Translating Renaissance Neoplatonic panpsychism into seventeenth-century corpuscularism: the case of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665)

ABSTRACT

Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism. Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. The aim of the present article is to highlight the (rather reticent) relationship of Digby’s corpuscularism with doctrines of spirits in connection with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition. Not uncommon in seventeenth-century natural philosophies, such “spirits” are notoriously evasive entities: half spirit, half matter acting as mediators between the realms of bodies and souls. This article suggests that Digby sought to preserve the inveterate ideas of a universal spiritus and a world soul and, in particular, that Kenelm Digby translated (rather than “overcame”) Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) spiritus doctrines into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism.

KEYWORDS:

• Digby
• Ficino
• spiritus doctrine
• panpsychism

1. Introduction

Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism.¹ Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. Digby postulates the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul.² Scholars generally agree that, in Digby, Aristotelianism and Cartesianism meet – albeit in an unstable union.³ Thus, John Henry has characterized Two treatises as “the culmination of the Aristotelian minima naturalia tradition.”⁴ This irenic and eclectic intellectual endeavor complicates any neat picture of the two extreme positions that were available in Digby’s day: the Cartesian theory of animals as machines versus a panpsychism “which saw no difference between human beings and animals.”⁵ Digby envisaged a conceptual framework that would accommodate the demands of mechanist philosophies of his day—and at the same time necessarily entailing the idea that human beings are the unique creatures in possession of an immortal soul. By showing the limits of mechanism, he was thus aiming to make philosophy a preparation for theology.⁶ This latter aspect Digby shared with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition inaugurated by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Yet, and in contrast to Digby, Ficino’s otherwise no less irenic synthesis between Neo-Platonism and Christianity had openly embraced the concept of a universal world soul, a spirit that would govern the bodies.

The aim of the present article is to highlight the (rather reticent) relationship of Digby’s corpuscularism with doctrines of spirits in connection with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition and its panpsychistic ideas about a universal spirit governing bodies.⁷ To readers only familiar with Two treatises (1644), arguably Digby’s philosophical opus magnum, this will doubtlessly come as a surprise—indeed, Lodi Nauta has recently argued that Digby was actually working in the opposite direction: a complete de-spiritualization of the world.⁸ Yet, my suggestion will become less amazing the moment we consider some of Digby’s other works. Niall Dilucia has shown in a recent article that Digby’s unpublished early sermons and letters were imbued with Christian Neoplatonic metaphysics;⁹ and in two recent publications, Clericuzio has highlighted the importance of the doctrine of a world spirit in some of Digby’s important texts that were published in the 1560s, that is, after the publication of Two treatises.¹⁰

Not uncommon in seventeenth-century natural philosophies, such “spirits” are notoriously evasive entities, as they are acting as mediators between the realms of bodies and souls. Spirits are difficult to accommodate within a corpuscular philosophy. Yet they prove immensely helpful to explain the basic conundrum of Digby’s approach to the mind–body dualism in Two treatises: namely how an immortal (and hence immaterial) soul is capable of communicating with the body.¹¹ My contribution suggests that Two treatises tacitly (and perhaps unwillingly) preserved these inveterate ideas of a world soul, because Digby was incapable of satisfactorily explaining the role of spirits in merely mechanistic terms. The conundrum may also be posited in the following way:

As is clear from Digby’s detailed discussions of sensation, memory, and imagination, all of these activities can and must be explained by the same principles we use to explain magnetic attraction, the generation of metals, rarefaction, and so on. This raises the question of what, if anything, sets the living body apart from other bodies.¹²

Exactly this problem again opens the perspective on the idea that everything is alive. In particular, I suggest that Kenelm Digby translated (rather than “overcame”)¹³ the spiritus doctrines, which we find in the thought of Marsilio Ficino into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism. Dilucia is certainly right to say that Digby, with Two treatises, moved “away from Neoplatonism … for reasons of argumentative clarity and Digby’s realization that the demands of salvation are better served by interrogating the world’s atomistic operations rather than communicating in chiefly metaphysical rhetoric.”¹⁴ But it is my contention that Digby did not move away from Renaissance Neoplatonic physics, because that physics was itself heavily dependent on Lucretian atomism and a doctrine of effluvia and spirits to which Digby too accrues a crucial explanatory role. Now of course the question is whether Digby can translate these doctrines appertaining to the Neoplatonic tradition without the metaphysics that accompanied them. The question is especially neuralgic, because Digby directed his intellectual endeavor in Two treatises to the same goal as Ficino before him: to prove the immortality of the human soul. “Translation” is thus a term that is deliberately ambiguous, but I believe not inappropriate, because the word highlights Digby’s conciliatory intentions and his modus operandi in Two treatises. This becomes clear the moment we remember that the Latin noun “translatio” and its related verb “transtulo” mean: “to carry or convey from one place to another,” “to convey (for instance enslaved victims in triumph),” “to transplant (plants)” and “to express by metaphor,” thus also denoting the “figurative sense of a word.”¹⁵ I suggest that the various senses of “translation” create a field of resonance for technical terms and notions that allowed Digby to present his synthesis.

A good example is a notion closely associated to the world soul in Neoplatonic physics. In Two treatises, Digby claims that it is wrong to conceive of the universal “vis formatrix” as an “unkonwne power and operation,” as long as it is not “rightly understood” as

the complexe assemblement, or chayne of all causes that concurre to produce this effect as they are set on foote, to this end and by this great Architect and Moderator of them, God almighty whose instrument nature is: that is, the same thing, … as we have declared and comprised under a different name.

