Even Francis Bacon, who was deeply indebted to Aristotle, never extricated himself from the tangle of form, cause and law[16].
Now this was a great argument, no empty dispute; the bones of dead controversies cumber the ground, but no controversy was empty which moved profoundly the minds and passions of men: both for ecclesiastical and secular thought the dispute was grave. While realism was essential to the Church—for instance, on realist grounds St Anselm defended the medieval doctrine of the Trinity against Roscellinus; the Church herself claimed a real existence apart from the wills of successive generations of individual and variable men; she taught that Man had fallen not only in many or all individual cases, but as a kind having a real existence[17], and again that in the Mass there is change of hypostasis[18]—while then realism was essential to the Faith, yet if forms pre-exist (“ante rem”) then the acts of God must be predetermined—“fatis” non “avolsa voluntas”; or if forms are only “in re” God must be form, living in each and every act and thing, which is Pantheism (“materia omnium Deus”): an impersonal conception and a dissolution of dogma which the Church must and did abhor. “Pessimus error”—there is the abyss, cried Albert, avoiding it by dialectical juggles. Erigena, the brilliant prophet and protestant[19] of the first period of the scholastic philosophy, was virtually a pantheist after the pattern of Parmenides[20]; as Spinoza was the last great realist. David of Dinan again was such a pantheist, though luckily for him the Church did not find it out till he was dead; and he was martyred only in his bones. Indeed the great Robert of Lincoln barely escaped the accusation of pantheism under the wing of Augustine. The heresies of David, and of Amaury, caused the reaction of the first years of the 13th century against Aristotle. Amaury seems indeed to have cleared out Christian dogma pretty thoroughly, and to have preached the coming of science as the “third age” of the world. Many of his followers were sent to the stake; by the Synod of Paris (1209) the works of Aristotle were proscribed, and many copies of them burned. This proscription was virtually withdrawn by Gregory the Ninth in 1231; and Hales, Albert and St Thomas devoted themselves again to the study of Aristotle, and established his supremacy[21]. Indispensable then as realism was for the Church, its creed, and its sacraments, yet therein it found itself in a dilemma between the conceptions of a Creator working under conditions, and of a spirit immanent in matter; and when theological philosophy culminated in St Thomas, and was fixed by him as it now rules in Rome, this difficulty was rather concealed in his system than resolved[22]. Every scheme of thought must make some declaration on the nature and place of universals; the problem was no hair splitting[23], it dealt with the very nature and origin of being; it agitated the minds of thinking men at a time of the most fervid and widespread enthusiasm for knowledge which the Western world has ever known,—at a time when Oxford counted its students by thousands, and when in Paris a throng athirst for knowledge would stretch from the cloisters of the Mathurins to the faubourg of St Denis[24]; and, in respect of our theme of this day, we shall see that even Harvey was embarrassed by certain aspects of it.
For, to resume, closely allied to the argument concerning universals was that concerning “form and matter.” Whether the terms used were “form and matter,” force or energy or “pneuma” and matter, “soul or life” and “body,” “determinative essence and determinate subsistence,” “male principle and female element,” “archæus and body,” the potter and the clay of the potter; or whether again they were “type and individual,” “cause and effect,” “law and nature,” “becoming and being,” or even the “thought and extension” of Descartes, the riddle lay in the contrast of the static and dynamic aspects of things; in the incessant formation of variable and transitory individuals in the eternal ocean of existence[25].
“Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.”
For early thinkers, untrained in the methods and unaware of the limits of thought, even for the great and free thinkers of Greece, a captivating analogy was irresistible[26]; while inventing schemes of thought they believed themselves to be describing the processes of nature. Moreover it has been the temptation of philosophers of all times, and even of Harvey himself than whom none had put better the conditions of scientific method, to suppose that by means of abstraction kinds may be apprehended; that thus they may get nearer to the inmost core of things; that by purging away the characters of individuals they may detect the essence and cause of individuation (σπερματικὸς λόγος): not perceiving indeed that the content of notions is, as Abélard had pointed out plainly, in inverse proportion to their universality. Like Sidney’s hooded dove, the blinder they were the higher they strove[27]. For example: from a lump of silver a medal is struck; from many lumps of silver many medals are struck, each different from the other: let us eliminate as accidents the notions of silver, of the blow of a hammer, even of particular features of the devices, and we shall reach the idea of an agent with a type or seal, or of such an agent with many seals, or ideas, who may thus individualise indifferent matter; or, to penetrate deeper into abstraction, who may transfer forms of his own activity to motionless stuff. It is my part to-day to show that before motionless stuff—before the problem of the “primum” mobile”—even Harvey himself stood helpless; helpless yet fascinated by the indulgence of invention when, in the De motu cordis, or the De generatione, he permitted himself to carry contemplation beyond the sphere of his admirable experiments. “Natural, vital and animal spirits” indeed he would have none of; saying well that he should want as many spirits as functions, and that to introduce such agents as artificers of tissues is to go beyond experience: yet in his need of a motor for his machine he was not able to divest himself of the language nor even of the philosophy of his day; he referred the cause of the motion of the blood, and therefore of the heart, to innate heat[28]. In his day he could not but regard rest and motion as different things; and motion as a super-added quality. In denying the older opinion[29] that the heart is the source of motion, of perfection[30] and of heat, he put the difficulty but one stage back; and, when in the treatise on Generation he propounded his transcendental notion of the impregnation of the female by the conception of a “general immaterial idea,” we find in him realism still very much alive indeed. Had Harvey been content with innate heat he would have done well enough; but the innate heat of the blood, as he explains it, is not fire nor derived from fire; nor is the blood occupied by a spirit, but is a spirit: it is also “celestial in nature, the soul, that which answers to the essence of the stars ... is something analogous to heaven, the instrument of heaven.”
