Jean Fernel's On The Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, And Occult Diseases In Renaissance Medicine (Medieval and Early Modern Science)

JEAN FERNEL’S ON THE HIDDEN CAUSES OF THINGS

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE Editors

JOHANNES M.M.H. THIJSSEN Radboud University Nijmegen

CHRISTOPH LÜTHY Radboud University Nijmegen

Editorial Consultants Joël Biard, University of Tours Simo Knuuttila, University of Helsinki John E. Murdoch, Harvard University Jürgen Renn, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science Theo Verbeek, University of Utrecht VOLUME 6

JEAN FERNEL’S ON THE HIDDEN CAUSES OF THINGS FORMS, SOULS, AND OCCULT DISEASES IN RENAISSANCE MEDICINE WITH AN EDITION AND TRANSLATION OF FERNEL’S DE ABDITIS RERUM CAUSIS BY

JOHN M. FORRESTER INTRODUCTION AND ANNOTATIONS BY

JOHN HENRY & JOHN M. FORRESTER

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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introduction Jean Fernel and the Importance of his De abditis rerum causis On the Transcript and the Translation . . . . . . . . . . . De abditis rerum causis: a Synopsis . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 67 73

de abditis rerum causis Preface

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105

liber primus/book i Chapter 1. The elements of the world provide the only matter for each thing that is brought into being . . . . Chapter 2. The form of a natural thing is substance, not accident . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 3. The substance of the form of every natural body is simple, and has not arisen from the forms of the substrate, contrary to Alexander’s position . . . . . . . Chapter 4. The forms of the individual parts that are in a composite are as it were preparations for the introduction of a form of the whole, and they are multiple Chapter 5. It is not the potentiality of a natural thing to proceed to a form through its own initiative; but just as an actuality is summoned from a disposition, a form is summoned from the potentiality of the matter . . . . . Chapter 6. There was not the smallest contribution previously in matter towards the generation of a form, and there is no potentiality of a form, nor can it be assigned to the kind of a substance . . . . . . . . . . .

121 137

155

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221

239

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Chapter 7. The form of what has been generated could not emanate from the parents. The character and source of the true origin of forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 8. The forms and original substances of everything are derived from heaven, according to Aristotle . . . . . Chapter 9. In philosophising upon Nature, Aristotle established the divine origin of forms: that greatest God created the heavens and stars, and bestowed on these the powers of begetting things; these are Platonic views too, compatible with Holy Writ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 10. All transient and mortal things were divinely originated in the past; they are now both begotten and controlled by heavenly excellence, which is itself manifestly divine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 11. The spirits by whose rudders people say the world is controlled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

271 307

323

349 373

liber secundus/book ii Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 1. Powers reside in each generated thing that are some of them due to the matter, some of them to the temperament of the qualities, and some to the form . . Chapter 2. The powers that a form displays, like the form itself, are manifestly divine and are referred to as such, there being no sure and evident basis for them . . . . . Chapter 3. The structure of the human body and of every living creature is divine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 4. Our soul is not sprung from the elements, on Galen’s judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 5. What the faculty of the soul is to Galen . . . . . Chapter 6. The substance of the three parts of the soul is divine, on Galen’s view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 7. The spirits of the human body, like those of all living things, are divine, as is their innate heat . . . . . Chapter 8. Very many functions and activities in us come from hidden causes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 9. Not one but three kinds of diseases are present in a similar part, and which the diseases of matter are . . Chapter 10. Diseases of the total substance, and how significant they are in the art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 11. Distinguishing characteristics of occult diseases

397

401

415 423 441 453 467 479 497 513 533 549

contents Chapter 12. On the pestilent diseases: that their cause is hidden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 13. There is something hidden in epidemic diseases Chapter 14. The contagious diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 15. Poisoned diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 16. Diseases, and also some remedies, transcend nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 17. The existence of some hidden properties of the form or of the total substance, and the number of their different sorts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 18. From where the property of the total substance originated, and how it is distinct from the substance, and where it resides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 19. Occult diseases should be treated with the secret property of medicaments, not by the Empirics’ procedure, but by skill and method . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

563 595 609 629 647

673

697

721 737 755

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is impossible to embark upon a project of this kind without sending out calls for help (and hoping that they don’t become too strident), and it is with great pleasure that we now thank all those who answered our calls. We must thank the staff in the Special Collections Department of Edinburgh University Library for their unfailing patience and helpfulness, and Professor Iain Donaldson of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh for helping us to gain access to facsimiles of sixteenth-century texts. Professor John Richardson of the University of Edinburgh provided invaluable advice on the niceties of Renaissance Latin typography, while Dr Robert Mill of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, and Dr Elizabeth Gosling of the Molecular Ecology Group at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, provided crucial information on plants and on invertebrate biology respectively. Carole Tansley, Secretary at the Science Studies Unit here in Edinburgh University, helped with so many of the little things arising that we ended up owing a great deal to her unflagging aid. We are also greatly indebted to a number of scholars of Renaissance intellectual history, and history of medicine. Dr Laurence Brockliss of Magdalen College, Oxford; Dr Jill Kraye of the Warburg Institute, London; Dr Hiro Hirai of the Centre d’histoire des sciences, University of Liège; Professor Vivian Nutton of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at University College, London; and Professor Nancy Siraisi of Hunter College, New York; all unstintingly offered us the very great benefit of their expertise. Last, but by no means least, we must thank Dr Christoph Lüthy of the University of Nijmegen. His help surely went above and beyond the call of duty as one of the editors of the series in which this book appears. We wish to thank him not only for his help in accepting this for publication, and for seeing it through the press, but also for his significant contributions to the content of the edition. He meticulously checked the whole translation, making many corrections and proposing many improvements; he made numerous suggestions with regard to the annotations; and the Introduction has also benefited greatly from his own considerable expertise in Renaissance natural philosophy. We thank all these people for helping us to improve this edition of Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things beyond what it otherwise might have been, but