And he adds: “Yet in discourse, for conveniency and shortnesse of expression we shall not quite banish that terme from all commerce with us.”¹⁶ Now we may immediately ask: is this translation of vis formatrix (denominating an occult—spiritual—forming power intrinsic to nature) into the Architecture of a godhead (whose instrument nature is) really a change of paradigms or merely a sleight-of-hand trick consisting in a regressus to a higher, no less inscrutable power? Or should we view it as a “transplantation” of the old concept into the new seedbed of early modern corpuscularism: I would suggest it is both at a time. But is Digby’s approach convincing? Is he still using the old terminology he wants to supersede in order to sweeten the pill of his uncomfortably material universe? Is he trying to keep up the conversation with all the philosophers, naturalists, alchemists, clergymen, who were adherents to a universe that is sentient and alive? This attempt at a captatio benevolentiae of his contemporary readers seems to be another probable motive.¹⁷ I will suggest in the following that Digby used key notions of the Neoplatonic tradition he wanted to supersede with the intention to eclipse and hence divert attention from the difficulties of his own mechanistic approach. To remain in with translatio: that the plant of a universal soul growing in the garden of Renaissance Neoplatonism “translated” to the seed-bed of Digby’s corpuscularism took roots there; yet still betrayed its origins. As opposed to most scholarship in the field of intellectual history, my present aim is not to point out the obvious differences between these approaches, but to take Digby’s conciliatory attempts at their word: that is, to conceive important parts of his intellectual endeavor in Two treatises as a translation of a characteristic and popular Neoplatonic metaphysics postulating a world soul into the language of corpuscularism.

Another example is the term “emanation.” In Two treatises, it sometimes signifies “emission” (of particles),¹⁸ yet the term is also resonating with the Neoplatonic sense of the communication between noetic, psychic and material aspects of the cosmos, and in the explanation of sensory perception by means of effluvia. Spirits had played a focal role here; Digby too had accorded a significant role to these spirits in the physiology of sensation.

2. The material world of spirits?

Thus, in Ficino’s immensely influential De vita libri tres (1489), spirits loom large in an attempt to conceptualize the imbrication of a pneumatic, all-pervading world soul with the spiritus of the human soul.¹⁹ In his earlier commentary on the Symposium, Ficino’s recreation of the speech of Diotima contains a—daring—outline of an anthropocentric pantheism.²⁰

Digby’s Two treatises gives very heterogeneous and inconsistent accounts of spiritus. Spirits serve to explain a virtually all-encompassing variety of phenomena, ranging from the physiology of human perception to the generation of animals and plants to the spirits of the material world. Digby’s affinity with Neoplatonic spiritus doctrines becomes explicit in the Discours touchant la guérison des plaies par la poudre de sympathie (1658). Here Digby advocates the efficacy of vitriol-spirit to cure wounds at a distance. Digby maintains that this spirit is a miraculous medicine of Paracelsian origin, “a corporification of the universal spirit which animates and perfects all that hath existence in this sublunary World.”²¹ Again Digby’s Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants (1661) proposes ideas that are explicitly related to vitalist and panpsychistic doctrines, as it describes the growth of plants as a process of fermentation, because aerial niter gives life to the organisms of plants and animals. In doing so, aerial niter acts like a lodestone which attracts “the vital principle of the air, that is the universal spirit.”²² Salpeter figures here universal life spirit contained in the air: “This Universlall Spirit then being Homogeneall to all things, and being in effect the Spirit of Life, not onely to Plants, but to Animals too, were it not worth the labor to render it to mens bodyes?”²³ Such ultimately Paracelsian ideas of the world soul are related to Ficino’s Neoplatonic panpsychism on a deep level, because, other than earlier Alchemists, Paracelsus had interpreted spiritus as a theological and a theurgical concept.²⁴

Digby’s synthesis adapts ideas from Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Yet—and rather surprisingly—Lucretius’s ideas had also been important in accounting for the same phenomena in Renaissance Neoplatonism. Here spiritus doctrines were also introduced to doctrines of a world soul or a pneumatic spiritus mundi. These transactions were facilitated by all sides; Lucretius’s own doctrines of effluvia were neither clear-cut nor terminologically consistent—they lent themselves to be adopted also by the Platonic tradition.²⁵ Lucretius’s De rerum natura, itself a poetic translation of Epicurus’s Greek Philosophy into Latin, was particularity open to such irenic interpretations or adaptations, due to the many translations of one of Epicurus’s key concepts, eidola or atomic effluvia accounting for perceptive acts in atomistic terms;²⁶ yet eidola also had an important and different role in Platonic metaphysics. The doctrine of effluences is discussed in Plato’s Meno (76A) in the context of the porous bodies emitting effluences. Plato ascribes this theory to Empedocles, who is often considered the originator of the doctrine of universal sympathy—and hence panpsychism. In this role, Empedocles has a prominent role as founder of doctrines of natural magic in the Renaissance.²⁷ Socrates mentions the doctrine of effluences in the context of the sexual attraction of the young man, Meno. In Marsilio Ficino’s enormously popular Renaissance theory of love, an outright mechanics of spiritus-effluvia will account for the process of falling in love.

As Antonio Clericuzio has shown, similar combinations of corpuscular textures and spiritual principles were not uncommon among Digby’s peers: starting with Francis Bacon, they were propagated by physicians of the generation of Highmore, Charleton and Willis.²⁸ In addressing the same topic, Silva Parigi concludes that many different thinkers of the early seventeenth century, from Bacon to Boyle, used the doctrine of spirits and corpuscular effluvia to overcome the older, magically connoted doctrine that occult sympathies and antipathies permeate the cosmos, thus replacing the concept of action at a distance by a “virtual contact within a circumscribed sphere of activity.”²⁹ In these corpuscular accounts, though, the notions of spirits or effluvia were often wavering between a physical corpuscular entity and a quality.³⁰ In the footsteps of Daniel P. Walker, Wolfe usefully suggests that animal spirits were “the primary feature used to explain mind-body interactions” and that they could be understood somehow in the framework of a “vitalized” materialism “as mini-minds, animated portions of matter.”³¹

The overall aim of Two treatises is to prove the immortality of the human soul, an effort that had also been the main task of Marsilio Ficino’s opus magnum, the Theologia platonica. Digby’s explicit intention in Two treatises is to contradict the doctrines of Aristotelian Alexandrists and their prominent Renaissance exponent, Pietro Pomponazzi.³² The latter notoriously argued for the mortality of the individual human soul but for the immortality of a collective world soul. This main thrust of Digby’s endeavor is well in accordance with his actual political agenda, as demonstrated in the publication of Two treatises. As part of the so-called Blackloists, a small group of English intellectuals, Digby was trying to establish a new counter-reforming Catholic theology in England.³³

