CHAPTER IV
THE NATURE OF LIFE
(_a_) THE VIS MOTRIX
The subject of motion naturally follows the discussions on the cognitive and appetitive functions. Nature indeed added this power as the complement of the others, that we might not only know and desire the good, but also act for its attainment.
The functions which have been discussed hitherto have been motions, but such as are usually called immanent: our present subject is local motion, in so far as that is related to will, or, to put it more comprehensively, in so far as it is traceable to an inner principle. The line of distinction is not so easy to draw as might at first appear. We are to speak of all changes of place, and these will include not only movements of one body, but also movements of the parts of one body. Among these movements of the parts are many which can only loosely be called subordinate to the Will: for if we reject ‘motus cordis, cerebri, intestinorum venarumque,’ and confine ourselves to ‘motus brachii, capitis, linguae,’ we may still find a difficulty in bringing all their movements under the head of voluntary movements. In fact what Gassendi does is to make the Vis motrix from the first an instrument of Will, and, without trying to make all movements of the parts actions of Will, merely aims at showing how these motions, which we ascribe to Will, are made possible in the economy of nature.
The power of motion is fundamentally one with life: it is ‘ex ipsa natura contexturaque animae,’ for the soul is by nature a fire (cp. p. 111), and its very life is motion (insita mobilitate vigens).[89] We thus annihilate at a stroke many threatening difficulties, strangling them in the cradle. If the soul is an active principle, activity will be the principle of the soul: we do not require to bridge the gulf from psychical to physical activity, since they will be one in their foundations: it may be that the deeper we go the more real the unity: that the corpuscles rather than the contextura corpusculorum are the real home of the mobilitas; but at any rate, in the spiritus ignei of our organism (the complex referred to as corpore animato) we find a fit starting point. Gassendi explicitly derives mobilitas from the natura ignea, and therefore, since fire was chosen principally for its mobility, commits himself to a circle: moreover, he considers that a body cannot communicate motion to another unless it be itself mobile, which is reasonable enough, except for the assumptions which it involves: for there could be no motion at all on this theory unless we could find a substance with innate mobility, and that mobility were communicable: these two points therefore have to be assumed. These questions we must leave for the present, and accept Gassendi’s position that the body is a living and moving organism, of which a descriptive analysis (if not an explanation) may be given.
The ‘vis’ is the inner fire in its form of spirits: its seat is decided according to the place where the nerves arise, and therefore must be the brain, not the heart: motion lags behind thought, because the spirits must be moved through the whole area of the body, and then re-directed to fresh courses. The organ of the vis motrix is the muscular system: a muscle includes vein, artery and nerve, the channels respectively of blood, vital spirits and animal spirits: anatomical experiments prove that the nerve is the mediator or bearer of vis, and the medulla is a subordinate centre or fountain of the virtus motrix from the brain. The nature of the muscular movement has been misunderstood by those who object that a fixed point is required for contraction: the muscle is not drawn up to its head, it contracts in the middle. Now, what is it that the nerve contributes to this action? Gassendi says it is an ‘imperium’: the essential part of the muscle is the tendon, for that alone has an innate power of contraction: the shock of the incoming current of spirits awakens the dormant power and causes action. This point is apparently considered to be highly important: its significance seems to lie in the fact that it dispenses with the necessity of any power being conveyed from the centre to the seat of action: there is no innervation in that sense of the term: the Mind or Phantasy issues its orders, and nothing more, which is a metaphorical way of denying _material_ activity to the mind. How far this ‘imperium’ is immaterial when it equals ‘appulsus spirituum’ is difficult to see, although technically the spiritus are immaterial; but it is clear that Gassendi is content to relieve the brain of the necessity of supplying the force that moves the mass.
