Alcmæon, his disciple, a great naturalist and an eminent physician, one of the first that discovered the importance of dissecting animals, and of all the heathen philosophers, he that appears to have had the truest ideas of the nature of the soul, Alcmæon, I say, calls the seed “a portion of the brain.”
Plato termed it, “an emanation from the spinal marrow.”
Democritus thought of it as Hippocrates and Galen.
Epicure, that respectable character, who better knew than any one, that it was pleasure alone that constituted the happiness of man, but who at the same time fixed the nature of those pleasures by such rules as the Christian Hero would not disown, or object to them: yes, Epicure, whose doctrine has been so cruelly disfigured and blackened by the Stoics, that those who knew nothing of him but through the chanel of their information, have suffered themselves to be misled by it in their opinion, to such a degree, that they have mistaken for a libertine, a debauchee, a man, “who (as M. Fenelon observes) was of an exemplary continency, and whose morals were extremely regular.” To which I shall add, that his principles are the most severe censure on the tenets of his pretended modern sectaries, who knowing nothing of him but his name, most basely and unworthily misuse it, by employing it to authorise systems of infamy, which he would abhor, and by which those men of probity and sense, who love the truth, ought not to permit his memory to be dishonoured, if so it was that men, themselves lost to honour, could dishonour any one. Epicure, I say, looked on the seed as a particle of the soul and the body, and grounded, upon this idea, his precepts for the chary preservation of it.
Though many of these opinions differ in some measure, they all agree to prove how precious this humor was held.
It has been a question whether it has any analogy to any other humor? Or is it the same with that liquid, which, under the name of the animal spirits, conveyed by the nerves, concurs to all the functions of the animal machine that are of any, though ever so little importance, and of which the depravation produces such an infinity of evils, so frequent and so unaccountable? To answer this question positively, it would be requisite first to know intimately the nature of these two humors; and we are very far from having as yet reached that degree of knowledge: we can at best propose nothing more than ingenious and probable conjectures.
Hoffman says, “It is easy enough to conceive how there is such a close alliance between the brain and the testicles, since both those organs separate from the blood the most subtile and the most exquisite lymph, destined to give force and motion to the parts, and even to have an influence on the functions of the soul. So that it is not possible but that an over-abundant dissipation of these liquids should destroy the strength of the mind and body[57].”
Elsewhere he says, “That the seminal liquid is like the animal spirits, which are separated from the brain, distributed through all the nerves of the body, and seems to be of the same nature; whence it comes, that the more of it is dissipated, the less there is secreted of the animal spirits.”
M. de Gorter is in the same idea. “The seed (says he) is the most perfect, the most importantly essential of all the animal liquids: it is also the most elaborate; it is the result of all the digestions; its intimate connection with the animal spirits, proves that, like them, it draws its origin from the most perfect humors[58].”
In short, it appears by these testimonies, and by a croud of others which it would be superfluous to quote, that it is a liquid of the utmost importance; that it might be called the essential oil of the animal liquids; or, perhaps more correctly, the spiritus rector, the dissipation of which leaves the other humors weak, and, in some measure, dead or vapid.