for your service Isodicastes You are unreasonably modest thus to diminish yourself Athanasius And as immoderate in your overvaluation of my Capacity to expresse my affection to Learning and Learned Men otherwise than only by the content I take in their conversation But let us leave this formality of Complements to young Courtiers as savouring of lesse plainnesse and freedom than ought to be amongst the Votaries of Truth and Science when they meet together And give me leave to enquire of you for it seems you came but lately thence somwhat concerning the state of Learning now in England I have been told of great Discoveries made by men of your Faculty there in Anatomy Diseases and their waies of Cure Far different from the Principles and Doctrine of the Antients I have heard also that the Mathematicks are in high reputation among you and have received much if not of improvement yet of illustration from the happy industry of some in our Universities Pray therefore let it not be troublesome to you to give us some hints of the particulars wherein the Wits of our Nation have of late been so highly beneficiall to the Commonweal of Philosophy Athanasius Sir you have laid a command upon me which is impossible for me to obey without shamefully betraying my own ignorance and by a disadvantageous representation of them much disparaging the noble successes of those Heroicall Wits among our Country-men who have addicted themselves to the Reformation and Augmentation of Arts and Sciences and made a greater Progresse in that glorious design than many ages before them could aspire to notwithstanding all their large hopes specious promises and manifold attempts Neverthelesse being your command I shall strive to yeeld obedience to it so far forth at least as to recount to you in brief what upon the suddain I can call to mind of the most considerable Novelties in Naturall Philosophy Medicine the Optiques Astronomy and Geometry found out by the ingeny and labours of men now living in England as yet in the prime of their strength and years In the Colledge of Physicians in London which without offence to any thing but their own Modesty I may pronounce to be the most eminent Society of men for Learning Judgement and Industry that is now or at any time hath been in the whole World you may behold Solomons House in reality Some there are who constantly imploy themselves in dissecting Animals of all kinds as well living as dead and faithfully recording all singularities that occur to their observation both in the severall species and individualls That so they may come to know what is perfectly naturall what preternatural what rare and monstrous among the parts of them And also what resemblance there is betwixt the Conformation of the parts in the body of Man and those in the bodies of other Animals ordained by Nature to the same or like and equivalent uses So that it will be hard for any man to bring thither any Fish Bird or Insect whose Emtrails these genuine Sons of Democritus are not already intimately acquainted with or at least which they will not with admirable dexterity and skill anatomize without confusion of the smallest Organ and instantly explore the proper office of each Organical part by remarking the Figure Substance Vessells and situation of it And I have some reason to put you in hope that ere long you may see a Collection of most of the Anatomical Experiments that these Men have made in the bodies of Beasts Birds Fishes and Insects of various sorts together with the Figure of each and all its principle Organs expressed to the life in Copper-Cuts and an exact account as well of the Analogy as Dissimilitude that is betwixt them and others of consimilar uses in Man the grand Rule or Prototype to all inferior Creatures Which is a Method certainly of inestimable use towards the complement of Natural History and the only way to perfect that Comparative Anatomy whose defect the Lord St. Alban so much complained of in our Art Others there are who daily investigate arguments to confirm and advance that incomparable invention of Doctor Harvey the Circulation of the Blood And have already brought the Doctrine thereof to so high a degree of perfection that it is not only admitted and admired by all the Schools in Europe but the advancers of it also are able to solve most of the difficult phaenomena in Pathology only by that Hypothesis And frequently effect such Cures by having respect thereunto in their intentions and prescripts as well in Cronique as Acute Diseases as could not be hoped from any other ground-work or supposition formerly laid At least not with equall correspondence to the true method of Healing which ought to be deduced from Principles of the greatest evidence and certainty in Nature among which certainly this of the Circulation is the chiefest And though I deny not but the like Cures may have been performed by Physicians who never dream't of any such thing as the continual motion of the blood from the heart by the Arteries to the outward parts of the body and thence back again by the veins into the heart but rested in the Antique opinion of a difference betwixt Arterial and Venal blood both as to substance and uses Yet I may safely affirm that the Remedies used by them wrought the effects aimed at by waies altogether accidental and beside the direct scope of those who gave them And to do a cure only by Accident you well know is much below the ambition