Seeds Sprouting Everywhere

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Notes

¹John North, 'Aristotle's Empiricism', Early Science and Medicine, 10 (2005), 91-97, quoting and translating L.M. de Rijk, De Rol van de Taal in het Empirisme van Aristoteles (384-322 v. Chr.) (Amsterdam, 2004), 26.

²Aristotle, Physics, II.1, 193b13.

³Aristotle, Physics, II.1, 193b19.

⁴Virgil, neid, VI: 724-27: 'Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis / lucentemque globum lunae Titaniaque astra / spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus/ mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet'.

⁵Incidentally, Hirai's point that 'c'est la thorie scolastique des minima naturalia qui est applique ces particules minimes' (p. 74) is somewhat inaccurate: the scholastics' 'minima naturalia' have no independent existence, whereas Fracastoro's infected particles do.

⁶This important text is now available in English translation, see John M. Forrester, Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things. Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine. With an edition and translation of Fernel's De abditis rerum causis by J. M. Forrester and an introduction and annotations by John Henry and J. M. Forrester (Leiden, 2005).

⁷For the concluding part of Hirai's story, concerning the atomist Gassendi, it is not unimportant to know that Agricola's description of the generation of minerals out of mud relies on small earthen particles being glued together (conglutinatio) by means of a type of fatty humour. On the history of corpuscular description of cohesion, see Gad Freudenthal, 'The Problem of Cohesion between Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: From Unctuous Moisture to Phlogiston', in Alchemy Revisited, edited by Z.R.W.M. von Martels (Leiden, 1990), 107-16.

⁸Daniel Sennert, De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu (Wittenberg, 1619), chapter 12 ('De generatione et mixtione'):

generationem nihil aliud esse, quam progressionem seminum e suis fontibus, abyssis, et vitalibus principiis in hanc mundanam scenam, qua ex invisibilibus visibilia fiant, et colores, sapores, odores; caliditatem, frigiditatem, humiditatem, siccitatem, magnitudines, situs, conformationes & omnium corporum ornamenta producant, et hoc modo individuorum renovatione specierum perpetuitatem custodiant ... . Formae et semina rerum naturalium non latent in abyssis.

⁹See O.R. Bloch, La philosophie de Gassendi (The Hague, 1971), 233-78; Norma E. Emerton, The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form (Ithaca, 1984), 108-10; 136-39.

¹²Pierre Gassendi, 'De temperie et valetudine animalium', II, in Syntagma philosophicum, II: 558b-559a.

¹⁰Gassendi, 'De plantis', IV, in Syntagma philosophicum, II, 172b, in Opera omnia, 6 vols (Lyon, 1658; repr. Stuttgart, 1964).

¹¹Margaret J. Osler, 'How Mechanical Was the Mechanical Philosophy? Non-Epicurean Themes in Gassendi's Atomism', in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, edited by C.H. Lthy, J.E. Murdoch and W.R. Newman (Leiden, 2001), 423-39.

¹³Rare and therefore precious discussions of this topic are: Jole Shackelford, 'Seeds with a Mechanical Purpose: Severinus' Semina and Seventeenth-Century Matter Theory', in Reading the Book of Nature. The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution, edited by A.G. Debus and M.T. Walton (Kirksville, MO, 1998), 15-44; and Marco Messeri, Causa e spiegazione. La fisica di Pierre Gassendi (Milan, 1985), ch. 7: 'I semi delle cose'.

¹⁴See Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles. A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht, 2002); William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006).

¹⁵Indeed, some of Hirai's extensive paraphrases of rare texts lead the reader astray, and his detailed, albeit always gentle rebuttals of previous authors still bear the mark of the dissertation as which this book began. One would, for example, have accepted his text-based exegesis of Gassendi's chemical thought without knowing exactly how and why it differs from Olivier Bloch's.