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we must exonerate them from any blame for whatever faults remain; these are undoubtedly due to the recalcitrant failings of the editors themselves. John M. Forrester and John Henry Edinburgh, August, 2004

INTRODUCTION

JEAN FERNEL AND THE IMPORTANCE OF HIS DE ABDITIS RERUM CAUSIS

Jean Fernel (ca. 1497–1558), author of the De abditis rerum causis, was one of the most notable physicians of the late Renaissance, and indeed physician to his King, just as Galen (129–ca. 216), the preeminent medical authority of the Greco-Roman world so frequently quoted by Fernel, had been personal physician to the Roman Emperors Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. If Fernel was conscious of his duty, as a physician, to uphold the doctrines of the Ancient medical authority, Galen, he was also fully aware of the Ancient belief that “medicine and philosophy are sisters,” and that medicine should therefore be exercised philosophically.1 The reference was to natural philosophy, of course, the attempt to understand the workings of the natural world, of which the human being, the precise focus of medicine, was a part. In Fernel’s time natural philosophy meant Aristotelian philosophy, and like Galen, Aristotle looms large in Fernel’s writings. The understanding of philosophy had been undergoing dramatic change, however, since the fifteenth century, when humanist scholars had first realised that other Ancient writings, besides those known to the Middle Ages, could still be recovered.2 Accordingly, Fernel was aware of a number of alternatives to the Aristotelian worldview, particularly, the Platonic and Neoplatonic (which he, however, would not have distinguished), and the Stoic philosophies.3 One of the great strengths of the De abditis rerum causis, and one of the reasons for its major importance in the intellectual history of the Renaissance, is the fact that its author engages with a number of competing authorities, discussing their significance, accepting some of their doctrines and rejecting others. Furthermore, since each of 1

See, for example, Aristotle, Parva naturalia i, 436a19–436b1. For a discussion of the belief that medicine and natural philosophy were necessary complements to one another, see Temkin, Double Face of Janus, pp. 187–188; and idem, Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and Christians, pp. 8–17. 2 See Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 37; and Grafton, “The Availability of Ancient Works.” 3 On the recovery of Platonism and Stoicism in the Renaissance, see Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 127–195, and 196–284; and Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought.

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these Ancient authorities had their own contemporary adherents in the Renaissance, Fernel can also be seen to be engaging with significant movements in Renaissance philosophy. In spite of Fernel’s traditional reverence for Ancient authority, however, it is clear that he believes he has his own contribution to make to the understanding of the first principles of the natural world, and of the human body. As a result, the De abditis rerum causis is one of the richest accounts we have of the twin sisters of philosophy and medicine, and the relationship between them.

Aspects of Jean Fernel’s Life and Work Thanks to Fernel’s disciple, Guillaume Plancy (1514–ca. 1568), already a distinguished humanist scholar when he became a member of Fernel’s household for the last ten years of Fernel’s life, we have a sensitive and detailed portrait of our subject.4 What’s more, Plancy’s brief “life” has been ably expanded and embellished by Sir Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) in his Endeavour of Jean Fernel (1946). It is not necessary, therefore, to present the full details of Fernel’s life here. There are one or two aspects of the story, however, that are worth re-examining. Plancy never provides a date for Fernel’s birth, but he seems to say that he was 72 when he died. As the editors of the Leiden edition of Fernel’s Universa medicina (1656) point out, this would mean Fernel was born in 1486.5 There are a number of reasons for supposing that this birth date is too early, and that Fernel was not as old as 72 when he died. The Vita was first published in the Frankfurt edition of the Medicina (1607), nearly forty years after Plancy’s death. The manuscript was not in Plancy’s own hand, and it is clear that the editor had some reason to doubt the recorded age of Fernel’s death. Accordingly, he inserted a note at that point: “lii forse scripsit, ita enim aevi clariss. nostri historici et chronologi” (“Perhaps he wrote 4

Plancy had been a pupil of the great French humanist Guillaume Budé (1467– 1540), and was entrusted with the posthumous editing of Budé’s Letters in Greek (Paris, 1540). On Plancy see Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 147–150. Sherrington also provides an annotated translation of Plancy’s Vita of Fernel, Endeavour, pp. 150–170. 5 Sherrington provides the marginalia from this edition. The relevant note reads “Therefore was born in 1485,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 165. The editors of the 1656 edition were working backwards from 1557, the year of Fernel’s death on the old calendar. Conventionally, the year of his death is now usually given in new style, 1558, so I have adjusted the year of birth accordingly.

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52, for such is the age given by our most distinguished historian and chronologer”). The reference is to Jacques A. de Thou (1553–1617), who claimed in his Historiarum sui temporis (Paris, 1604) that Fernel was 52 when he died.6 This would put his year of birth at 1506. The most commonly accepted date of Fernel’s birth, 1497, derives from a later biographer, Jean Goulin (1728–1799), who seems to have split the difference, putting Fernel at about 62 when he died. Sherrington declares that “On various counts Goulin’s statement appears the right one,” and this seems to be the correct judgement, in spite of the clear pronouncements that he was 52 or 72 when he died.7 The crucial landmark seems to be provided by Plancy’s statement that Fernel was “about sixty years of age,” when the King’s physician, Louis De Bourges (1482–1556) died, and Fernel could no longer refuse the King’s requests that he, Fernel, should take over as royal physician.8 There are a couple of other landmarks in Fernel’s life which also help us to judge between the alternative dates. According to Plancy, it was not long before the publication of Fernel’s first published works, his Monalosphaerium (Paris, 1527) and Cosmotheoria (Paris, 1528), that his father had objected to Fernel’s continued dependency on his family, while there were other children who had to be looked after.9 If Fernel had died at the age of 72, it would mean that he was still living off his family at the age of about 40 (1526). This seems too late. If de Thou’s chronology is correct Fernel would have been about twenty. Although nowadays this might seem a more likely date, by the standards of Fernel’s time it is perhaps a little too early. In the sixteenth century the third stage of childhood, adolescentia, could be considered to extend to 28, or the following stage, juventus, to the age of 30, particularly for a scholar, or even just a bachelor.10 6

See Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 149. Sherrington also provides a comprehensive bibliography of the different editions of Fernel’s works, pp. 187–207. 7 Jean Goulin, Mémoires littéraires. Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 173. See ibid. pp. 172–177 for a fuller account of Goulin’s claims about Fernel. 8 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 163. Earlier in his career, Fernel resisted the former dauphin’s invitation that he should now continue as royal physician, when the dauphin succeeded to the throne in 1547, by arguing that his own research, “and his devising of new methods of treatment for still more difficult cases,” was of more benefit to the public good, and that De Bourges, as physicianin-chief to the late king, had a hereditary right to continue as physician to Henry ii. 9 Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 152. Monalosphaerium (Paris, 1527). Cosmotheoria (Paris, 1528). 10 A classic study of childhood in history is Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; see pp. 329– 336. See also, Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, pp. 27–31.

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Goulin’s chronology, making Fernel about 30 before his father lost patience with him, may not be too far off the mark. It is by no means impossible that Fernel was born as late as 1506, as de Thou suggested. Plancy describes his death as premature, and elsewhere regrets that his achievement “was cut off by untimely death,” which seem to apply more fittingly to a fifty-two year-old than a seventy-two year-old.11 If Plancy had the Biblical three score years and ten in mind (Psalms, 90, 10), however, he might still regard sixty-two years as premature. Fernel published his mathematical works while he was teaching natural philosophy at the College of Ste Barbe and, simultaneously, improving his own grounding in philosophy. “When he had devoted to these studies introductory to medicine more labour than enough, he turned wholeheartedly and with all his might to complete the four-year curriculum leading direct to medicine,” Plancy tells us. If we assume he turned to his medical training as soon as he had seen his mathematical works through the press in 1528, this would mean that he could have achieved the md by 1532, at the age of 26 if de Thou was correct. This was not an inordinately young age to receive this degree, particularly if one applied oneself as assiduously as Fernel evidently did. His contemporaries, Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553) and Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), achieved theirs by the age of 24, as did William Harvey (1578–1657) in the following generation.12 Fernel’s predecessor as royal physician, Louis de Bourges, was only twenty-two when he achieved his md. This leaves ten years, from 1532 to 1542, before the publication of Fernel’s De naturali parte medicinae. This seems sufficiently long to accommodate the “several years” spent reading the great masters “for himself at home,” while pursuing mathematics, and refining his Latin style; and the subsequent “six whole years” of medical practice and teaching which followed after his abandonment of mathematics, and led to his first medical publication.13 This being so, it might even be suggested that, if Goulin’s chronology were to be accepted, it would make Fernel a rather late 11

“Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 165, 162. Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 15, accepting the reconstruction of Goulin, says Fernel achieved the md in 1530. This would put Fernel at 24, the same age as Cardano, Fracastoro and Harvey when they achieved their MDs. This would require an overlap of the four years Fernel took on the curriculum for his md with the period when he was seeing his mathematical works through the press. This overlap is perfectly possible, but is not what Plancy says. 13 These are specified in Plancy’s Vita, see Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 153, 155. 12

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starter in life. He would have been in his mid-thirties by the time he achieved his md. This might seem implausible for a medical writer who achieved such great distinction, were it not for the fact that it is clear from Plancy’s Vita that Fernel devoted the early part of his intellectual life to the study not of medicine but of natural philosophy and mathematics. According to de Thou’s reckoning, Fernel would have been twenty-two and twenty-three when he published his mathematical works. Although mathematics has always been a pursuit in which the young excel, this seems too precocious, making Fernel even younger than Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was when he hit the peak of his mathematical powers during his socalled annus mirabilis.14 Once again, therefore, it seems safest to assume that the date of 1497 (or even 1496) is the most likely to be the correct year of Fernel’s birth, making him sixty-two when he died. If Fernel was a slow starter in medicine, then, we do not have to accept this was a sign of slowness of wit. There is another explanation ready to hand. Plancy tells us that Fernel was dismayed with what he had learned for his Master’s degree: “All he had done was to pick up futilities inculcated by barbaric tutors.”15 Accordingly, Fernel became an autodidact, seeking to improve his Latin style, his knowledge of the liberal arts, especially the mathematical subjects, and natural philosophy.16 It was evidently some years before he decided to pursue a vocation in medicine, and at that time, if Plancy’s report is to be believed, his learning was such that he could have pursued a career in theology, jurisprudence, or mathematics. The details of his career suggest that, even after he chose medicine, he continued to devote much of his time, as we shall see, to natural philosophy and mathematics.17 Although, in Tristram Shandy fashion, we have dwelt at length on the moment of Fernel’s birth, we need not proceed so slowly through the rest of Plancy’s Vita but can let it speak for itself. It is perhaps worth saying a little more than Plancy does, however, about the prominence of mathematical studies in Fernel’s early life.

14 Newton’s annus mirabilis was 1666/7, when he was turning from 24 to 25. For details of Newton’s mathematical achievements at this time see Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 143–175. 15 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 150. 16 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 150–152. 17 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 151–152.