The existence of an immortal soul is what distinguishes human beings from animals, who are designed and moved by the divine artificer, thus functioning like clocks or other ingenious automata.³⁴ Harrison has pointed to the theological importance of this debate: the status of animal creation was at stake, with its subservience of nature to human ends.³⁵ Digby accordingly explains animal generation and animal self-motion as the interaction of mutually dependent parts of an organic individual that lacks soul.³⁶ Yet Digby conceives of these animal-automata not merely in mechanistic terms, as clockworks, with cogs and wheels; actually, he cautions his readers that the divine artificer is only by analogy a clockmaker.³⁷

3. Spirits, or the trouble with Descartes

As is well known, materialist doctrines encounter difficulties in their attempts to explain the acts of perception, passions and memory they encountered in animals as merely more complex movements of matter. Spirits solve the problem for Digby: in explaining why limbs become paralyzed or insensitive, Digby writes:

they proceed out of the divers disposition of the animal spirits in these partes: which if they thicken too much, and become very grosse, they are not capable of transmitting the subtle messengers of the outward world, onto the tribunall of the braine, to judge of them.³⁸

He accordingly distinguishes between “thin” and “thick” spirits in the brain. Spirits seem to have some kind of agency, as when Digby explains that the spirits of passions sometimes may outnumber and, like a victorious army, prevail in their “battle” over the spirits of reason.³⁹ In this, Digby openly disagrees with Descartes. For Digby, spirits are “instruments” which allow us to focus on certain objects—as when the brain deploys “the greatest part of his store of spirits about that one object, which so powerfully entertaineth him, the others find very few free for them to imbue with their tincture.”⁴⁰ Spirits are the crux of Digby’s disagreement with Descartes, as he explains:

but I shall goe the more common way; and make the spirits to be the porters of all newes to the braine: only adding that these newes which they carry thither, are materiall participations of the bodies, that worke upon the outward organes of the senses; and passing through them do mingle with the spirits, and so do goe whither they carry them, that is to the braine; onto which for all partes of the body, they have immediate resorte, and a perpetuall communication with it.⁴¹

Digby maintains that his account has the advantage of explaining the capacity of soul to direct its perceptive acts towards a certain object, whereas, “in Monsieur des Cartes way (in which no spirits are required) the apprehension must of necessity be carried precisely according to the force of the motion of the externe object.”⁴²

Spirits also loom large in Digby’s description of the functioning of the heart, where he is again in explicit disagreement with Descartes. According to Two treatises, the heart is an “abridgement of the whole sensible creature” which is very hot and full of blood.⁴³ The movements of the heart are caused by “heate or spirits imprisoned in a though viscous blood; which it cannot so presently breake through to gett out.”⁴⁴ Thus, pleasant objects dilate these vital spirits in the heart, whereas unpleasant objects contract the spirits.⁴⁵ Again openly disagreeing with Descartes, Digby explains the movements of the heart with a chemical analogy, a spectacular experiment. He says that if you enclose mercury into a hot loaf of bread, it will “also leape about, and skippe from on place to an other, like the head or limpe of an animal (very full of spirits) newly cutt off from its whole body.”⁴⁶

Thus, spirits were by no means the prerogative of human beings alone (even though the quality of spirits varies even among human individuals).⁴⁷ Two treatises mentions different kinds of spirits:⁴⁸ “spirituall” juices enable plants to grow,⁴⁹ animal sperm is generated from the vaporous substances of the blood,⁵⁰ and, in animals and human beings, spirits are the products of the digestion of food.⁵¹ But it is not merely animal and vegetable life that seems to be endowed with spiritus. Spiritus is tied to the evaporation of substances and the technique of distillation.⁵² Thus, Two treatises mentions spirits obtained by distillation of alcohol and other substances: alchemists produce spirits “etheriall and volatile.”⁵³ Likewise, a mysterious “sun powder” produced by special glasses has the “spirituall quality” to penetrate even gold, which Digby identifies as the most solid element.⁵⁴ Spirits also account for the special properties of “Electricall” bodies such as amber to attract other bodies. Still lower on the scale of the hierarchy of being, fiery spirits are the “most thinne and subtle substance” imaginable; they prepare all matter.⁵⁵ But why should these spirits be really utterly material: how can they, simply by their exiguous size, accomplish the communication between extended bodies and incorporeal minds? Traditionally, spirits were not.

4. The pre-history of spirits

The concept of spiritus was prominent in medieval and early modern medicine. Spiritus, as the most subtle part of blood, assumed a crucial mediating role between the realm of animal souls and bodies. Souls of animals and human beings, and to a lesser degree plants, were believed to be in possession of spiritus as an instrument that allowed for souls to exert control over bodies. D. P. Walker has given one of the most succinct accounts of the concept in Medicine:

Medical spirits are very fine, hot vapour, deriving from the blood and breathed air. They are corporeal. They are usually divided into three kinds; natural, vital and animal  … . The vital spirits are manufactured in the heart and conveyed by the arteries; their main function is to distribute innate or vital heat to all parts of the body. Animal spirits are elaborated from these and are contained in the ventricles of the brain, whence through the nervous system they are transmitted to sense-organs and muscles; their functions are motor-activity, sense-perception, and, usually, such lower psychological activities as the appetite, sensus communis, and imagination. They are the first, direct instrument of the soul.⁵⁶

In Renaissance Neoplatonism, different spirits served as media for cognition, just as spirits acted as mediators between soul and their body, through which soul communicates life to a body.⁵⁷ Ficino had accorded a conspicuously elevated role to spiritus as a universal transmitting substance. Spiritus was the instrument of the world soul to shape and direct all sublunary matter; crucially, this universal, cosmic spirit was of the same nature as spiritus in the human soul.⁵⁸ This set of claims neatly dovetails into the Stoic concept of thinking pneuma, as the tensest kind of matter; doctrines of spiritus are thus conducive to pantheistic doctrines.⁵⁹

If we turn to Ficino’s earlier versions of spiritus theory, it is clear that spirits are part and parcel of a panpsychistic philosophy. Spiritus, that paradoxical entity, is “an excellent body a body not a body,”⁶⁰ with a surfeit of stellar fire that is the cause of all generation and motion—hot, moist and life-giving (vivificus).⁶¹ In Ficino as in Digby, medical spirits originate from the heat of the heart out of the “more subtle blood.” From the heart, this most refined spirit “flies” to the brain, where the soul uses spiritus as its instrument to command the interior and exterior senses.⁶² Ficino maintains that spirit exists in all substances—from the elements and their generative powers, to the metals and stones—and that their spirits can be separated.⁶³ Like Digby, Ficino postulates a physical economy of spirits: according to De Vita, subtle spirits are available only in limited quantiles, and there is the danger that thick blood may hamper soul’s proper operations by making it melancholic through an abundance of cold, black bile.⁶⁴