of a Rational Physician who ought to have a firm and well-grounded Theory of the Faculties and Virtues proper to each particular Instrument he is to make use of in rectifying the disordered Oeconomy of nature in mans body For my own part I speak ingenuously I am so well satisfied of the Verity of this Harvean Circulation and have so seriously considered the great advantages that may be made of it in order to the ennobling the Art of Medicine by reducing the maxims of it from obscure and conjectural to evident and demonstrative And by accommodating the same to the explanation of most of the Apparences in Pathology That I have had some thoughts of undertaking to justify all the Aphorisms of Hippocrates which concern the Nature and Sanation of Diseases by reasons and considerations deduced meerly from this one Fountain the Hypothesis of the Circulation of the blood And if my troubles had not deprived me of leisure I had ere this made some progress in that enterprise But I have digressed and ask your pardon for it There are moreover among the members of this venerable Society who pursuing the hint some few years since given them by Iacobus Mullerus a German in an Academical exercise of the nature of Animal and Voluntary Motion have gone far toward the explication of the reasons and manner of the Motions of the Muscles by the principles of Mechanicks An enterprise of great difficulty and long
desiderated as leading us to understand the Geometry observed by the Creator in the fabrick of the Microcosme and the verification of Anatomical assertions by demonstrations Mathematical The same persons likewise have demonstrated that we goe because we fall i. e. that each step we advance is but a shifting the body to a fresh Centre of Gravity And our Rest but a remaining or fixing of it upon the same As also that in progression the Head of a man is moved through more of space than his feet by almost one part of four in respect of its greater distance from the Centre of the Earth which indeed was toucht and only toucht upon by that prodigie of Mathematical subtleties Galileo in his Second Dialogue de Mundo There are also of these Miners of Nature who have found out more probable and commodious Uses for the Glandules or fatty Kernells scituate in divers parts of mans body than were assigned unto them by all antecedent Anatomists For whereas Those generally conceived them to have been intended by Nature to no nobler an end than either for the Imbibition or dreining of superfluous humours inundating the parts adjacent to them Or for the susteining of Veins Arteries and Nerves in their progresse from part to part These have discovered that some Glandules serve for the preparation of the Succus Nutritius or juice that nourisheth the whole body That others are official to the sequestration of some lesse profitable and disagreeable parts of the same nutritive juice or Vital Nectar And that a third sort of them are ordained for reduction of those same lesse profitable parts after their separation or streining back again into the masse of blood by the small veins that are contiguous to them And among these likewise there is one A person of singular note for his Universal Learning and indefatigable industry in Disquisition who aiming to promote the certainty of these New Tenents 1. That according to the Anatomical observations of Ioh. Pecquet a young Physician of Diepp in Normandy the Chylus is convey'd from the stomach by the Venae Lacteae or Milky Veins into a certain Receptacle or common promptuary scituate at the bottom of the Mesentery and thence transmitted upwards by a conduit running all along on the inside of the Spine of the back to the subclavian veins and so delivered into the right Ventricle of the heart there to be turned into blood 2. That the Liver is not the immediate instrument of Sanguification but inservient only to the sequestration of the Cholerick parts of the blood and the conveying the same into the Gall to be thence excluded into the Duts 3. That there is no Anastomosis or mutual Inosculation betwixt the small branches of the Vena Portae and those of the Vena Cava in the substance of the Liver as was generally believed from the infancy of Physick till of late years when this Gentleman was so happy as to evince the contrary by ocular demonstration 4. That there are certain thin slender and transparent Vessells for the most part accompaning the veins especially in the liver named Vasa Lymphatica by Thomas Bartholinus who seems first to have discovered them and Lymphe-ducts by others since containing a clear liquor like water which they exonerate into the common Receptacle of the Chyle newly mentioned to the end that being again infused together with so much of the Chyle as enters the veins into the blood it may both prevent the Coagulation of it and also in respect of its predisposition to Volatility associating it self to the Vital spirits in the Heart and Arteries promote the Mication or boyling motion of the blood And 5. That the solid parts of the body are not in the general nourished by the blood which He conceives to be only the fewel of the Vital Flame or Heat and in regard of its great Volatility and harsh and grating nature more likely to prey upon and consume than feed and repair the substance of the solid parts but by the sweeter and more unctuous part of the Chylus drawn up by the mediation of the Nerves especially those of the sixth