Mayow, Tractatus quinque medico-physici, esp. books one and four. On Mayow's role in experimental culture in the period, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan, 232, 264.

40. Bynum, ‘The Anatomical Method’, 451; Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 164–167, 232–237, esp. 167. See also Davis, Circulation Physiology, 65–92.

41. Willis, Five Treatises, 24–3.1

42. Boulton, Concerning the Heat of the Blood, 9–10, 30.

43. Ibid., 106. As Boulton explains, the animal spirits are ‘ground and rubbed betwixt the fixed and more solid Particles of the Blood; whereby they are minutely dissolv'd, and being put into a swift intestin Motion, they endeavour powerfully to expand themselves and to fly away; but being held in, and reverberated, by those grosser Particles; their Motion is by that means inverted, and that Force, which, if they had but Liberty, would be lost in a further Expansion, being inverted and driven forcibly upon the other Particles, they mutually increase and promote one anothers Motion; by which Motion the Blood, when it affects our Sensory, causes us to perceive Heat’: ibid., 94–95.

44. Ibid., 78, 80, 101.

45. Ibid., 92.

46. Ibid., 114–115. Cf. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 133: the ‘underlying continuities between the older Galenic accounts and images of how the body became diseased and the newer medical philosophies […] indicated a degree of consensus about diseases’.

47. Midgley, A New Treatise, esp. 253ff. Midgley was a London physician.

48. Ayloffe, Government, 74.

49. See Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, for a detailed account of inquiries by Lower, Willis, Boyle, and Harvey, among others.

50. See Bynum and Nutton's Theories of Fever, esp. Iain M. Lonie's contribution, 19–44, in which he argues for the derivation of preernatural heat from calor innatus.

51. Fernel, Physiologia, 297.

52. See Pagel, William Harvey's Biological Ideas, 208, 257; and Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, esp. 3–7, 38–42, 164–192; see also Bono, Word of God, passim. Van Helmont strongly rejected the relationship between heat and decay, as well as all contraries in medicine; see Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, 42–44, 154–159.

53. Harvey, Works, 502.

54. Ibid., 503, 510.

55. Ibid., 511.

56. Bono, Word of God, 107, 107n40. On Harvey's terminology in general, see French, ‘William Harvey's Natural Philosophy’.

57. Harvey, Works, 117.

58. Woolton, Immortalite, fol. 2r.

59. Henry, ‘Matter of Souls’, 90. See also Park, ‘The Organic Soul’.

60. See, for example, Martensen, ‘Alienation and the Production of Strangers’, 163, suggesting that the Restoration is a period in which physicians and divines worked toward the ‘proper composition of the orthodox English body’.

61. The ‘fall’ of Galenic theory rarely meant the occlusion of Galenic practice; see Temkin, Galenism, 135, 165, and passim. For a later period, see King, ‘Medical Philosophy, 1836–1844’.

62. Anonymous, Anthropologie Abstracted, 58. A preface by the important printer Henry Herringman states that the work was authored by a physician, ‘esteemed […] as one of the most hopefull of his Profession’ (sig. A2v).

63. Diethelm, Medical Dissertations, passim, esp. 75–76, chaps. 3, 7, 8.

64. Donne, Sermons, 2.261–262; cf. 5.65, where Donne deploys various meanings of spirit, from the Holy Spirit through to the ‘vitall spirits’ themselves. See also Harley, ‘Medical Metaphors’.

65. Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.806, 5.480.

66. Anthropologie Abstracted, 100.

67. Still one of the finest overall descriptions of early modern physiology is Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 2–16, although he does not treat thoroughly either heat or moisture. See, in general, one of the finest treatments of both ancient and early modern theories of the soul, French, Robert Whytt, esp. 93–108, and Wright and Potter, Psyche and Soma, esp. the essays by Michael, Voss, and Wright; on the political implications of various kinds of medical thought about bodies and souls, see Reill, ‘Anti-Mechanism’, Cook, ‘Materialism and the Early Modern State’, and Wolfe, ‘From Substantial to Functional Vitalism’.

68. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man, 98; Mikkeli, Hygiene, 77.

69. Elyot, Castel of Helth, sig. 12r; Fernel, Physiologia, 297–299, 489, 297.

70. Vesalius argued that ‘cerbral power’ produced animal spirits, not any particular part of the brain, and certainly not the rete mirabile, which did not exist; on this disagreement, see Wear, ‘Galen in the Renaissance’, 234–235.

71. Bartholinus Anatomy, 135, 136–138. He mentions the contraction and dilation of the brain as the mechanism for moving spirits, a notion explained, at length, in the physician Purcell's A Treatise of Vapours, 52ff.

72. van Diemerbroeck, Anatomy, 403, 398.

73. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 7.