All movement is for some end: it applies therefore an antecedent phantasy giving the good as end. Will then may be said to initiate movement, and the difficulties which normally surround that proposition are dispersed if we remember that the Appetitus Rationalis is one with the sensitivus and Phantasy mediates sense and intellect. None the less, ‘sunt in hac re tria praesertim admiranda.’ They are (1) the choice of the nerves required; (2) the speed of the action; (3) the amount of the mechanical force. The first problem is shirked: it is said that the branching of nerves is never a division of a nerve, but only a dispersion of several nerves joined together: hence any one nerve is continuous, and the spirits will never be perplexed like a traveller changing at a junction: this however is only an explanation of the persistence of nerve-currents in one channel: what we hoped to learn was how the current chooses the right course at first. The second difficulty is settled by saying that a fiery substance can of course act with the rapidity of light! As to the third, the answer has already been given when it was pointed out that the energy stored in the muscle is the immediate cause of the mechanical motion.
The special treatment of the subject of motion contains very little of interest to the modern reader: even contemporaries must have found its elaborate details wearisome. It is divided into three parts dealing with (_a_) movements of parts; (_b_) vocalisation; (_c_) movements of the whole or modes of progression. The first and third divisions do not require any notice: they are mainly concerned with very elementary anatomy, relieved with the quaint, if unconscious humour, which occasionally crops up in unpromising places. The chapter on the voice[90] is too characteristic to be passed over in silence. In the first place the definition is carefully elaborated: it runs thus: vox proprie est sonus emissione spiritus in ore animalis aliquo affectu incitati creatus. The word ‘proprie’ excludes the ‘voice’ of all instruments; ‘emissione’ dismisses the theories of all those who had not recognised that the act of producing sound is that of expiration not inspiration: aliquo affectu incitati is added to exclude coughing, sighing, and the like. Sighing would seem to be one of the ways of expressing ‘affections’; but Gassendi explains that he means ‘affectus _animi_’: in short, a sound to be properly vocal must be significant and voluntary, following on some definite act of imagination. The mental activity precedes the physical: for this reason the ancients often spoke of the inner voice, but this is not really a distinction of kinds of voices: the inner voice is nothing more than thought itself which the outer or physical organ interprets. There appear to have been some narrow-minded attempts at confining the possession of a voice to man alone, and among other devices this voice of the mind was invented that man might be distinguished from the animals even in this detail: it would naturally follow that the human voice was generically distinct from that of animals, and capable of surviving the dissolution of the body. This is one more instructive example of the way entities can be multiplied to serve irrelevant purposes. Gassendi’s position is comparatively a strong one: as the voice is the servant of the imagination it will be just as coherent in its expressions as the imagination is in its images. Intelligibility is not an absolute quality, and animals are probably intelligible to one another: their language is foreign to us, but so is Chinese, and while it may be ‘impious’ to say they speak in the human sense, each may be said to speak after its own kind without offence. This correlation of the voice and the faculty of images, puts Gassendi on a firm basis capable of considerable expansion. When we come to deal with the specifically human voice we find the evolutionary aspect tending to obliterate the hard and fast distinctions more natural to this period of thought. The natural history of speech must begin with a stage not so far removed from that of the animals: infants make only vocal sounds: fari non possunt, as the name witnesses; and it is only after time and experience that they reach the varied articulations of developed speech. Gassendi notes that pronunciation is directly related to physical structure: it cannot be learned from books, and in some degree remains always a birth-right not to be won by labour. This point was another blow at theorists who vaguely equated the power of speech with human nature in general and ignored the facts. On the question ‘sintne nomina natura vel instituto’ Gassendi takes the same view as Epicurus, and avoids both extremes: the primary name is a sound significant of pleasure or pain; but people even in the same place would regard the same thing differently, and hence designate it by different names: so that intercourse would be impossible if convention did not supplement nature and carry out a natural selection of sounds until one object had one name: for succeeding generations this would be a nomen ex instituto acquired through the medium of society.