As mentioned, Digby (against Descartes) took recourse to animal spirits to explain soul’s capacity to direct its intention to a particular object, amassing spiritus through this activity.⁶⁵ Ficino explains that spiritus vapors ensure soul’s ability to focus itself on an object; this also allows transitory powers of a soul to infect another with its influences, such as the evil eye and the capacity of a pregnant woman to impress some sensory image upon the body of her fetus.⁶⁶ Digby describes these effects of maternal longings in the same way in Two treatises. Ficino says that vaporous spirits, most prominently when they are emitted through the eyes, are able to act outside the body. Vapors of different qualities provide the key element in explaining these actions of the soul.⁶⁷ One of Ficino’s most influential accounts of this spiritus mechanics is given in the passages of the De amore, his immensely influential commentary on Plato’s Symposium. Here Ficino describes the ways in which a lover’s spirits become completely directed to the beloved—totally occupied with reconstructing a phantasmatic spiritus image of that beloved. According to Ficino (and again reminiscent of Digby’s description of the malfunctioning of the brain mentioned above), this activity leads to a lack of clear spiritus and causes the overabundance of thick, potentially noxious melancholic blood. Such ideas clearly echo the panpsychistic framework of Neoplatonic physics. Yet, does this allow for a coherent account in Digby’s translation, can you sever Ficino’s physics from his metaphysics?

5. Lucretius: rerum simulacra, eidola, effluvia

Spiritus doctrines have a particular affinity to Lucretian atomism—and a related theory of effluvia that, again, accounted for one of the most neuralgic problems of Classical atomism: sense perception. According to this theory, sensation is caused by material particles—atoms—which all bodies are constantly emitting. As all matter is porous to different degrees, these effluvia penetrate the surrounding bodies (and vice versa). Lucretius had called these emissions rerum simulacra, and had defined them in analogy to a sort of outer skin that is peeled off.⁶⁸ Like Digby after him, Ficino adapted Epicurean atomism for his own ends, with their common Latin master Lucretius considered “a tainted authority,” in Michael Allen’s words.⁶⁹ As we shall see, it is here that Digby’s mechanist account of perception dovetails into Ficino’s Neoplatonic and medical frameworks of panpsychistic ideas connect with the workings of a pneumatic world soul: because Digby goes beyond Lucretius, thereby eclipsing the inconveniences to explain the communication between souls (that lack extension) and bodies, whose most conspicuous quality is extension. It is worthwhile to look more closely into the fine tuning of these concepts. In accordance with the atomistic theories of Lucretius, Digby postulates a sphere of activity “where a body emanates his nature.”⁷⁰ Digby contends that there is a “perpetualll fluxe of little partes or atomes out of all sensible bodies.”⁷¹ Accordingly, sensation comes about by means of “atoms of insensible bignesse” which are transported in the channels of the nerves. Here, “that atome by the reason of the subtility of the liquor it is immersed in, is presently and as it were instantly, diffused through the whole substance of it,” so as to present itself to “a motion or a knocke confortable” to the nature of the brain.⁷² On the surface, this account seems to be straightforwardly atomist, and can be closely related to Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Lucretius uses the analogous Latin verb pulsare to explain the communication between atomic films and our perceptive faculties.

One tacit implication from Lucretius’s account is that these “atoms” move the brain in an adequate way to produce sensation. Digby maintains that the impact of the “knocke confortable” is capable of representing the “nature” of the object it “emanates” from. Thus, perception occurs as bodies absorb these “natures” transported by the atoms into their pores, and these “natures” are “sufficient to imbue the whole length and quantity of spirit that is in one nerve.”⁷³ If we take Digby by his word, he uses “atom” synonymously with “nature.” Yet, as opposed to Lucretius, who thought that the mere touch of atoms would be sufficient for sensation, according to Digby the spirit inherent in the nerve is a necessary prerequisite for sensation. This is not all, for Digby explains that, with regard to all acts of perception, light “cometh impregnated with a tincture drawne from the superficies of the obiect it is reflected from that it bringeth along with it, severall of the little atomes which of themselves do streame.”⁷⁴ Digby thus seems to imply that not merely the “atomes” or “natures” but some sort of extract of the perceived object is necessary for the act of sensation. Thus, again as in Ficino, the crucial role of bridging the gap between body and soul is played by “spirits.” For Digby explains that the “spirits” which reside in the organs of perception become “imbued” with the “tincture” of the perceived object. This doubling is significant: a tincture (in the sense of a solution of a medical substance in alcohol) is already something that is imbued (or tinctured). It is as though Lucretius’s simulacra rerum, in order to reach the perceptive organs, must exist in some degree of high concentration—an extract, or essence that is already of a spiritual nature. In other places, Digby uses the word tincture in exactly this way: for instance, when talking about subtle spirits obtained by alchemical processes, which extract “the heart, or tincture, of spirits of any thing they distill or make an extract.” Tinctures are thus already spirits, and not merely corpuscles or peel-offs from an object.⁷⁵ In this vein of argument, Digby accordingly says that spirits exists in different states of refinement, for instance when he states that “opticke spirits  …  are conceived to be the most refined that are in man’s body.”⁷⁶ I suggest that what at first sight might appear to be minor vacillations in terminology are (perhaps self-conscious) attempts to explain how non-extended soul and extended matter may communicate by forms of matter. Digby translates the problem of the communication between body and mind to ever-smaller particles, extracts of a substance, spirited tinctures, medical spirits. Yet he does not say how this translation should solve the basic problem: an explanation of the communication between body and mind.⁷⁷ Unless, of course, you concede that these spirits effectively do the job because they act as what they have traditionally been taken to mean: not body not mind, but both. Translating the problem merely to humans (and declaring the rest of sentient beings mere automata) does not solve the problem: as long as you cannot do the trick then to show what happens in the act of perception in human beings, arguably the moments in which mind and body may be observed in their interaction. And Digby certainly believes that such an interaction is possible: as he maintains that soul effectively grows with the sensory experiences it makes, soul “changed from not being to being; so, may she likewise be changed from lesse knowing, to more knowing.”⁷⁸

Digby’s translationes are parading, as it were, the old concepts, in triumph, as the Roman generals had paraded their defeated enemies. But they still keep their identity, an uncanny liveliness no matter how enchained and subservient to God’s ordering hand they had been declared in Digby’s new philosophy. For Digby’s reasoning amounts to an infinite regress: a form of translation that works like a set of Russian dolls, that constantly become smaller, but continue to resemble each other in shape.