Conjugation called the Recurrent Nerves into the brain and there elaborated and afterward transmitted by the Nerves to all parts of the body This worthy Person I say aiming to promote the certainty of these recent Opinions hath collected illustrated and disposed them into one Systeme Hoping thereby to declare their mutual Consistence as well each with other as with the demonstrative doctrine of the Circulation of the blood And at the same time put an end to all disputes concerning the Milky veins the use of the Spleen of the Capsulae Atrabilariae or Renes succenturiati Deputy Kidnies as Casserius Placentinus called them and sundry other Difficulties in Anatomy But whether or no he hath attained to the full pitch of his hopes in that design you will be best able to judge when you have read and examined the weight of his experiments and discourses delivered in his excellent Book de Anatomia Hepatis In the mean time give me leave to advertise you that his modesty is so great as that he expresly professes his own want of full satisfaction concerning the truth of sundry particulars therein contained And therefore presents them to the World as positions not of apodictical evidence but great probability and worthy to be embraced only till time shall have brought more credible ones to light Furthermore among these Merchants for light we have some so excellently well skilled in all sorts of Medical Simples that they know not only the names but the faces also and virtues of most of the Plants in Europe And can besides that give you a better account of the American druggs than Piso Margravius and others notwithstanding the large volumes they have compiled concerning that subject They likewise so well understand all Fossilia and the several kinds of Minerals pretious Stones Salts concreted juices and other subterranean productions That even Lapidaries and Miners come to learn of them We have others who enquire into the mysteries of Refiners Belfounders and all others that deal in Metals Others who search out the frauds and sophistications of Wine-Coopers and Vintners in the brewing feeding stumming and adulterating of Wines Others who can inform you exactly of the severall hurtfull Arts of Brewers Bakers Butchers Poulterers and Cooks All which are of very great detriment to the health of men though the danger be commonly undiscerned And were the civil Magistrate but half so careful to reform as these Doctors have been in detecting those publick abuses the Citty of London would soon find by happy experience that Physicians are both as willing and able to preserve health as to restore it In a word there is nothing escapes their examination which may any way concern the safety of mans life or the knowlege whereof can conduce to make themselves every way accomplisht in their Profession And as for Chymistry which I
like conditions of Matter Truth is I have often heard among your soaring and long-winged Wits of Abstracted and Unbodied Notions and have somtimes perplexed my mind and almost crackt the membranes of my brain in striving how to comprehend them And yet I alwaies found my Phansy so inseparably conjoined to my Intellect as if they were both one and the same Faculty Nor am I yet able to distinguish betwixt my Imagination and Intellection And when once you shall have satisfied me of a reall Difference betwixt them I shall soon confesse you have gone very near the Demonstration of the Souls Immortality Because if the operations of the Intellect be clearly distinct from those of the Phansy which is a Corporeal Faculty and therefore limited to the perception and representation of only Corporeal Natures It will almost follow that the Intellect which is capable of knowing Incorporeals is a substance clearly distinct from the body and so Immaterial since different effects must have different Causes And as for your other Postulate viz. the exemption of my mind from contrary prejudice This also is what I should expect from the efficacy of your intended Arguments For as I told you before I believe the Immortality of the Soul but cannot perswade my self of the possibility of its Demonstration by any other but Divine reasons And it must be your work to convince me of the error of that perswasion Neverthelesse I will assure you of my best Attention and that I come not with a resolution not to be satisfied Athanasius Dear Sir have patience a while and you shall soon perceive both the Necessity and Equity of what I require And in the mean time do not take occasion to anticipate my Notions but leave me to deliver them in their due places and order Lucretius I shall punctually observe your commands and therefore if you think fit immediately addresse your self to your Demonstration Athanasius First it will be convenient in order to the prevention of all Equivocation and Logomachy that may arise from the various use of the word Soul that we insist a little on the examination of that vulgar Opinion which admitteth a real distinction betwixt Animus and Anima the Mind and the Soul In regard it seems to be the very same according to which many Doctors of the Church have conceived the Soul to have Two Parts a Superior and Inferior the one being the Mind Intellect or Reason the other comprehending the Sense Appetite Natural and Brutish There are you know many eminent men as well Theologues as Philosophers who as they hold Man to be composed of two parts a Soul and a Body so do they