Benjamin Goldberg

A dark business, full of shadows: analogy and theology in William Harvey.

In a short work called De conceptione appended to the end of his Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651), William Harvey developed a rather strange analogy. To explain how such marvelous productions as living beings were generated from the rather inauspicious ingredients of animal reproduction, Harvey argued that conception in the womb was like conception in the brain. It was mostly rejected at the time; it now seems a ludicrous theory based upon homonymy. However, this analogy offers insight into the structure and function of analogies in early modern natural philosophy. In this essay I hope to not only describe the complex nature of Harveys analogy, but also offer a novel interpretation of his use of analogical reasoning, substantially revising the account offered by Guido Giglioni (1993). I discuss two points of conceptual change and negotiation in connection with Harveys analogy, understanding it as both a confrontation between the border of the natural and the supernatural, as well as a moment in the history of psychology. My interpretation touches upon a number of important aspects, including why the analogy was rejected, how Harvey systematically deployed analogies according to his notions of natural philosophical method, how the analogy fits into contemporary discussions of analogies in science, and finally, how the analogy must be seen in the context of changing Renaissance notions of the science of the soul, ultimately confronting the problem of how to understand final causality in Aristotelian science. In connection with the last, I conclude the essay by turning to how Harvey embeds the analogy within a natural theological cosmology.

Epigenesis and the rationality of nature in William Harvey and Margaret Cavendish

The generation of animals was a difficult phenomenon to explain in the seventeenth century, having long been a problem in natural philosophy, theology, and medicine. In this paper, I explore how generation, understood as epigenesis, was directly related to an idea of rational nature. I examine epigenesis—the idea that the embryo was constructed part-by-part, over time—in the work of two seemingly dissimilar English philosophers: William Harvey, an eclectic Aristotelian, and Margaret Cavendish, a radical materialist. I chart the ways that they understood and explained epigenesis, given their differences in philosophy and ontology. I argue for the importance of ideas of harmony and order in structuring their accounts of generation as a rational process. I link their experiences during the English Civil war to how they see nature as a possible source for the rationality and concord sorely missing in human affairs.

Pneuma and the Pre-Socratics

To make clearer the range of associations which pneuma could have, we look at an extreme example of its importance in the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. They associated ‘prime matter’ with a single substance. Air, or breath – pneuma – has an observable association with life, so for Anaximenes pneuma or breath became identified with life and hence with soul, in the sense of intelligence, as well.

Spirits and Innate Heat

The spiritus is a characteristic feature of Fernel’s physiology. It is an important part of his explanation of generation. And it is an aspect of his physiology which called forth comment from contemporaries. The first section of this chapter gives an account of innate heat and spiritus as Fernel explains them in the Physiologia and Dialogus, the second deals with the action of spiritus in generation and the third considers contemporaries and successors who wrote commentaries on heat and spirits and commented on Fernel’s own system. Those considered are Joannes Argenterius, Jean Riolan the Elder, Zabarella, Paparella, and Caimo on innate heat, and Delphinus, Bertacchius and Bronzerius on spirit.

The Soul in Generation and the Animation of the Foetus

The role of the soul in generation was a subject for controversy, rooted in Aristotle’s definition of anima. The classic questions concerning the soul in generation, which we find in Fernel, his contemporaries and successors, arise from this definition of anima. Put briefly, they are: is the seed animate, or is it an instrument of an “external efficient” as Cremonini called it? If the latter, is this external cause the parents, God, Nature, the heavens? Is the anima (as form) the same thing as species? And, related to this, how are the faculties or actions of a complex living creature such as a man, composed of parts of different forms or species, integrated into a functioning whole?

Academic Theories of Generation in the Renaissance

The introduction gives the shape and contents of the book as a whole and includes a literature review (of works published by 1980). This review suggests that none of the writers is interested in the Renaissance for its own sake. Most of them concentrate on one group of writers, the anatomists, or alternatively the authors of obstetric treatises. No attempt is made to set their descriptions into any other theoretical context than that of modern embryology. The book distinguishes four main types of sixteenth century writing on generation: 1. Practical treatises and anthologies dealing with the diagnosis of pregnancy and the care of women in childbirth. These are the most common. 2. Anatomical texts which include a description of the parts serving generation and of the development of the foetus. 3. Textbooks of theoretical medicine which include generation, and commentaries or monographs by medical writers. 4. Commentaries on the Generation of Animals of Aristotle and related works, usually by natural philosophers. Virtually all other historical accounts base themeselves on the first two categories, though without distinguishing them from the last two. This book focuses on the last two groups. This study began from the attempt to understand one particular Renaissance treatise on generation, Jean Fernel’s “De hominis procreatione atque de semine”,1 and to place it in a proper intellectual and historical context. This led me back to the classical authorities on which the work was based, in their Renaissance translations and editions. Coming forward again, I wanted to be able to compare Fernel’s work with those of other contemporary medical writers, and with another group of Renaissance writers on generation, the natural philosophers, with whom he seems to have been familiar. The work thus falls into three sections. The first deals with the major classical texts on generation, which provided the raw materials for treatment of theoretical questions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The second part