Let us look more closely into these translations: Lucretius had called the atomic emissions simulacra rerum, thus translating the Epicurean term eidola.⁷⁹ According to Ficino’s Platonic understanding of the term, idola are shadows of ideal forms—simulacra animae—intermediary beings between physical and noetic entities which are material enough to interact with our physical organs. Like spiritus, these idola are the precondition for the interaction between the stars and our bodies; they are emanations of a world soul.⁸⁰ In his Neoplatonic translation of Lucretian ideas, Ficino uses the noun pulsatio to describe the communication between the celestial idola and our bodies, entailing the existence of a pneumatic world soul. The verb pulsare (Lucretius), translates into pulsatio (Ficino) and becomes Digby’s knocke conforable.⁸¹

Digby’s use of the term species is also revealing; he maintains that “several little atoms that emanate from the body” enable the eye to receive these “species” (my emphasis). Digby’s substitution of “emission [of atoms]” for the term “emanation” is remarkable in this context. I find only one occasion where Lucretius uses the verb emanare. No wonder, because the term emanation is usually associated in context with the Neoplatonic ideas of the proodos and epistophé of the ineffable One.⁸² As is well known, the concept of species was introduced in scholastic philosophy. As Leen Spruit in his seminal work explains, intelligible species “may be regarded as a mental representation whose raison d’être is chiefly functional: it provides the immaterial mind with an integrated and accessible representation of sensory information.” An inherent difficulty in the concept of species is that “intelligible species are produced on the basis of physically grounded sensory representations; and yet, they are received by an immaterial mind.” Medieval discussions therefore focused on “the functional role of species, without investigating their ontological status or origin.”⁸³ Digby tries to provide an explanation for precisely this ontological status, with the result that he expediently introduces vital spirits in the act of sensation and he maintains that human beings are the only creatures endowed with an “incorporeal spirit.”⁸⁴ The problem of the communication between bodies and sols is thus solved, albeit again by the intercession of a Neoplatonic spiritus. In Two treatises, spirits are special entities, and their function is not reducible to a merely atomistic mechanics. Digby’s account of the function and nature of spirits is inconsistent.⁸⁵ Ficino’s concept of a world soul—which entailed “spirits” in different degrees of refinement on all hierarchical levels of creation, and only assigned human beings a special role inasmuch as their souls were immortal—is in much closer analogy to Digby’s synthesis as the latter (probably) would have liked to admit. In Digby later writings, the concept of a world soul becomes explicit and an integral part of his arguments.

6. Digby’s Discours touchant la guérison des plaies

Chemical explanations in connection with spiritus become clearly featured in Digby’s later texts:⁸⁶ the Discours touchant la guérison des plaies par la poudre de sympathie (Paris, 1658) advocates the efficacy of a certain kind of vitriol spirits to cure wounds from a distance. The weapon salve is a miraculous medicine of Paracelsian origin. It is purportedly effective without direct application to the afflicted parts of a patient’s body, instead treating the weapon that caused the lesion. Digby explains the efficacy of this hotly debated cure as the result of material effluvia: in ostensibly chemical and corpuscular terms, the spirits of vitriol in the air help the shed blood to return to its legitimate owner, fortifying the blood in the process.⁸⁷ Here Digby explains: “I conclude then, Messieurs, by representing unto you that all this mystery is guided, and governed all along by true natural wayes and circumstances, although by the agency and resorts of very subtil spirits.”⁸⁸ In the Discours, Digby went as far as to state that

The Chymists do assure us that it is no other then a corporification of the universal spirit which animates and perfects all that hath existence in this sublunary World, which is drawn in that abundance by a Lover so appropriated, by means whereof I my self have in a short time, by exposing it only unto the open air, made an attraction of a celestial Vitriol ten times more in weight, which was of a marvailious purenesse and vertue, a priviledge which hath not been given but to it, and to pure virgin salt-peter.⁸⁹

This passage is intriguing for many reasons: it not only openly and approvingly introduces a “universal spirit” ascribed to alchemists⁹⁰—analogous to Neoplatonic ideas about the world-soul—but also implies the concept of universal sympathy when we read that a “Lover” attracts the world soul. Willis, the English translator, mistook the word “Aymant” (Lodestone) for the French princeps for “lover.”⁹¹ It is a revealing error. The translation, however, is not as misleading as we would surmise today, since the mysterious powers of the lodestone to attract iron had traditionally been a key rubric for many authors who postulated a universal sympathy and antipathy.⁹² Ficino’s surprisingly mechanistic description of the attachment lovers feel is actually paralleled in Digby’s corpuscular account of the mechanics of the weapon salve, itself generally classified as a magnetic cure.⁹³

Even more explicitly than in Two treatises, Digby maintains in the Discourse that spiritus has the capacity to construct a phantasmatic resemblance of the represented object. He explains that spirits act as the “sentinels” of soul “because that the atomes from without being conveyed by these intern spirits, to our imagination erect there the like edifice, or else a model in short resembling the great body whence they come forth.”⁹⁴ Likewise, Ficino had prominently discussed the specific capacity of spiritus to recreate phantasmatic images of a desired object in the imagination regarding love—falling in love actually depends on the effluvia of spiritus from the desired object. These spirits enter the eye of the lover and make their way to the brain, where they start to occupy all the lover’s spiritus. As in Digby, the imagination builds a mental replica of the desired object. The excessive production of spiritus necessary for this building activity also dries the blood up and causes melancholic baleful humors—leading to sickness if the love remains unrequited and the lover’s brain is not supplied with spirits flying from the beloved during the exchange of reciprocal love. Love is thus a form of contagion, caused by effluvia, as Ficino maintains with explicit reference to Lucretius.⁹⁵ We are back at Plato’s Meno, discussed above, where Socrates had presented Empedocles’s doctrine of effluvia in the context of love and universal attraction.