conceive that his soul is likewise composed of a twofold substance the one Incorporeal or Immaterial immediately created by God and infused into the body at the instant of its Empsychosis or first Animation in the Mothers Womb The other Corporeall or Material originally contained in the Parents Seed and derived ex traduce from the Seminalities of Male and Female commixed in coition which is as it were the Medium or Disposition by the intermediate nature whereof the Diviner part is conjoined and united to the Elementary or Body And this Opinion they ground chieflly upon that speech of the Apostle 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 I perceive a Law in my members warring against the Law of my Mind c. For say they since it is impossible that one Simple Essence or thing should war against or have contrariety to it self from this Repugnancy betwixt the Sense and the Mind or Reason it seems necessarily consequent that the Sensitive and Rational Soul are things essentially different each from other Whereunto they superadd also that unlesse this Distinction be admitted we can never well understand how Man as a living Creature can be said to be in one part little lower than the Angels and in another to be like the Horse or Mule that have no understanding How in respect of one part he is made after the Image of God and in respect of another he is compared to the Beasts that perish How in one respect he acknowledgeth God to be his Author and Principle and in another he owns his production upon his Parents How in one relation he is said to be Immortall and in another subject to death equally with the smallest worme Notwithstanding it is not either the Authority or Arguments of these Men that seem prevalent enough to bring me to be of their persuasion For as to their Authority I could thereunto oppose that of some Fathers yea and Councils who not onely reprehend but condemne all such as make a duality of Souls in man were not the thing already well known to you However suffer me to put you in mind that the pious and learned Conimbricenses who certainly have most profoundly and judiciously of all others handled this Question though they proceed not so far as to censure this conceipt to be Hereticall as some others before them had don yet they expressy declare their Dissent from it And as for their Reasons alledged I thinke them likewise insufficient For all that Psychomachy or intestine Conflicts which these men imagine to be betwixt the inferior part of the soul which is called the sensitive and the superior called the Rational or betwixt the Natural Appetites and the Will doe arise onely from the repugnancy or contrariety which is between those motions of the spirits which are on one side caused by the senses affected by externall objects and those motions of the spirits which on the other side are caused by the will after the soul hath deliberated upon their conveniency and utility And in truth each individuall man hath one and onely one soul in which is no variety of parts that which is the Sensitive is also the Rationall and all her Appetites are absolute Volitions The cause of these mens error seems to be this that they could not well distinguish the Functions proper to the soul from the Functions proper to the body to which alone we ought in right to ascribe whatever we observe in our selves to be repugnant to our Reason So that in Man there is no other Contract or Contrariety of Affections but what consisteth in the contrary motions caused by the spirits and purer part of the blood in that part of the body in which as in its principall and more immediate organ the soul is enthroned and exerciseth her faculties whether that be the Plexus Choroides in the brain as most Physicians conceive or the Heart as the Scripture seems to intimate or the Glandula pinealis in the centre of the brain as Des Cartes affirmeth or any other part whatsoever one of these motions arising from the determination of the spirits by the will one way and the other from the determination of them by the corporeal Appetite another way And hence it comes often to pass that these impulses being contrary each to other the stronger doth impede and
speculate or understand without Phantasms and therefore it is not likely that the soul is a distinct substance and separable from the body For the ground hereof is false viz that there is no Intellection but what is either direct Imagination or done by Imagination as we have formerly proved and that with no sparing hand so that we need not here repeat it Nor had I here remembred this Argument of Aristotle but that this you now urge is very neer of kin thereunto as to its force and importance and so put me in mind of it afresh Lucretius An Eighth Objection may be made from hence that the Soul being once expired the body soon corrupts stinks and resolves to dust I say expired or like a vapour exhaled through the conduits and pores of the body and therefore so divided into small portions or particles as that in that very Egression or Expiration it must be wholly comparated to Dispersion and what is capable of such dispersion is capable of totall dissolution Athanasius You might well Lucretius have spared yourself and me the trouble of this impertinent objection had you thought my Answer to your Fifth worthy your memory For since you could not then deny that the soul as Incorporeal is diffused through the whole body and therefore may