Gassendi quotes an example of the contemporary science of language which shows that he knew where to stop. The doctrine of natural names had been defended on the ground that the meaning and the motion were often identical. Tu and ego, for example, necessitate movements of the lips outward and inward respectively, that is to say toward you and toward myself! The error which had most to be combated was the use of arbitrary as the opposite of natural. There could be no question to an intelligent mind of arbitrary names: though an arbitrium might be exercised in the selection of words when a language was consolidated, in the early stages such words as became ex instituto would be so from a natural process rather than any direct activity of human choice.[91]
(_b_) LIFE AND DEATH
The definition of life is a task essayed by writers in generation after generation. A broad distinction can at once be made according as the writer takes life in the sense of a thing or a process. If he regards it statically as a being or entity he is not likely to advance far: if he regards it dynamically as a doing or function he will at least be on the right track. In this respect a philosopher who inclines to use motion as his common denominator is guided by his general attitude of mind into paths that may reach the goal. At the same time vita and operatio are not quite identical: it is truer to say vita per operationem patescit, although it cannot be understood sine ordine ad operationem.
Gassendi proposes as his definition ‘quaedam quasi usura sive possessio animae facultatisque operandi ipsius,’ obviously wishing to combine with the notion of unintermittent function the idea of an agent. It is however a fallacy to try and erect the means of life into Life itself. To define life as mansionem caloris (or calidi innati) is to commit such a fallacy. The calor is really fomentum vitae: it is necessary, but not more so than the elements: though in fact it prevails and is the principium agens. Its activity is directed to the absorption of the humours, which are the pabulum vitae. All life is creation: the individual is no isolated unit: the stream of becoming flows through him: as worlds, nations, and generations arise and decay, so the individual moves along, dying daily and daily regaining new life. Generatio is continuatio vitae and vita is a continens generatio. Life abides as the flame of a candle, kindling what it burns: its fuel is the humour, itself the flame, but only he can distinguish the one from the other who can separate the burning from what is burnt.
This position carries with it the doctrine that identity is continuity of action: the original seed contains two forces, the heating and the heated: calidum primigenium and humidum primigenium as opposed to such heat as that of the sun or humours such as are obtained in food. From the first then there is a duality which makes action possible. The heat-corpuscles by virtue of their nature fly off and take with them the humid: the consequent exhaustion is checked by alimentation, by which the humid elements are multiplied and detain the heat-elements. The action of the heat-elements is then employed in distributing the new elements throughout the body and renewing its tissues. Life then is the interaction of these two principles, a conclusion which derives its importance from the fact that the current doctrines supported a substantia immutabilis as the secret entity called life. This view was dictated by the false view of identity. In place of a fixed identity we can put the identity of equivalence: a part remains to connect the changes, and the form is not lost in the flux of matter. From this however Gassendi exempts the pars rationalis. Again, the stages of growth are not reached per saltum: a proportion is maintained and identity consists in this proportion. As the brain also grows, thought-identity cannot be absolute or immutable: empirically at least it is partial: particles vanish and with them parts of our experience: hence some things are forgotten and some remembered confusedly. There is an unfortunate crudeness in speaking, as though an experience could be attached to a brain particle; but it is redeemed by the last trenchant remark that our identity abides because we have never been separated from ourselves.
The processes of life as thus described would seem to be unending, involving continual growth. There are however natural conditions which prevent this. Growth is checked by the hardening of parts which do not permit of accretion as they become closed to the influx of new material. In the midst of life there is death, and it is an error to confine the word death to the act of expiring: death is properly the whole course of failure to assimilate, unless it be violent and due to some extraneous cause. Gassendi discourses at large on all the legends of long life in man and animals and also on all manner of violent deaths: death by drowning was thought most awful, for the soul being a flame is particularly averse to water.
By regarding death as no less natural than life Gassendi touches a question of great importance in his day. His dictum, what has a natural birth has also a natural death, was by no means generally accepted, and his summary of the opposite teaching is an interesting commentary on contemporary thought. It must be remembered that this discussion does not affect the question of the immortality of the soul.