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To the modern reader it may seem surprising that a medical man should be so interested in mathematics, but this would not have been considered remarkable by Fernel’s contemporaries. On the contrary, as the distinguished scholar Lynn Thorndike wrote, Fernel “continued the common medieval association of mathematics with medicine by a work on proportion published in 1528 and of medicine and astronomy by his Cosmotheoria.”18 The association was partly due to the legacy of the Middle Ages in which the mathematical science of astronomy, was seen as essential for the prognostic and diagnostic art of astrology. The seven liberal arts, considered propaedeutic in the Medieval university and therefore taught in the Arts Faculties, included four mathematical subjects. Geometry, arithmetic, music (essentially the mathematics of proportion) and astronomy, made up the so-called quadrivium. Geometry and astronomy continued to be taught, however, in the higher faculty of medicine, in conjunction with astrology. It was not unusual, therefore, to find the most advanced mathematicians working not in the Arts Faculties but in the Medical Schools.19 Although the usefulness of mathematics, both in everyday life and in pedagogy, was recognised in the Medieval university, the intellectual status of mathematics remained suspect. Aristotle’s relegation of astronomy to the so-called mixed sciences, for example, meant that it was seen as inferior to, say, physics.20 While physics based its explanations of phenomena in terms of physical causes, astronomy based its explanations of the movements of the heavenly bodies not on physical causes but on geometrical principles. Since astronomy was concerned with the movements of physical bodies, it should have developed physical explanations, but because it could only develop geometrical explanations it was a mixed science, mixing the principles of geometry with physics. Accordingly, there was some dispute 18

Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. v (1941), p. 557. The work on proportion is Jean Fernel, De proportionibus libri duo (Paris, 1528). Consider also Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton, p. 4: “Leading astronomers and cosmologers of the renaissance were educated as physicians; the two avocations were compatible and partly interchangeable.” On the role of the mathematics of proportions in Medieval medicine see McVaugh, “The Two Faces of a Medical Career: Jordanus de Turre of Montpellier.” 19 On the associations between medicine and mathematics see, for example, Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance, pp. 171–190. Consider Alessandro Achillini and Girolamo Fracastoro, physicians whose mathematical works are cited in n. 22 below. 20 On the mixed sciences see McKirahan, jr., “Aristotle’s Subordinate Sciences”; and James G. Lennox, “Aristotle, Galileo, and ‘Mixed Sciences.”’

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as to whether astronomy could be said to offer explanations at all: geometry could be used to show in what way planets were moving, but not why they moved this way. As with so many other things, this attitude to mathematics began to undergo dramatic change during the Renaissance. Perhaps as a result of the new found Platonic and Neoplatonic writings, with their much greater admiration for mathematics than that expressed in Aristotelianism, a number of mathematically sophisticated humanist scholars began to emphasize the certainty of mathematics over that of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Presumably this was not unconnected with attempts to reconcile the convoluted geometry of Ptolemaic astronomical theory, newly epitomised in the Theoricae novae planetarum (1454) of Georg Peurbach (1423–1461), with Aristotelian cosmology. Fernel’s own interest in mathematics should be seen in the context of those in the forefront of attempts to reform astronomy and cosmology, men such as Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), Agostino Nifo (1469–1538), and Fracastoro, all of whom were also physicians.21 This was also the time, of course, when another would-be physician, training at the famous medical school of Padua (from 1501 to 1503), was also wrestling with the same problem: Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543).22 It is worth noting that, although Fernel is now remembered exclusively as a medical writer, he should not be seen as merely a dabbler in mathematics and astronomy. Plancy tells us that when he was prevailed upon by his father-in-law to abandon mathematics (on the grounds that it was taking the family towards financial misfortune), Fernel sold his collection of the writings of all the old mathematicians (presumably Renaissance editions of ancient mathematicians), his collection of astrolabes, and “many other costly bronze instruments he had devised for himself.” What’s more, he also had to dismiss “the craftsmen and engravers whom he maintained – not without

21

Alessandro Achillini, Quatuor libri de orbibus (Bologna, 1498); Agostino Nifo, Expositio in iv libros De caelo et mundo (Sessa Aurunca, 1514); Girolamo Fracastoro, Homocentrica sive de stellis (Venice, 1538). On the importance of mathematics in the Renaissance humanist movement see Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics. On the change in intellectual status of mathematics in the Renaissance see Nicholas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” especially, pp. 693–702. 22 Copernicus attended the Medical School at Padua from 1501 to 1503, but had to return to his home in Frombork (Frauenburg) before he could complete his studies. On Copernicus’s role in the changing intellectual status of mathematics in the Renaissance see Westman, “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century.”

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considerable cost – under his roof,” and terminate the instruction in mathematics he was providing for a number of “distinguished pupils.”23 The craftsmen and engravers were clearly employed by Fernel to build and calibrate the instruments which he designed; perhaps variations on the “monalosphaerium,” evidently a kind of astrolabe, which was the subject of Fernel’s first book. If it isn’t clear from his activities as an instrument maker that he was seriously engaged in mathematical astronomy, it becomes undeniable after the achievement of his Cosmotheoria. Chiefly concerned with the size and shape of the Earth, it includes a remarkable attempt to establish the distance on the ground of a degree of latitude. He began with observations in Paris, and then proceeded due (or almost due) northward until the elevation of the sun at midday corresponded, according to his sophisticated calculations, to one degree further north. He had a trusted “horarium” to keep time; spring-driven clocks had only been available since about 1500, so he was well up with the current technology. He then returned to Paris by coach, counting the 17,024 coach wheel revolutions that took him there, and using the value of 22/7 for π to arrive at an estimate of the distance. It is a testimony to the care with which Fernel undertook this operation that the accuracy of his result continued to impress subsequent investigators and commentators, even causing one to describe him as a mathematician “of great distinction.”24 Plancy excuses Fernel’s fascination with mathematics on the grounds that astronomy “excites such wonder and charm in the human mind that, once fascinated by it, we are caught in the toils of 23

Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 154. See Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 15. Sherrington attributes the quoted phrase to Smith, Rara Arithmetica, but I cannot find this anywhere in that source. Perhaps Sherrington’s notes were confused at this point? Smith does however speak in glowing terms of Fernel’s De proportionibus. See ibid, vol. i, p. 157. In 1740, a further investigation of the same question, over the same span between Paris and Amiens, was published (Picard, Degré du méridien entre Paris et Amiens, determiné par la mesure de M. [Jean] Picard). Comparison is rendered very difficult by the use of several different sets of units, but Picard and associates reckoned that Fernel’s came to just over 56,746 toises, while their own when fully corrected came to 57,183, a difference of 0.8 per cent. A toise (see Annals of Philosophy, [1813], 1, 452–457) corresponds to 76.7344 English inches. Fernel’s estimate then amounts to 69.13 miles or 110.6 km. Leon Figard, Un médecin philosophe, pp. 21–23, also revisited this estimate and stated that the present-day value is around 111 km. See also Wightman, Science and the Renaissance, vol. i, p. 143: “One of the outstanding scientific achievements of the sixteenth century was the measurement carried out almost unaided by the great Physician, Jean Fernel, in 1528, and described by him in his Cosmotheoria.” 24

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an enduring and delighted slavery, which holds us in bondage and serfdom.” There is something in this, of course, but it hardly seems to account for the fact, confirmed by the subsequent family crisis, that Fernel “so clung to mathematics that neither love of his wife, nor the endearments of his children, nor the care of his house, could take him off them.”25 Given the extent of Fernel’s commitment, the level of his achievement, and the growing importance of mathematics in Renaissance natural philosophy, it seems perfectly possible that Fernel, for a while at least, might have believed that he could make a real contribution to what has since been called “the mathematization of nature”; in particular he may have believed that he could make a useful contribution to the art of navigation.26 If so, he would not have agreed with Plancy’s assessment, that mathematics makes “no contribution to the public weal,” and that while pursuing it he was effectively “letting the years go by,” asleep “on the quicksands of the sirens.”27 Be that as it may, it is after the family emotional and financial crisis caused by his commitment to mathematics that Fernel turned “entirely to medicine.” As Sherrington has pointed out, Plancy was un25

“Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 153, 154. On the mathematization of nature, and its historiography, see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, pp. 59–97. Fernel’s Cosmotheoria was primarily concerned with geodesy, and as such might have led to improvements in navigational techniques. This might account for the fact that Fernel dedicated the work to John iii, King of Portugal, ruler of the leading maritime nation at the time. Fernel’s Monalosphaerium was dedicated to another Portuguese, Diogo de Goveia (ca. 1471–1557), a mathematician who later became Rector of Ste Barbe, and who may have been Fernel’s mentor in mathematics, and may therefore have impressed upon Fernel the importance of work related to navigation. That Fernel was aware of recent developments in navigation is undeniable; see the comments in his preface to the present work, p. [2] 109 (the number in square brackets is the page number in the 1567 edition, included in Fernel’s Universa medicina and indicated here in both Latin text and translation, this is followed by the page number in the present edition). See also Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 14 and 172. It is worth adding that the sumptuous nature of Fernel’s mathematical works, produced by Simon de Colines (1480–1546), the foremost printer in France, can be seen as further evidence for the new respect with which mathematics was held at that time. Sherrington, Endeavour, remarks upon the lavishness of the publication of the work “of an unknown and poor man” (p. 14), and assumes that Fernel must have been regarded as “someone of outstanding promise, or that he had a generous patron at his back.” It would also have helped that mathematics in general was newly seen as something of great intellectual and cultural significance. 27 Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 152–154. Plancy’s comments against the importance of mathematics should be seen as illustrative of the backlash against mathemat26

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aware that Fernel’s first medical work was not the De naturali parte medicinae, although that was the first to be published (1542), but the De abditis rerum causis. The De naturali parte medicinae, usually known by its later title, the Physiologia, refers in a number of places to the “Dialogue,” Fernel’s informal title for the De abditis causis. It seems clear from this, not only that Fernel had written the “Dialogue” by the time he came to write the Physiologia, but also that he circulated it in manuscript, and expected interested readers to have reasonably easy access to it.28 Internal evidence in the Physiologia suggests that Fernel had begun writing this work by 1538. In the anatomical description of the ligaments he wrote, while we were composing the description, the strength of the bonds they create between limbs and between every bone in the body was revealed by the Count Sebastianus, poisoner of Francis Dauphin of France who led an armed array against the Emperor Charles. At Lyons the effort of four powerful horses pulling in opposite directions for nearly an hour did not succeed in dragging or tearing him apart, nor even in splitting him …

This protracted execution took place in August 1538.29 It seems likely, therefore, that if Fernel was engaged with writing the Physiologia in 1538, the De abditis rerum causis was already complete by then. When Fernel wrote the Preface for the De abditis rerum causis as he prepared it for publication, he was perfectly justified, therefore, in referring to its two books as “long-withheld studies.”30 If we can accept the accuracy of Fernel’s own account in the dedicatory preface to Henri ii, he began thinking of these matters twenty years before: I suspected some twenty years ago that something that might be called divine lurked wholly hidden within the art of healing, and was not yet

ics by those unsympathetic to mathematical studies, or simply by more conservative thinkers. For similar strictures against the value of mathematics, and even abstruse natural philosophy, in the early modern period see Steven Shapin, “A Scholar and a Gentleman.” 28 Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 22, and 174–175. References to the “Dialogue” appear in Physiologia, Bk ii, Ch. 8, p. 211; Bk. iii, Ch. 2, p. 219 (the 1547 edition even provides a marginal reference and an entry in the index to the “Dialogue” at this point); Bk. iv, Ch. i, p. 259; and Bk. v, Ch. 18, p. 393. 29 Fernel, Physiologia, Bk i, Ch. 4, p. 45. Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 22. 30 Fernel, De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [1] 105 It is clear that Fernel revised the work for publication, however, since there are references to the Physiologia, e.g. Bk ii, Ch. 6, p. [78] 467.

