[59.] “The universe will never be happy unless it is atheistic.” Although La Mettrie calls this a “strange opinion” it is clear that he secretly sympathizes with it. Holbach affirms this doctrine very emphatically. “Experience teaches us that sacred opinions were the real source of the evils of human beings. Ignorance of natural causes created gods for them. Imposture made these gods terrible. This idea hindered the progress of reason.”[71] “An atheist ... is a man who destroys chimeras harmful to the human race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experience, and to reason, which has no need of recourse to ideal powers, to explain the operations of nature.”[72]
[60.] “The soul is therefore but an empty word.” Contrast this with Descartes’s statement: “And certainly the idea I have of the human mind ... is incomparably more distinct than the idea of any corporeal object.”[73] Compare this doctrine, also, with Holbach’s assertion: “Those who have distinguished the soul from the body seem to have only distinguished their brains from themselves. Truly the brain is the common center, where all the nerves spread in all parts of the human body, terminate and join together.... The more experience we have, the more we are convinced that the word ‘spirit’ has no meaning even to those who have invented it, and can be of no use either in the physical or in the moral world.”[74]
[61.] William Cowper (1666–1709) was an English anatomist. He was drawn into a controversy with Bidloo, the Dutch physician, by publishing under his own name Bidloo’s work on the anatomy of human bodies. His principal works are: “Myotamia reformata” (London, 1694) and “Glandularum descriptio” (1702).[75]
[62.] William Harvey (1578–1657), an English physician and physiologist, is renowned for his discovery of the circulation of the blood. He was educated at Canterbury and Cambridge, and took his doctor’s degree at Cambridge in 1602. During his life he held the position of Lumleian lecturer at the College of Physicians, and of physician extraordinary to James I. His principal works are: “Exercitatio de motu cordis et sanguinis” (1628), and “Exercitationes de generatione animalium” (1651).[76]
[63.] Francis Bacon (1551–1626) was one of the first to revolt against scholasticism and to introduce a new method into science and philosophy. He claimed that to know reality, and consequently to gain new power over reality, man must stop studying conceptions, and study matter itself. Yet he did not himself know how to gain a more accurate knowledge of nature, so that he could not put into practice the method which he himself advocated. His works are full of scholastic conceptions, though many of the implications of his system are materialistic. Lange claims,[77] indeed, that if Bacon had been more consistent and daring, he would have reached strictly materialistic conclusions. The account of the motion of the heart of the dead convict is found in “Sylva Sylvarum.”[78] This book, published in 1627, a year after Bacon’s death, contains the account of Bacon’s experiments, and of his theories in matters of physiology, physics, chemistry, medicine, and psychology.
[64.] Robert Boyle, one of the greatest natural philosophers of his age, studied at Eton for three years, and then became the private pupil of the rector of Stalbridge. He traveled through France, Switzerland, and Italy, and while at Florence, studied the work of Galileo. He decided to devote his life to scientific work, and in 1645 became a member of a society of scientific men, which later grew into the Royal Society of London. His principal work was the improvement of the air-pump, and by that the discovery of the laws governing the pressure and volume of gases.
Boyle was also deeply interested in theology. He gave liberally for the work of spreading Christianity in India and America, and by his will endowed the “Boyle Lectures” to demonstrate the Christian religion against atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and Mohammedans.[79]
[65.] Nicolas Sténon was born at Copenhagen, 1631, and died at Schwerin in 1687. He studied at Leyden and Paris, and then settled in Florence, where he became the physician of the grand duke. In 1672 he became professor of anatomy at Florence, but three years later he gave up this position and entered the church. In 1677 he was made Bishop of Heliopolis and went to Hanover, then to Munster, and finally to Schwerin. His principal work is the “Discours sur l’anatomie du cerveau” (Paris, 1669).[80]
[66.] La Mettrie’s account of involuntary movements is much like that of Descartes. Descartes says: “If any one quickly passes his hand before our eyes as if to strike us, we shut our eyes, because the machinery of our body is so composed that the movement of this hand towards our eyes excites another movement in the brain, which controls the animal spirits in the muscles that close the eyelids.”[81]
[67.] “The brain has its muscles for thinking, as the legs have muscles for walking.” Neither Condillac nor Helvetius go so far. Helvetius explicitly states that it is an open question whether sensation is due to a material or to a spiritual substance.[82]