The common teaching was based on that antithesis of life and death which regarded death as a purely negative term: the reality was life, death an unreality, and some method ought therefore to be discoverable by which life might be made infinitely continuous. At the bottom of this doctrine lies the idea of the World Soul, which, as it is perpetually taken up by us and lost again through the dispersion of particles, might be retained if the nature of man was purified and made perfect. The prescribed process was as follows; the Anima Mundi will remain in the perfect substance: this is gold which can be relaxed so as to absorb from the rays of the sun the principle of life: being thus enclosed in one substance, a vital elixir may be formed from this substance, and the Anima Mundi be conveyed into the body, which gradually becomes purified and perfected, attaining all the qualities which belong to the spiritual body mentioned in the Bible, and fulfilling the prophecy that men should be almost angels, being ‘a little lower than the angels.’ ‘Sane vero,’ says Gassendi, ‘haec sunt non tam refutanda quam diris omnibus devovenda.’ Criticism is hardly necessary even to the extent of pointing out that if gold admits the external principle so easily it might no less easily part with it. The whole scheme is the work of ill-trained imaginations urged on by the desires which are common to all races and all times. The idea of reducing all things to one form was based on the opinion that, if all things are forms of matter, the matter must be some nature to which all other natures were reducible, and through which they could be transformed into any other given nature. This fundamental common nature x being a universal, its discovery would simplify all the sciences, and especially that of medicine, making possible a medicina catholica, for the unity of the universal nature would admit of a medicine one and universal, apparently because it would make a plurality of diseases impossible. The tyranny of the universal in the sciences has been noted often enough: its power was at its highest when the minds of men were dazzled by new discoveries, and vague generalisations were suddenly quickened into a new indefinite possibility of life by rumours of great discoveries and vague echoes of unearthly knowledge from the dim and superstitious cell of the alchemist.
These two pages give an excellent account of the essence of Alchemy as a magic science. Gassendi also gives us a hint of the way in which Transubstantiation and Transmutation became confused: ‘gloriosum Christi sanguinem ... edixerunt nihil aliud esse quam Catholicam suam Medicinam!’ (II. 615).
(_c_) THE CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS
I.
The word temperament or temperies which is used by Gassendi to denote the constitution of living bodies was ambiguous in his own time, and has now diverged still further from its original meaning. The complexity of meaning is however a true indication of the evolution of the ideas the word denotes. The Latin ‘temperamentum’ originally meant no more or less than the Κρᾶσις of the Greeks, and is convertible with ‘commistio’: it looks therefore entirely to the physical composition of the body, and is a name for the various ratios which may hold between the elements in any ‘totum compositum.’ None the less the purely physical aspect never excluded the idea of character, which again, though applicable to all things, tended to become restricted to psychical character. In this way a natural course of development carries us over from elements and atoms to characters and dispositions.
The doctrine of Temperaments is a characteristic element of mediaeval thought: its vagueness gives it a tinge of mysticism: it seems to unite the two worlds of mind and matter in one comprehensive grasp, and links the characters of our acquaintances with the day of creation and the emergence of atoms from chaos. Looked at from one point of view, mediaeval thought will be seen to have no lack of breadth: dogma was indeed a constricting power, but it did not suppress the longing for universal terms in which to state or solve problems, nor impose its precision on minds that found much satisfaction in undefined thoughts and over-defined diction.
Though the subject of temperament may now be said to have vanished from what we usually call philosophical works, much of what the mediaeval thinker collected under that title can be found in modern form in works that deal with the concrete individual, with the natures and dispositions of children, hygiene, adolescence, and the like, and we find in books on these topics a growing tendency to vindicate the relation of physical to psychical characteristics in that concrete way which the theories called ‘psycho-physical’ rarely or never attempt.