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coming properly to light; so I was impelled by zeal and eagerness for it to search out its nature.31

This would mean that Fernel began to think of occult diseases and their causes around 1528, when he was publishing his mathematical works. There is nothing intrinsically implausible about this; indeed, quite the contrary. For the modern reader, mathematics and magic seem far removed from one another: at opposite ends of the spectrum of intellectual respectability. It was very different, however, in Fernel’s day, when mathematics was seen as closely akin to magic.32 An obvious association occurred through the juxtaposition of astronomy and astrology, which were so intimately related that they were hardly distinguished from one another in Fernel’s time. Léon Figard (1859–1907), otherwise concerned to distance Fernel from astrology, admitted in his study of this medécin philosophe that his mathematical works were full of astrology.33 The Monalosphaerium includes material on “critical days,” and the affect of the lunar cycle and the motions of the Zodiac on medical matters. It also gives instruction in casting horoscopes. There is less of an overtly astrological nature in the Cosmotheoria, but, significantly, it is in this work that Fernel suggests that even the sphere of the primum mobile, which he agrees is starless, exerts an occult influence on earth.34 As we shall see, it is a major premise of the De abditis rerum causis that many of the phenomena of life derive from a nature in things which corresponds in some way to the nature of the stars, or the nature of heaven, that there is a “celebrated heavenly power, diffused into the whole universe, [which] makes its way right into the remotest recesses of the earth, penetrating the most close-knit and solid bodies.”35 31 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [3] 117 Although undated this preface must have been written just prior to publication in 1548 since Henry ii only succeeded to the French throne the year before. 32 On this see, for example, Eamon, “Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance”; Zetterberg, “The Mistaking of ‘the Mathematics’ for Magic in Tudor and Stuart England”; and Neal, “The Rhetoric of Utility: Avoiding Occult Associations for Mathematics through Profitability and Pleasure.” 33 Figard, Médecin philosophe, pp. 33–34. See also, Thorndike, History of Magic, v, p. 557. 34 Fernel, Cosmotheoria, Bk. i, Ch. xi, fol. 28v. The primum mobile is to play an astrological role in the De abditis rerum causis too; see, for example, Bk ii, Ch. 2, p. [66], ? On the primum mobile in general, see Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs. 35 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 8, p. [45] 313 At this point Fernel draws inspiration from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, a major work in the alchemical and occult tradition, but elsewhere he draws inspiration from Aristotle (for example, De generatione animalium, 736b34–737a1), Plato, Galen and other writers.

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So, just as we do not have to assume there was an intellectual discontinuity, or unconformity, between Fernel’s mathematical work and his medical work, we do not have to assume any discontinuity between his interest in mathematics and his interest in occult influences. For Fernel, and for his contemporaries, these things were all of a piece. It is not surprising, therefore, that when he abandoned serious high-level mathematical study to devote himself “entirely to medicine,” his first medical work should be a work concerned in the profoundest way with understanding occult influences, particularly those that might be said to be akin to astrological influences, and the hidden diseases that might arise from them.

The place of De abditis rerum causis in Fernel’s oeuvre The De abditis rerum causis stands out markedly from the rest of Fernel’s medical writings, and not just because instead of being written as an expository textbook, it is presented as a Ciceronian dialogue between three interlocutors.36 The books which Fernel subsequently prepared for the press all have the character of comprehensive textbook surveys. The time was ripe for textbook production in any field. Printing had just reached a high degree of productivity, so that nicely produced volumes no longer fetched prohibitive prices. There could be one copy per pupil, not one per class.37 Furthermore, the increased numbers of medical students in France, and 36

According to Plancy, just before writing it Fernel had been receiving lessons in Latin style from a rhetorician, Jacques Destrebey. Fernel may have wanted to try out his new skill to best effect by presenting his ideas in the form of a Ciceronian dialogue. Cicero (106–43 bc), of course, provided Renaissance humanists with the model for good Latinity. Plancy mentions the De natura deorum, and the De officiis as Fernel’s favourite Ciceronian dialogues; “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 151. Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Fernel’s contemporary, also composed a work (his Theonoston) in Ciceronian dialogue form with three participants (Siraisi, Clock and Mirror, p. 80), and it would be easy to offer many more examples. Perhaps the most famous example in the history of science of the presentation of ideas through the dialogue form is Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems [1632], which also involved three speakers. 37 See Grendler, “Printing and Censorship”: “A Latin folio volume of a classical, legal, medical or philosophical text might be purchased for a ducat (124 soldi) or less. Books in smaller formats, especially vernacular titles in 8º, 12º or 16º comprising 150 to 400 pages, sold for as little as 40, 30, 20, 10, 8, 6, or even 4 soldi … In the second half of the 16th century, a Venetian master mason earned 30 to 50 soldi per day (producing an annual income of 50 to 100 ducats, depending on how many days he worked), and his assistant 20 to 37 soldi. Hence, a literate artisan could afford

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indeed Europe generally, together with an increasing lay audience for medicine, meant that the systematic textbook came to be seen as a more useful commodity than the commentaries on ancient authorities and the compilations of Quaestiones which had been more typical earlier. Consequently, Fernel’s textbooks really did provide a Universa medicina for their time.38 The Physiologia presented a full account of the structure, processes, and functions of the healthy body.39 Being essentially a summation of Galenic theory, occasionally modified in accordance with Aristotelian doctrines, and taking account of subsequent commentators, it was a book that the erudite Fernel could write confidently, even though he did not have many years of medical practice behind him. The Pathologia, “a systematic essay on morbidity, pursued unhaltingly through the body, organ by organ,” and the Therapeutice, a preliminary survey of how disease is to be overcome, did not appear until twelve years later.40 As Plancy tells us, the Pathologia required not just a command of the medical literature, but extensive clinical experience: He incorporated in it all that is good, and that stands confirmed on a solid basis, in the ancient writers, and added on his own account what he found they had omitted. He removed uncertainties, cleared up obscurities, corrected mistakes, excised superfluities, pinning himself to no view given merely on authority alone, lest that involve him in endorsing error.41