Like Two treatises, the Discours repeats several other common tropes that Ficino had rehearsed. One key empirical corollary for the extraordinary formative powers of the spirits over the body in Renaissance natural magic was the ancient belief that if a woman is exposed to a strong sensation or harbors an intense longing during intercourse or pregnancy, this state could influence the formation of the embryo in her womb.⁹⁶ According to this theory, the image of its mother’s obsession was impressed on the fetus, and the future children would thus physically resemble the desired object or carry marks of it on their skin.⁹⁷ Digby devotes many pages of his Discourse to this topic, but he had already presented it in Two treatises. Here Digby maintains that species are “strong in the imagination, it must of necessity be carried downe together with the spirits into the seede.” By consequence, when the “seede becomes infected with this nature,” and starting with the brain of the embryo, it will “fill the childe’s body with the infection and tincture of this object, and according to the impression with which they were in the mothers fantasy.”⁹⁸ The Discourse describes “marvelous marks of longing” and affirms “that those Spirits had the power to cause such essential changes, and fearful effects, upon bodies that were already brought to their shapes of perfection.”⁹⁹ The power of spirits is thus so enormous that they may even change the species of an object.¹⁰⁰ And he explains:

all the effects of a strong and vehement imagination working upon another more feeble, passive, and tender, ought to be more efficacious in the Mother acting upon her son, then when the imaginations of other persons act upon them who are nothing to them. And as it is impossible for a Master of Musick, let him be never so expert, and exact, can tune so perfectly any two Harps, as the great Master of the Universe, doth the two bodies of the Mother and the Infant, so it follows by consequence, that the concussion of the principal string of the Mothers, which is the imagination, ought to produce a greater shaking of the consonant string in the Infant, to wit, his imagination then the string of a Lute being touched, upon the consonant strings of another: and when the mother sends spirits to some parts of her body, the like must be sent to some part of the childs body.¹⁰¹

The phenomenon of musical resonance is, again, an inveterate example for the universal magical sympathy directed by a world soul.¹⁰² On one and the same page of De vita, Ficino had presented these ideas, the influence of the human imagination over the shape of future children and the powers of musical harmony as celestial numbers in motion; and these celestial numbers conveyed into musical harmonies also have therapeutic effect, since they work on the human spirit.¹⁰³

7. Conclusion

I have presented Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem in Two treatises as an attempt to translate the older panpsychistic conceptual framework into a language compatible with corpuscular theories that had become one of the main intellectual agendas of the seventeenth century. I used “translation” in the sense of transplanting or transferring an aspect of the model of causation used in the Neoplatonic tradition into a natural philosophy with otherwise different theoretical assumptions.

The crucial issue in Digby concerns his reading of the status of spirits/effluvia/eidola/tinctures. Lucretius, the important source for Digby as for Ficino in that respect, had no “narrowly technical language” for effluences. Lucretius’s “richness of language”¹⁰⁴in accounting for the term eidola made it easy to translate these notions into different contexts.

Thus, Ficino’s Renaissance synthesis of Neoplatonism had amalgamated Lucretian simulacra rerum and Platonic eidola, contributing a highly influential aesthetic and unified vision of a cosmos, where Neoplatonic physics went in tandem with metaphysics. Ficino’s panpsychist accounts of love magic and universal sympathy pervading the entire cosmos shaped the scientific and literary imaginations of generations of Renaissance thinkers to come: To such an extent that, in Digby’s day, effluvia and the related spiritus doctrines did not need to be identified as a “third” causal model, or was there a need to disclaim them.¹⁰⁵ Rather, they were the solution to the problem, since their vagueness allowed the accommodation of Neoplatonic as well as corpuscular theories.

For Digby, this had the advantage that he could salvage the appealing aspects of this tradition into what purported to be the radical new philosophy; Digby’s approach was more one of translation than of radically “overcoming” older traditions. In my reading, Digby did not entirely rid his philosophy of panpsychist ideas. His approach in Two treatises remains ambiguous: was Digby emphasizing familiar terminology to merely sweeten the pill of the new mechanist philosophy and a concurrent de-spiritualized universe,¹⁰⁶ or was he trying to cover up the inconsistencies of his mechanist solutions to the problems of mind–body communication? I have suggested that both was the case. After all, Two treatises employed rather unsophisticated modes of argument: in order to by-pass the inconveniences of the mind–body divide, Digby introduced many ever-more refined mediators in a system of regress that I have compared to Russian dolls. Not a convincing solution, but one that sought to capitalize on the respectability of an inveterate terminology. I have suggested that this vested panpsychism or pan-spiritualism was a way out: for it still preserved God’s ordering hand, and it made a direct and constant intervention into nature superfluous.

Digby, like Ficino before him, sought to secure the position of human beings at the center of creation as God’s unique creatures, endowed with an immortal soul. Digby’s task in Two treatises was to translate the doctrine of an immortal individual human soul to the new philosophy. In this process of translation, he relied more heavily than he would admit on Ficino’s synthesis—and with it, on panpsychistic ideas: even in Two treatises.

Digby thus moved from endorsing Neoplatonic metaphysics early in his biography to corpuscularism in the Two treatises. Here he translated a distinctly Renaissance Neoplatonic terminology appertaining to physics, trying to disentangle it from the panpsychist metaphysics that was part and parcel of Ficino’s approach. It seems that this did not satisfy him, for, in his later years, Digby re-implanted the concept a universal world spiritus into his thought, as we learn from his discourses on the weapon salve and on the vegetation of plants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective – EXC 2020 – Project ID 390608380: [grant number 390608380].

Notes on contributors

Sergius Kodera

Sergius Kodera received his Doctorate in 1994. Since then, Kodera has been teaching Early Modern and Renaissance Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He received his Habilitation in 2004. Currently he is working on a book-length study on Della Porta in English. His main fields of interest are the history of the body and sexuality, magic and media in trans-disciplinary perspectives. For a list of publications, see https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3119-2749.

Notes

1 Harrison, “Animal Souls”, 524. For a short biography of Digby’s adventurous life, see Foster, “Digby”; for a monograph, see Petersson, Kenelm Digby.