If we now turn to Gassendi’s pages we find that he begins with a summary of qualities, enumerating three different classes, and then states quite generally that all qualities owe their origin to the ‘temperies,’ and as the temperament is so will the qualities be. The chief reason however for discussing the question of temperament is that we may be able to advance to the questions of health and disease, which are only natural and unnatural conditions of temperament. In a sense the temperament is life, for it is that equilibrium which must be maintained, and which admits only a limited degree of disturbance.
The history of the theory of Temperament divides naturally into two periods. In the earlier the question is mainly of elements, and always of some form or other of matter: in the latter chemical principles take the place of primaeval elements. If any one finds this a distinction without a difference, and complains that chemical principles are a form of matter, he must recollect that such was not the attitude of the fourteenth century, when men were most at home with ‘dead matter,’ and felt a difficulty in classifying many of the chemist’s discoveries.
Those doctrines which take as their basis either atoms or elements, go back to the earliest days of Greek thought. They have however many difficulties. The nature of the combination is a fundamental problem: the result has to be a mean of some kind; but if we deal with either atoms or elements as irreducible ultimates, they must either (like grains of corn) be simply co-existent, or they must interpenetrate. Co-existence clearly is not what is wanted, and interpenetration implies that two bodies occupy the same space. On the other hand, qualitative difference is not obtainable if the elements are all homogeneous: water added to water only gives a difference of more or less: our combinations must be different in kind, analogous rather to the mixture of wine and water. This is in fact our type, and we must explain the mixture as we have done in discussing qualities, by introducing the concept of intension. We have here really two questions. One is of the temperamentum ex primis principiis: the other of temperamentum ex contrariis. The former goes deeper than the latter, and is an ulterior question, the decision of which hardly affects the second. Gassendi proceeds to deal with the latter. As a theory it is really independent of the particular given matter: it rests upon a category which may be taken formally. Any combination _x_ + _y_ satisfies the conditions if _x_ and _y_ are contrary. Hence there is no a priori reason for taking only those four, earth, air, fire, and water, to which the discussion is usually confined. That choice is dictated by irrelevant considerations of the physical constitution of the universe: so far as our category goes, we might employ such opposites as light, heavy, smooth, rough, and the like. Avicenna indeed seems to have been confused, and perhaps others with him: they took the four elements as typical of four qualities, and so were led astray, speaking as though the qualities might change and mingle, whereas the true view is that of Galen, who refused to divorce quality from substance, and remained on firmer ground in trying to explain the Temperament (Κρᾶσις) as an interrelation of substances (Galenus probandus dum elementarum substantias misceri totas per totas dicit).[92] These points we leave and simply admit four substances, a hot, a cold, a wet, and a dry, which, wherever they have obtained their qualities, are mingled and tempered. Their mingling results in some corpus (lapis, planta, animal), and we may define a temperament as ‘congrua calidi et frigidi, humidi et sicci mistura.’ This dogmatic solution of the question seems dictated by the medical views of the time on humours and diseases, which Gassendi was probably not in a position to criticise. According to Galen, temperaments may be distinguished into nine kinds, one the canon or norm, the rest abnormal, due either to excess of one quality (which gives four kinds) or of two (giving four more). A temperament may be too hot or too dry (siccum et calidum), but cannot be too hot and too cold (calidum et frigidum): these eight are therefore the only combinations possible. The mean temperature is itself twofold according to Avicenna, namely universal and specific. The universal is ad pondus, _i.e._ a typical form assumed as the nature of universal substance and determined quantitatively, the mixture comprising mathematically equal quantities of the four opposites. This however is condemned by Galen as purely theoretical, and if it existed it would be a pure equilibrium which could exhibit no action and no metabolism (neque si qualitates sic temperatae existerent actio exseri ab illis ulla posset). The second or specific kind is ad justitiam, a proportion which realises a mean, and which, while being the same in the sense of always being a mean, is not absolute quantity. This kind varies with the nature of the being and the different ages of the same being, but in such a way as to maintain its chief characteristics. There will be degrees of better and worse in the types thus realised, and therefore we may derive from this a true type without assuming the typical absolute type ad pondus. Every animal is heterogeneous, and therefore its temperament is complex. Some of its parts are fluent, some fixed: the fluent are called humours and their excess gives the four types sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic: the fixed comprise the ‘partes spermaticas semineasve et sanguineas’: the spermatic or ex semine formatae are bone, cartilage, ligament, tendon, nerve, artery, and membrane: those ex sanguine procreatae are the softer parts, heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs. The whole has a harmony of its own, and the whole animal is a well-ordered republic.