The same was even more true of the Therapeutice and Plancy says that it only provides “an introductory explanation of medicaments,” implying that it was included in the Medicina of 1554 only as an

to own a few books, a schoolteacher more volumes, a well-paid university teacher a hundred or more, and a patrician collector several thousand” (p. 31). 38 Universa medicina was the title given to the collection of Fernel’s major medical works, including the De abditis rerum causis. The collection first appeared from Andreas Wechel in Paris in 1567, and continued to be reissued until 1680. As with all Fernel’s works, the editions are detailed by Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 195–200. On the development of the textbook tradition generally, see Schmitt, “Rise of the Philosophical Textbook.” 39 See Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 60–97; Jacquart, “La Physiologie de Jean Fernel et le Canon d’Avicenne”; Poma, “Tradition et innovation dans la Physiologie de Jean Fernel”; and Henry and Forrester, “Tradition and Reform: Jean Fernel’s Physiologia (1567).” 40 The quotation is from Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 101. The Pathologia first appeared in Fernel’s Medicina (Paris, 1554), which also included the De naturali parte medicinae, re-named as Physiologia, and the Therapeutice. 41 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 161.

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interim measure.42 It seems clear that Fernel was still working on the composition and actions of medicines when he died, using Plancy as what would now be called a research assistant.43 It would seem that by the time he came to write the Physiologia, Fernel had already formulated the ambition to write a universal survey of medicine. Ambitious as this was, it did not call for originality of thought as we would understand the term. Not, at least, for a man of Fernel’s time, who would still have tended to assume that the correct system of medicine had been known to the Ancients and, for the most part, had been correctly handed down to posterity. Fernel’s project called for a dedicated assiduity, acute analytical and organisational skills, and a willingness to test things against one’s own experience, if necessary “by repeated trial.”44 With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that the analytical and organisational skills which Fernel brought to bear on his project were essentially those developed in the scholasticism characteristic of the pre-modern universities, and that even Fernel’s notion of experiential trial was in the thrall of broadly scholastic preoccupations, so that his interpretation of his data was always in keeping with his theoretical assumptions.45

42 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 161–162. The Therapeutice consisted of only three books, the second of which was Fernel’s earlier treatise on bloodletting, De vacuandi ratione (Paris, 1545), which is briefly discussed by Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 98–99. 43 Plancy tells us that, at Fernel’s request, he gathered “from the classical writers everything of importance they had to say on the subject,” and that Fernel examined these passages with a view to amplifying it from his own experience, “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 162. He also mentions that Fernel managed to complete a “General Treatment of Fevers” shortly before his death, ibid., p. 164. This was first published in the 1577 edition of the Universa medicina, see Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 196. 44 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 162. 45 This is not the place to enter into the psychology, sociology and philosophy of scientific discovery, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that there is no shame in Fernel’s inability to break free from the intellectual norms of his time – we are all equally guilty of this. Sherrington, writing in a more positivistic age, felt obliged to apologise for Fernel’s failure to be more modern in his thinking, and to make too much of details of his thought which could be made to look like foreshadowings of modern ideas. There has been a marked tendency in the history of science since Sherrington’s day not only to reject this “whiggish” approach to the history of science (judging the past in terms of present-day values), but also to emphasise the importance of the historical context for properly understanding the thought of past thinkers. See, for example, Herbert Butterfield, Whig Interpretation of History; Robert M. Young, “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature.” For a detailed account of the historical context of Fernel’s thought, see Brockliss and Jones. The Medical World of Early Modern France.

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It seems clear that Fernel believed he could best serve “the public cause and the common weal” of his own time, and of posterity, by providing a comprehensive compendium of traditional medical knowledge.46 But if Fernel saw himself primarily as one who expounded and clarified the Galenic legacy, not all of his contemporaries agreed. There were still those who saw him as an innovator, seeking to add unnecessary refinements of his own to Galen’s system.47 Clearly, such critics were more reluctant than Fernel himself was “to deviate even a finger’s breadth” from ancient authority, but they were not mistaken in seeing genuine innovation in Fernel’s system of medicine.48 Indeed, Fernel himself could not forebear from claiming his own originality. Although, as Plancy says, it can be seen as a companion piece to the Physiologia, dealing with important aspects of the theory of medicine, and so forming part of the foundation for the Pathologia and the Therapeutice, it is perfectly evident that Fernel saw the De abditis causis as his own original contribution to medicine. We can see this, for example, in the account Fernel gives in his Preface of how he came to think of these matters: I suspected some twenty years ago that something that might be called divine lurked wholly hidden within the art of healing, and was not yet coming properly to light; so I was impelled by zeal and eagerness for it to search out its nature. I realised that it was the management of hidden diseases, a thing not really familiar, nor set out in the counsel of the ancients; yet without it the art of healing would be hampered and be only a beginning, destined not to possess all its components.49

Similarly, when Eudoxus, the mouthpiece in the dialogue for Fernel himself, is finally persuaded to expound the theory of what Fernel calls “diseases of the total substance,” he notifies his companions: What you require is extremely obscure and unheard-of, and included in no art so far, which makes me embarrassed to take on its discussion.