2 Blank, “Composite Substance”.

3 Adriaenssen and de Boer, “Atoms and Forms”, 58.

4 Henry, “Atomism and Eschatology”, 214. For an introduction to Digby’s precarious relationship with Hobbes and Aristotle, see Krook, “John Sergeant”, 25–40.

5 Harrison, “Animal Souls”, 521.

6 Lobis, “Philosophical Theology”; Henry, “Immortality of Soul”.

7 For comprehensive introductions, see Walker, “Animal Spirits”; Walker, “Medical Spirits”.

8 Nauta, “Body and Soul”, 35–57.

9 Dilucia, “Salvation and Soul”, 4–5, 6–8. The question for Digby was whether natural philosophy will be able to solve the problem of the immortal individual human soul, and Dilucia maintains that Digby pursued a “vernacularized soterology” (10).

10 Clericuzio, “Plant Chemistry”, 571–2; Clericuzio, “Digby on Palingenesis”, 163–82.

11 See, for instance Wolfe, “Material-Cerebral Plasticity”, 95–6, on the irritation of Descartes’s scholars to come to terms with the concept.

12 Adriaenssen and Georgescu, “Introduction”, 24–5.

13 As, for instance, Parigi, “Effluvia”, 355, says.

14 Dilucia, “Salvation and Soul”, 12.

15 Cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1963–4 (transfero); Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1956–6 (translatio).

16 Digby, Two Treatises, 231, my emphasis.

17 Especially so in the light of Digby’s conversations with fellow alchemists. Cf., for instance, Clericuzio, “Digby on Palingenesis”, 170.

18 Digby, Two Treatises, 138. See also Adriaensen and Georgescu, “Digbean Way”, 24, on the ambiguities of this “radial, effluvia-based account of physical change”; Jalobeanu “Bodies and Orbs”.

19 Ficino, De vita, 246 (III, 1).

20 Ficino, De amore, 202–3 (VI, 3); on the world soul, see P. R. Blum, in this volume; for a nuanced discussion of these ideas in Plotinus, see Poma, Magie et Guerison, 249–53.

21 Digby, Late Discourse, 142.

22 Digby, Vegetation of Plants, 12–13, 61–4, 70; Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, 85; Clericuzio, “Digby on Palingenesis”; Petersson, Kenelm Digby, 294–301.

23 Digby, Vegetation of Plants, 70; Clericuzio, “Digby on Palingenesis”, 169, 164, 174, on the resurrection of plants, 165. It is remarkable that sal nitri is identified with soul by the Hohenheimer (see Zemla in this collection on the relationship between Ficino and Paracelsus). Clericuzio, “Plant and Soil Chemistry”, 571–2, on Digby’s references to the Paracelsian chymists Sendivogius and Duchesne. On Duchesne’s ideas of the world spirit and their relation to Ficino’s Neoplatonism, see Hirai, “World-Spirit and Quintessence”, 251–2 and passim.

24 Clericuzio, “Digby on Palingenesis”, 171–2. On the theological interpretations of (world) spirits in Paracelsian Medicine, cf. Wels, “Spiritualismus, Theoalchemie”, esp. 21–3, 30 and passim.

25 Rosenmeyer, “Sensation in Lucretius”, 1403. The notion of effluence was anticipated by Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus; the term used is απὸρροια; cf. Rosenmeyer, “Sensation in Lucretius”, 151, N. 2; Bailey, De Rerum Natura, III, 1180–1.

26 Thus Rosenmeyer, “Sensation in Lucretius”, 140, lists for the following terms Lucretius uses for eidola/effluvia: “simulacra, res, semina, corpora, primordia, corpuscula, exordia, elementa, membranae, imagines, formarum figurae, and formarum vestigia”.

27 Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, 298–305 and passim. Vojtěch Hladký, in this volume.

28 Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, 75–102. Thus Bacon says in Historia vitae et mortis (1623) that spirits wish to multiply and come out of bodies, joining with other spirits of a similar nature (connaturalia); cf. Parigi, “Effluvia”, 353; see also Rusu, “Same Spirit”.

29 Parigi, “Effluvia”, 364.

30 Parigi, “Effluvia”, 355.

31 Wolfe, “Material-Cerebral Plasticity”, 96. On Willis, see Wolfe, “Material-Cerebral Plasticity”, 106. Walker, “Medical Spirits”, 288 and passim.

32 Digby, Two Treatises, 428–9. On Pomponazzi and Digby’s devout rationalism, see Lobis, “Philosophical Theology”, 116–21, and passim. Digby grounded the immortality of the soul in the limits of mechanism; Henry, “Immortality of Soul”; Dilucia, “Salvation and Soul”, 10.

33 Henry, “Atomism and Eschatology”, 212, 215–19 and passim.

34 Digby, Two Treatises, 227. Digby, Two Treatises, 324, speaks about instinct without using the word: “this invariability in the birdes operations, must proceed from a higher intellect that hath determined and precisely ordered a complexe or assembly of sundry causes, to meete infallibly and by necessity, for the production of an effect he had designed”. Thus, birds are like clocks, and even man-made automata can be so deceptive that they seem to be alive.

35  Harrison, “Animal Souls”, 521. This is reminiscent of an often quoted passage in Ficino, Theologia Platonica, IV, 168–70 (13, 3, 1), where Ficino seeks to prove the uniqueness of human beings by their being inventors of arts which surpass nature. Ficino, Theologia Platonica, IV, 180–2 (13, 3, 12), says that animals have no reason as Lucretius erroneously maintains (182).

36 Blank, “Composite Substance”, 16.

37 Digby, Two Treatises, 227, 231.

38 Digby, Two Treatises, 282.

39 Digby, Two Treatises, 391–2.

40 Digby, Two Treatises, 277–8, 280; Digby, Two Treatises, 285, where such spirits account for the faculty of memory.

41 Digby, Two Treatises, 276–7.

42 Digby, Two Treatises, 277.

43 Digby, Two Treatises, 294.

44 Digby, Two Treatises, 234.

45 Digby, Two Treatises, 293–4.

46 Digby, Two Treatises, 235 (my emphasis).

47 Digby, Two Treatises, 44–5.

48 Digby, Two Treatises, 44–5.

49 Digby, Two Treatises, 218.

50 Digby, Two Treatises, 221–2.

51 Digby, Two Treatises, 215–6.

52 Willis is a case in point for using the analogy between distillation and animal spirits, which are “the outcome of a qualitative transformation: the separation and exaltation of a volatile salt”. Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, 68; Wolfe, “Material-Cerebral Plasticity”, 102. On the Renaissance ideas on distillation intersecting with physiology, see, for example, Kodera, “Distillation of Spirits”.