II.
The progress of knowledge tended to relegate to the limbo of myths all the ancients had said about elements. The Chemists substituted for principles and primary elements their own chemical elements. Into the details of this doctrine we need not penetrate: in the place of the four elements five substances were recognised as the elements to which all things could be reduced, and from which they must therefore have arisen. Gassendi is not concerned with the value of this position as a scientific doctrine, but with its philosophic import. He obviously regards it as pretentious, and his criticism is an interesting composition of views on the nature of things. There are four direct charges against the doctrine; the authors of it cannot agree among themselves as to the number of ultimate principles: special properties of natural objects, such as the healing power of dictamum or the deadly cold of hemlock, remain unexplained: no explanation is given of the form of organic and inorganic products; and all the higher qualities such as sagacity are completely overlooked.
Though these are details, they involve a principle of the highest importance. The merely scientific mind takes its stand on analysis: the chemist says ‘analysis gives such and such elements, and therefore, unintelligible as it may be, these must be the source of all that we see.’ But when is an analysis exhaustive? If the chemists laugh at the ancient physiologists, what will future ages say to the chemists? The assumption of finality is mocked by progress; and the progress we boast is part of a movement to which we must succumb—a sentiment that recalls the saying, ‘the evolution of thought is part of the whole evolution.’ When is an analysis exhaustive? Probably never, but at any rate only when it admits of an adequate corresponding synthesis. Gassendi shows that he clearly comprehended this great principle. The chemist, he says, would laugh at a surgeon who declared that the living being was no more than a sum of the parts which he could dissect and display. If we try to make our analytic of constitution a complete explanation of life, failure must necessarily ensue.[93] The reason is clear: we strive to exhaust in terms of sense what is not given to the senses: we cannot reach the ultimate because the torch that lights the intellect fails us on the road.[94] For this reason it is useless to substitute for principia any imaginary sensuous agents such as mechanical spirits: the complexity of life in all its forms, with all its endless adaptations, cannot be explained by mechanical agents unless we abuse the term and ascribe to such agents properties which are foreign to mechanism. The construction of a palace appears to us marvellous with its endless processes: the wood has to be brought from the forest, the stone from the quarry, and all the parts have to be shaped and fitted together; but in this case we see the agents, architect, masons, and woodcutters, and if we still find cause of wonder in this, how much more should we marvel at the construction of a living body where all the agents are unseen and the structure has to be maintained by incessant repair![95] We must not think that we can exhaust nature: there is something that does not fall in the range of human powers, and while we cannot completely explain Nature we must so far bow before it as to acknowledge that the whole is more than the parts, the synthesis greater than our analysis.
This criticism is strengthened by the restraint it shows: it ends in no dogmatic introduction of a creator which science might require to have demonstrated: it is intended only to define the limits of science.[96] The question arises, are those limits necessary or contingent? No distinct answer is here given, but Gassendi seems to consider that in time (perhaps infinite time) the unknown might become revealed, not to sense alone but to an intellect guided by sense. After this philosophic digression, the treatise returns to the question of diseases and their cure, medicine being the science to which the doctrine of temperaments is properly ancillary. For our present purpose this part of the subject is superfluous.
PART III. ETHICS