74. Fernel, Physiologia, 295ff.; Walkington, Optick Glasse, 24–25, 29–30, and see his chapter on spirits, 96–101. De la Chambre explains these two spirits: ‘those that are fixt and restrain'd to some part, which are the first Bonds, whereby the Soul and Body are joyned together, and those, which are errant and unconfin'd, which distribute to all the members, the heat particularly assign'd them by the heart’: Art How to Know Men, 110.

75. Sennert, Institutions, 12–13.

76. Burton, Anatomy 1.1.2.2, 129.

77. Maynwaring, Tutela sanitatis, 59.

78. Blankaart, Physical Dictionary, 266.

79. Ibid., 233.

80. Willis, Two Discourses, 23–25. See Frank, ‘Thomas Willis and his Circle’, esp. 131ff.,; Wright, ‘Locke, Willis, and the Seventeenth-Century Epicurean Soul’; and Smith, ‘Picturing the Mind’, esp. 160ff.

81. Harvey, Works, 115–116.

82. Boulton, A Treatise, 83–84.

83. Harvey, Works, 510.

84. Pagel, William Harvey's Biological Ideas, 256; Bono, ‘Medical Spirits’, 107.

85. Pagel, William Harvey's, 344ff.

86. Section 1, aph. 80; section 5, aph. 35 in Joutsivuo, Scholastic Tradition, 180.

87. See, for example, Historie of Life and Death, 196ff., 240ff.; and Sylva sylvarum, 26–28.

88. Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 13.

89. For example, in 1733 the English physician George Cheyne insists that the ‘Notion of animal Spirits is of the same Leaven with the substantial Forms of Aristotle, and the coelestial System of Ptolemy’: Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment, 146.

90. Bono, ‘Medical Spirits’, 94–96. Bono builds on his 1981 Harvard dissertation, ‘Languages of Life’, which is further elaborated in his Word of God. Other scholars' concerns with spirits have been relatively limited. See, for example, Baker, The Image of Man, 280–282; Klein, Form and Meaning, 62–85; Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 3–9; Dockrill and Tanner, Concept of Spirit, esp. the chapter by Dockrill; Clericuzio, ‘The Internal Laboratory’; and Summers, The Judgment of Sense, 110–124. A very general account appears in Martensen, The Brain Takes Shape, 23–46.

91. Walker, ‘Francis Bacon and Spiritus’, 126.

92. Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, 469.

93. Debus, ‘Chemistry’; Rees has multiple works devoted to Bacon's natural philosophy, but see, for example, ‘Matter Theory’.

94. Agamben, Stanzas, 90–101.

95. Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 44 (his emphasis); the whole chapter is germane, although Sutton does not treat spirits as an explanans of persuasion.

96. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, 182–183.

97. Wright, Passions of the Minde, 4. As Bacon put it in Life and Death, 236, the spirits work directly on bodies and passions and vapours directly affect spirits. Of course, the reverse, that humours affect the spirits, is also pertinent: ‘when the humours bee not sufficiently and enough concocted and attentuate, unpure spirits proceed out of them, enforcing a manifest alteration of the state, as well of the body as of the minde.’ The spirits, too, ‘manifestly alter the state as well of body as of minde’: Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 15, 25.

98. Wright, Passions, 45. As Walker argues, spiritus ‘encroaches on soul as far up the scale of faculties as imagination’: ‘Francis Bacon and Spiritus’, 122.

99. Wright, Passions, 63, 60, 50. The physician Ferrand, in Erotomania, a treatise on erotic melancholy, confirms that animal spirits, if ‘sullied by those blacke vapours that arise from Melancholy blood’, present ‘all objects […] to the Imagination in a terrible and fearefull shape’, hindering the ‘noblest faculties, and especially the fancy’: 36–38.

100. Wright, Passions, 66.

101. Baglivi, Practice of Physick, 163.

102. Brydall, Non Compos Mentis, 53.

103. Charron, Of Wisdome, 532–533.

104. Wright, Passions, 160.

105. See the now famous essay by Bouwsma, ‘Two Faces of Humanism’. Fenner, Treatise of the Affections, 54–56, notes the controversy between ‘the Philosophers, the Stoicks, and the Peripatetiques, concerning the affections’ and argues that the Stoics were wrong to consider all passions unnatural, since they were ‘implanted in our hearts’ by God, but certain passions, like malice and envy, cannot ‘be regulated, nor guided by moderation, but are quite to be rooted out’. And there seems to be a difference between tranquillity, a term popular in the early sixteenth century, and constancy – the latter a neo-Stoic notion popularised after the religious upheavals of the mid- to late sixteenth century.

106. See Schmidt, ‘Melancholy and the Language’; and Pender, ‘Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination’.

107. Cooper, Government of our Affections, 8–10; Senault, The Use of the Passions, 15–19; Charleton, Natural History of the Passions, 113–114. See also Pender, ‘Subventing Disease’.