In denying that a spirit descends and stows itself in the body, as “an extraneous inmate,” Harvey advances beyond Cremoninus, who then taught in the chair of Averroistic philosophy in Padua; for, says Harvey, I cannot discover this spirit with my senses, nor any seat of it. In another passage indeed Harvey warns us “not to derive from the stars what is in truth produced at home”; in yet another he tells us that philosophers produce principles as indifferent poets thrust gods upon the stage, to unravel plots and to bring about catastrophes: yet he concludes that “the spirit in the blood acting superiorly to the powers of the elements, ... the soul in this spirit and blood, is identical with the essence of the stars.”
Thus the riddle which oppressed these great thinkers, from the Ionians to Lavoisier, was in part the nature of the “impetum faciens[31]”—of the Bildungstrieb. What makes the ball to roll? Does heart move blood or blood move heart; and in either case what builds the organ and what bestows and perpetuates the motion? Albert of Cologne, and at times even Aristotle, as we have seen, were apt to leave moving things for abstract motion, and to regard formulas as agents. Telesius again, the first of the brilliant band of natural philosophers in Italy of the xvith and xviith centuries, was still seeking this principle of nature in the “form” of the peripatetics. Gilbert regarded his magnetic force as “of the nature of soul, surpassing the soul of man.” Galileo, although willing to conceive circular motion as perpetual[32], and even self-existent, was unable thus to conceive rectilineal motion.
Harvey, then, and other naturalists of the time, including Cæsalpinus and after a fashion even Descartes, followed the medieval world and Aristotle in deriving the source of motion directly from the spheres. Harvey says with Dante, “Questi nei cuor mortali è permotore.” The attraction exercised by external supreme mind (not associated with matter) and its thoughts bring the material cosmos and its parts into regular movements. The so-called Αἰθήρ, or fifth element, “στοιχεῖον ἕτερον τῶν τεσσάρων, ἀκήρατόν τε καὶ θεῖον” (De Cælo, cap. 2 and vid. Zeller II. ii. 437), under the name of the Quintessence, played a large part in the speculations of Lulli, Paracelsus and other chemical mystics. Till Copernicus transfigured the cosmos, and Galileo and Newton carried terrestrial physics into the celestial world, the heavenly bodies were regarded as animated beings, themselves set in motion by spheres, and, by propagation of their intense activity from sphere to sphere, animating all sublunary matter, wheels within wheels, even to its innermost particles. Aristotle’s view (Metaph. xi.) was as follows:—The stars and planets are in their nature eternal essences; that which moves them must itself be eternal, and prior and external to that which it causes to be moved; likewise that which is prior to essence must itself be essence; and so on for a hierarchy of eternal essences: thus Heaven if not God is a divine embodiment (Θεῖον σῶμα); and this πρῶτον τῶν σωμάτων he regarded as the essence of heaven and stars, and the cause of animal heat in living beings. Thus the transition from Aristotle to the later conception of the celestial bodies as themselves animated beings was easy; indeed the attribution of intelligence to the spheres goes back at any rate to Plato (Timæus), if not to Pythagoras; and was the foundation of astrology. In Harvey’s time there was still in Rome a basilica of the Seven Angels (the planetary essences). Much of this doctrine Harvey probably got from Cicero (Acad. i. ii. 39 and De Fin. iv. 5-12; vid. Krische), who speaks of “ardor cœli” as the whole astral sphere. If I am not mistaken Harvey somewhere advises Aubrey to study Cicero.