Renaissance Commentators on “De Generatione”: Felix Accorambonius (fl. 1540–90)

Similar points concerning the logic behind the order of the “Animal Books” are developed by Felix Accorambonius in his Interpretatio obscuriorum locorum et sententiarum omnium operum Aristotelis… (1590). The section “De Generatione Animalium Annotationes” of his Interpretatio is concerned with a discussion of the major controversies and questions arising from the text and from commentaries, in particular those of Galen in the work De semine. Accorambonius concentrates on four linked problems which are important to the philosophical, as distinct from the medical, debate on De generatione: the problems of spontaneous generation and of species; the mind and its relation to the semen and to the virtus formativa; and the relation of elemental, animal and celestial heat. Accorambonius also takes up the difficult question of the origin of the mind. His Interpretation is an attempt, in the manner of Averroes, to discuss controversial questions and reconcile Peripatetic doctrine with Catholic faith; Aristotle with Plato; and even, often, Aristotle with Galen. He seems particularly interested in examining the controversies which divide Aristotle and Galen.

Classical Theories of Generation in the Renaissance

Plato, Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle – the four main classical examples – are considered as sources for the speculation surrounding the question of generation in the Renaissance They are important as the most accessible, and by far the most valued, of the classical authorities on generation known to Renaissance writers. Part I tries to make clear the answers of the four writers to such questions as: how is the semen formed? where, and of what substance? how does it transmit life, organised form and even detailed likeness to the offspring? how are the parts of the foetal body generated and distinguished? what does each parent contribute to this process? It also hopes to suggest the major sources, and clarify the major themes, of Renaissance theoretical discussions of generation. This is an attempt to look back at the major Greek medical writers not from the twentieth century but from the sixteenth.

Agostino Nifo (1470? –1538)

Nifo produced commentaries and translations for major Aristotelian treatises. His medical activities as a practising doctor and university professor of medicine bring to his commentary on De generatione animalium the perspective of the medical tradition at Padua in the late fifteenth century. The Expositio of de generatione animalium is largely a section-by-section paraphrase of the text, with occasional points of difference raised by later commentators. Nifo begins his commentary with a summary of the themes of each of the five books of De generatione. He touches on a number of questions which we have already met, including the role of spiritus and heat in generation, the sense in which the seed or conceptus is ensouled, the generation of the mens. Nifo argues that sexual and spontaneous generation, though the mechanism by which they operate is different, are parallel and equivalent processes. All he could say was that similar effects (i.e. generation) must have had similar causes (similar measures of heat). It may well be that these differences in the kinds of explanation which were acceptable to Renaissance doctors and natural philosophers had more profound effects in determining their approach than the simple division into ‘Aristotelians’ and ‘Galenists’.

The ‘Anti-commentary’ of Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588)

In a class by itself is the De Rerum Natura juxta propria principia of Bernardino Telesio. This is a commentary on the natural philosophical works of Aristotle, and a rejection of the Philosopher Telesio argues that the world is constructed of two substances, heaven and earth, shaped by paired opposing qualities of heat and cold. Generation involves spiritus with its qualities of heat and motion. The two seeds contribute to the foetus by fusion, not as agent and patient. Telesio rejects Aristotle’s claim for the primacy of the heart in generation. He tackles a much trickier question: the operation of the soul in generation. The role of spiritus in Telesio’s writings seems designed to counter a major problem of unity. Galen’s solution, the multiplication of ‘faculties’ to control the body’s diverse operations, compounds the problem. Spiritus is one, and performs the actions of the soul throughout the body. Telesio’s monistic system, with its emphasis on unity, has considerable claims to originality. He is included because his work follows the standard format of Aristotle commentaries, and treats many of the same problems.