53 Digby, Two Treatises, 124–5. On ardent spirits as life giving substances, see Digby, Two Treatises, 134–5.

54 Digby, Two Treatises, 51.

55 Digby, Two Treatises, 304.

56 See Walker “Astral Body”, 120, for an invaluable account for the main weakness of the concept of spiritus, namely its “paucity of empirical evidence”; See also Walker, “Medical Spirits”. On the identification of spiritus/pneuma with the alchemical quintessence, see Mothu “Distillation de l’âme”, 436–7; Clericuzio, “Internal Laboratory”; Parigi, Spiriti, effluvi.

57 Ficino, De vita, 254–6.

58 Ficino, De vita, 384, 256. See Kodera, Disreputable Bodies, 172–3, on Ficino’s world spirit as the quintessence.

59 For the nexus between pneuma and astral body, see Proclus, Elements of Theology, 313–21. On spiritus and pantheism, see Walker, “Medical Spirits”, 289, 292.

60 Ficino, De vita, 256: “Opus est igitur excellentoris corporis adminculo, quasi non corporis”.

61 Ficino, De vita, 256.

62 Ficino, De vita, 110.

63 Ficino, De vita, 288.

64 Digby, Two Treatises, 258; Ficino, De vita, 114, 116–18. On Ficino’s spiritus, see also Kodera, Disreputable Bodies, 63, 90, 106, 120.

65 Blank, “Material Souls”.

66 Ficino, Theologia Platonica, IV, 136–40; 150–2 (13, 2); 190–6 (13, 4).

67 Ficino, Theologia Platonica, 194–6 (13, 4); Ficino, De Amore, 213 (VI, 9).

68 Lucretius, De rerum natura IV, 28 ff IV, 50–2. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II, 464, translating mebrana as “film” “ea quae rerum simulacra vocamus, quae quasi membranae vel cortex quod speciem ac formam similem gerit eius imagoquae”. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II, 31–2. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II, 462: “quasi membranae summo de corpore rerum dereptae volitant ultroque citroque per auras” (“which like films form the outermost body of things fly forward and backward through the air”).

69 On Ficino’s precarious relationship to Lucretius’s materialistic theory of vision, see Allen, Icastes, 193–5; Hankins “Rebirth of Theology”.

70 Digby, Two Treatises, 137–8.

71 Digby, Two Treatises, 278.

72 Digby, Two Treatises, 278.

73 Digby, Two Treatises, 279, my emphasis.

74 Digby, Two Treatises, 280, my emphasis.

75 Digby, Two Treatises, 155. See also Digby, Two Treatises, 301, 425, on the compatibility of his thought with alchemy.

76 Digby, Two Treatises, 282.

77 Cf. Nauta, “Body and Soul”.

78 Digby, Two Treatises, 434.

79 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura IV, 881–2; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II, 408: “dico animo nostro primum simulacra meandi/ accidere atque animum pulsare”; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II, 409, translates “strike the mind”.

80 Ficino, Theologia Platonica IV, 136–42 (13, 2).

81 Ficino, Theologia Platonica IV, 146 (13, 2): “Pulsatio idoli nostri fit ab idolis, naturae nostrae pulsatio ab illis naturis ed idolo nostro” (“The shock to our idolum comes from the idola, but the shock to our nature comes from the natures of our own idolum”).

82 Digby, Two Treatises, 280. Digby, Two Treatises, 286, is another passage where Digby identifies these atoms as species. Lucretius, De rerum natura III, 570.

83 Spruit, Species Intelligibilis, vol. 1, 6–8.

84 Digby, Two Treatises, 342, 411–12.

85 Digby, Two Treatises, 278–80 (vital spirits).

86 Dobbs, “Digby and Alchemy”; Principe, “Alchemical Circle”.

87 Kodera, Nahkampf und Fernheilung; Parigi, “Spirito del mondo”.

88 Digby, A Late Discourse, 151 (my emphasis). I am quoting from the English translation that had appeared in the same year as the princeps.

89 On Digby’s analogous ideas in his Discourse concerning the vegetation of plants, see above.

90 Clericuzio, “Digby on Palingenesis”, 164, 169–71; Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 513, discusses the possible alchemical sources for this idea, and juxtaposes Henry More’s Neoplatonic, panpsychistic solution with Digby’s synthesis.

91 Digby, Discourse, 184.

92 Ficino, De amore VI, 2. On the cosmic dimension of magnetism in the context of the hierarchy of cosmic sympathies, see Ficino, De vita, 316 (III, 15).

93 Poma, Magie et guérison, 68–71, 109–14; Solís, La medicina magnética; Kodera, Nahkampf, 12–17.

94 Digby, A Late Discourse, 89, 91. On the importance of clean air as a medium for salutary spirits and unclean air as medium of contagion, see Ficino, De vita, 378–80 (III, 24); Kodera, Disreputable Bodies, 168–70.

95 Ficino, De amore, VI, 9, M 214, VII, 4 M 246–9, esp. VII, 5 M 249–51.

96 Ficino, Theologia Platonica IV, 110 (13, 1).

97 Pancino, Voglie Materne. On the close connection between the imagination and monstrous births in relation to the organic soul, and on Empedocles as the “source” for these ideas dear to Ficino, see Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 4, 18–19; Kodera, “Ingenium”. See Blank, “Material Souls”, on criticisms of these doctrines.

98 Digby, Two Treatises, 330; cf. also Digby, Two Treatises, 336–7.

99 Digby, Late Discourse, 98, 110, 95–110.

100 Digby, A Late Discourse, 109: “and it may be well believed, that in some of them there was a transmutation of one species to another and the introduction of new informing form  …  totally differing from that which had been introduced at first”.

101 Digby, Late Discourse, 95–6.

102 Walker, “Ficino’s Music”.

103 Ficino, De vita, 330 (III, 17), see also 358–60 (III, 21).

104 Rosenmeyer, “Sensation in Lucretius”, 140.

105 Parigi, “Effluvia”, 358.

106 Henry, “Immortality of the Soul”.