The Springs of the Soul

Abstract

This chapter turns to the place of the passions in the “new philosophies” of the mid- to late-seventeenth century, which aimed to bring them into the purview of a true “certaine science.” In the process, they changed the concept of passion, turning it from a motion of the sensitive soul with associated but secondary effects in the body to a more centrally physiological movement: a motion of the spirits, themselves understood in increasingly materialist terms; or even a “spring” of the soul: a physical movement in the body that causes effects in the soul. The chapter demonstrates the impact of this shift in the concept of passion on late-seventeenth-century rhetoric. But it also argues that rhetoric continued to shape new forms of philosophical discourse on the passions, albeit in hidden or even disavowed ways. It traces the influence of rhetoric through major philosophical texts by Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Locke. In its final pages it turns to two novels, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, to show how they fuse concepts of passion shaped by the new physiologies with an updated version of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions that had once belonged to rhetoric but that by the late seventeenth century was also guiding the production of new forms of long prose fiction.