108. de la Chambre, A Discourse upon the Passions, 340ff.

109. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 12–13.

110. On de la Chambre, see Wild, ‘Marin Cureau de la Chambre’; Doranlo's La Médecine au XVIIe siècle; Darmon, Les Corps immatériels; and Sturdy, Science and Social Status, 89–95.

111. De la Chambre, Art How to Know Men, 115.

112. Ibid., 121, 150.

113. Ibid., 156–157, 53; see Wild, ‘Marin Cureau de la Chambre’, 445ff.

114. De la Chambre, Art How to Know Men, 44–46.

115. Maynwaring, Tutela Sanitatis, 59–67.

116. Baglivi, The Practice of Physick, 163.

117. Descartes, Passions, 43–46.

118. See Brown, ‘The Rationality of Cartesian Passions’. I have not treated Descartes' conception of spirits – airy, windy bodies, which are very small and move rapidly – since it seems both typical and explored well in Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks, esp. 37–45; and in James, Passion and Action, 94–108.

119. Descartes, Passsions, 43–44.

120. Ibid., 61.

121. Bacon, Works, 4.455–456.

122. Bacon, Life and Death, 227, 222–223, 229–30; cf. 381–434.

123. Descartes, Passions, 43; cf. 107–109. As de la Chambre states, ‘Good and Evil make no impressions on the Soul, otherwise then by the Images, which the knowing Faculties frame thereof, and that those Images have not any other vertue, then to represent […] in regard we cannot make any other conceit of Knowledge, then as the representation of things, which is made in the Soul, it follows, that the Soul, which acts, while she knows the things, must her self make this representation, that is, frame the Pourtraiture and Image of the things’: de la Chambre, Art How to Know Men, 77–79.

124. Descartes, Passions, 129.

125. Bartholin, Bartholinus Anatomy, 135.

126. Lamy, Art of Speaking, 4.9–10.

127. Ibid., 4.11–15.

128. Ibid., 4.8.

129. Ibid., 4.11–13.

130. Ibid., 4.16–17, 19ff.

131. Ibid., 3.203–205.

132. Charleton, Two Discourses, 40–41.

133. Ibid., 48.

134. Ibid., 49–51.

135. Ibid., 66; cf. 73. The finest work thus far on the exigencies of the imagination is Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 39–77; he cites Lemnius, Sennert, and Joannes Le Clerc, in a 1633 Leiden dissertation, on the ways in which the spirits are affected by ‘vapours’ rising from distempered blood or organs: Clark, Vanities, 59.

136. Maynwaring, Tutela Sanitatis, 56.

137. Charleton, Two Discourses, 111–112.

138. Malebranche, Search after Truth, 88. On Malebranche's reception see, for example, McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy, 279, citing Hume at 279.

139. Malebranche, Search after Truth, 89, 344, 373.

140. Ibid., 339: ‘We know that before his sin man was not the slave but the absolute master of his passion and that with his will he could easily arrest the agitation of the spirits causing them’; see also 360.

141. Ibid., 338–339, 349, 397.

142. Ibid., 355, 381, 403.

143. Ibid., 351; see also 183, 368–369.

144. Ibid., 399, 171–172, 176.

145. Huarte, Examination, 5: ‘I found that every science required a speciall and particular wit, which reaved from that, was little worth in other sorts of learning’; see also 21–22.

146. Ibid., 131, 143–137.

147. Ibid., 136–137.

148. Ibid., 139, 142–143; cf. 31.

149. Ibid., 146–147.

150. Ibid., 131–132; cf. 139.

151. Ibid., 146.

152. Ibid., 57; see 120–129.

153. Ibid., 21–22.

154. Galen: Selected Works, 175–176, a text that appears in volume one of the Aldine edition (1525). The best treatment is Lloyd, ‘Scholarship, Authority and Argument’.

155. Huarte, Examination, 22–23. On national difference see, for example, Floyd-Wilson, ‘English Mettle’; and Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body, esp. 119ff.

156. Huarte, Examination, 75, 244–245, 115, 103, 182.

157. Charron, Of Wisdome, 48.

158. Ibid., 49.

159. Ibid., 48–49.

160. Charleton, Two Discourses, 114–115, and 142; Hobbes, Elementum Philosophiae, 73.

161. Thompson, Bodies of Thought, esp. 79–95.

162. Edwards, Demonstration, 2.2.

163. Ibid., 2.60, 48, 99.

164. Edwards, Demonstration, 2.75.

165. Ibid., 2–74–78; Power, Experimental Philosophy, 67.

166. Edwards, Demonstration, 2.80.

167. Ibid., 2.79.

168. Yolton, Thinking Matter; Thomson, ‘Medicine and Materialism’; Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 68–79.

169. Power, Experimental Philosophy, 67, 72.