issue out of it intire and unimpaired as possessing no place and in that respect as capable of passing through the solid and compacted parts as through the conduits and pores why should you now resume that gross conception of the Souls expiring from the body like a vapour or exhalation And as for the Putrefaction of the Body after the Soul hath withdrawn itself from it though it nothing at all concern the buisiness in hand I say the Cause thereof is the defect of that vital Agitation of the Heart Blood and spirits by which the Humours most prone to putrifaction were partly kept from subsiding and fermenting and partly so extenuated as to be discussed and expelled Lucretius A Ninth from hence that in Lipothymies or swooning fits the vigour of the Soul is so much abated and brought low as that it would be totally dissolved and extinguished in case the Causes of those its Failings or Dejections were yet more violent as frequently they are and then they cause sudden death Athanasius Here you recur to the Symptomes of bodily Diseases again but I wish I could as easily remove them from the body as you from defending the Mortality of the Soul by any considerations drawn from them and their most fatal effects For as to Lipothymies which according to the Etymologie of the word you call Failings of the Soul they are in truth only Failings of the Heart or vital influence arising from the preclusion or stopping of those passages ordained for the continual transmission of vital Spirits which as servants the Soul makes use of to Life Sense and Motion And therefore reflecting upon what I have already said it is obvious to conceive that the whole Soul being diffused through the whole body all the failing in Swooning fits doth fall not upon her Self but upon the Vital Organs which at that time are rendred unfit for the uses and actions to which they were framed and accommodated And if the Causes of such Failings should chance to be so violent as to induce suddain death then the Soul indeed would and must wholly depart yet not by reason of any dissolution of its substance or exceeding imbecility in it self but only for want of those Dispositions in the Organs of life by which she was enabled to enliven the body And here I could mind you of a certain sort of Lypothymies that happen in Ecstasies of some Holy men when the Soul being transported with the superlative beauty and excellency of Divine Objects in abstracted contemplations doth so much neglect her inferior functions as that the body all that while seems senselesse and livelesse And yet this an argument rather of the strength of the Soul than of any Failing or Defection in it self I could also insist upon this that in sleep there is a kind of Defection of the influence of the Soul upon her corporeal Organs especially those inservient to Sense and Motion and yet the Soul is then most her self as Cyrus long since observed in one of Xenophons Orations in these most elegant words Dormientium Animi maximè declarant Divinitatem suam multa enim eum remissi ac liberi sunt futura prospiciunt ex quo intelligitur quales futuri sint cum se planè corporis vinculis relaxaverint But the Objection being otherwise refuted doth require neither Lucretius Experience teacheth that no man when dying findeth his Soul to depart out of his body whole and at once but rather to fail by degrees within his breast just as he doth his Sense in each proper Organ Which he would not do in case his Soul took her flight whole and intire out of his breast as a bird out of a Cage and therefore it is probable that the Soul being dissolved at the instant of death is breathed out in dispersed Atoms together with the Aer expired from the Lungs Athanasius You must needs be streightned for Objections Lucretius when you fly to uncertain Experiments and incompetent conceptions of vulgar heads and therefore I hope you cannot much longer hold out against truth I say to uncertain experiments because since it is impossible that any man in the extream moment of life wherein his Soul ceaseth to be either in his breast or any other part of his body should say to the standers by Now I am sensible of the egresse or flight of my Soul and I perceive how it departs because while he is able to speak or be sensible of any thing the Soul is still in the body and at the instant of its departure the Speech all Sense fail for ever The experience you alleage is uncertain and so no experience at all To incompetent Conceptions of vulgar heads because the common people not being able to understand the nature of an Incorporeal and how possessing no place no body can hinder its passage or trajection have a certain grosse apprehension that the Soul must issue out of the breast the same way that the breath doth out of the lungs And as for its Dispersion into Atoms you do ill to suppose it to be Corporeal when you have been so often beaten from that starting hole These Impertinences are much below so great a wit as yours Lucretius and I should very much wonder how you could fall upon them but that I ascribe it to your present humour of Contradiction which doth many times transport even wise men themselves to gross extravagancies Lucretius If the Soul were Immortal and conscious of its Immortality as you have affirmed certainly it would not grieve to leave the body which is rather its prison than delightful Mansion but rather rejoyce to be set at liberty and exult as a snake doth to