46

The quoted phrase is Plancy’s, Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 162. Indications of the opposition to Fernel can be found in Deer Richardson, “The Generation of Disease: Occult Causes and Diseases of the Total Substance,” especially pp. 187–194; and Lonie, “Fever Pathology in the Sixteenth Century: Tradition and Innovation,” especially pp. 24–25, and 32–35. 48 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [1] 105. Cf. Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), De humani corporis fabrica, p. iv, where he complains in the preface that contemporary anatomists never depart from Galen “by the breadth of a nail.” 49 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [3] 117. 47

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introduction But as it is of such close concern to medicine as to be regarded as comprising its best part, I would be sorry to fail you in something so important.50

Later, when Philiatros wonders how it is that “no one over such ages” has expounded ideas like these before, Brutus suggests that “it was the result of great deference, which made posterity accord Galen such worship and respect that they thought it wrong to add anything to him or take anything away.”51 Similarly, writing on his own behalf in the Preface, Fernel regretted the common belief “that the healing art was discovered and brought to an adequate conclusion by the efforts of the past.”52 Fernel’s belief that he has discovered something new in medicine, adding to Galen, explains why he enters into a prolonged discussion in the Preface about the ways in which the moderns have advanced upon the Ancients. the present age has virtually nothing it need envy in that learned past epoch. Oratory and the heights of eloquence are now flourishing everywhere; all sorts of philosophy are being cultivated; musicians, geometers, craftsmen, painters, architects, sculptors, and other practitioners beyond counting have displayed minds so keen that each group of them has adorned its art with noteworthy and splendid works, which match those of the ancients whom everyone agrees to honour. The advance of time has not only contributed lustre and additions to what has already been discovered; it has brought forth in addition new arts, to which neither the talent nor the diligence of our predecessors had ever attained.53

Fernel could not resist mention of the three great advances of the Renaissance, gunpowder, printing, and improvements in navigation. “So what is it,” he asks, “that makes people say that this age of ours is incapable of innovation?”54 There are too many people, he feels, who “totally block the path to new discoveries, and bring the serious charge of effrontery against those who have devoted their whole effort … to establishing 50

De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 10, p. [93] 533. We shall return to the notion of “diseases of the total substance” below. 51 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 10, p. [95] 545. 52 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [1] 105. 53 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [1] 107. 54 Ibid. The innovations of gunpowder, printing and the mariner’s compass (or the improvements in navigation that went along with it) constituted a well established rhetorical topos by Fernel’s time. Thorndike even goes so far as to refer to it as “the now trite trio of ‘modern’ inventions” (History of Magic, v, p. 558).

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something new.” There can be no doubt that Fernel saw the contents of the De abditis causis in these terms. What he was doing was so novel that it opened new country: “We have got here ourselves so as to make for everything challenging, thorny and pathless, and perhaps make it passable by our traversing it.”55 It is in the context of this discussion that he asks for people “devoid of the evil of spite, to sum up and assess the extent of my proposal’s success.”56 It is clear that Fernel believed he was making his own contribution to the Renaissance by bringing about the advancement of medicine. Having said this, Fernel was too much a man of his time completely to throw off the fundamental belief that all true knowledge had been known in the distant past. Adam, after all, had known all things, and human wisdom had gradually become forgotten or corrupt after the Fall. Renaissance intellectuals, excited by the revelations provided by their recovery of numerous ancient writings, including the so-called Hermetic Corpus, which they believed to be part of a pagan tradition dating back at least to the time of Moses, believed in a prisca theologia and a prisca sapientia which it was their duty to recover or reconstruct. The older that knowledge could be shown to be, the closer it was to the wisdom of Adam, and so the truer it had to be. Consequently, it was a test of the truth of any new discovery, or any new theory that there should at least be hints of it recoverable from the past.57 This was the impulse that led Copernicus and his few followers to call heliocentrism the Pythagorean theory, and even Newton, nearly two-hundred years later, tried to suggest that the Pythagoreans knew the inverse square law of gravitational attraction. The point being that if there was no hint of heliocentrism or universal gravitation in ancient wisdom, then they could not possibly be true.58 55

De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [1] 105, and Bk ii, Ch. 9, p. [88] 513. De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [2] 111 Fernel makes further references to his own originality, for example, at Bk i, Ch. 1, p. [6 and 7], 133 and Ch. 14, p. [114] 625–627. 57 The belief that Adam knew all things derived from Genesis, 2, 19. On the impact of the discovery of the Corpus Hermeticum, see the Introduction to Copenhaver, Hermetica, pp. xiii–lxi. On the belief in an original ancient theology and philosophy see, for example, Walker, Ancient Theology; Schmitt, “Prisca theologia e philosophia perennis”; and Sailor, “Moses and Atomism.” 58 On Copernican theory as Pythagorean, see Copernicus, On the Revolutions, pp. 4– 5; and, for example, Digges, Prognostication euerlastinge of right good effecte, sig., M1r : “A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes according to the most aunciente doctrine of the Pythagoreans, latelye revived by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations approved” (also used as caption to illustration on Folio 43). On Newton’s belief in the prisca sapientia tradition, see Rattansi and McGuire, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan.”’ 56

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Accordingly, we can see Fernel, in spite of wishing to claim his own originality, pointing to places in the ancient literature where his ideas are adumbrated. In spite of his statement in the Preface that the management of hidden diseases was not “set out in the counsel of the ancients,” he draws attention to “the oracle of Hippocrates in which he affirms that there is a divine aspect present in diseases.” Furthermore, in case anything should be thought ill-founded on uncertain opinion, I will be seen to have stated individual items from the counsels of Galen; though he does sometimes seem deliberately to tone down these topics, he generally returns to them, even reluctantly. Hence everyone will recognise the line we are pursuing (and we are the first to direct it to general medical use), and [will note] that the ancients reached the same point, hardly anyone not having this view installed and as it were imprinted in his mind, even if he generally puts it another way. And so, while a number of people are going to think this teaching of ours is novel, it is in fact very ancient, and I am not so conceited as to boast of originating it; I claim only to be its interpreter and expounder.59

Like Copernicus and other Renaissance innovators, Fernel tried to have his cake and eat it too: claiming his own originality with one breath, while in the next insisting that it must be true because it was well known to the Ancients.60 Whether Fernel’s contemporaries saw it as discovery or recovery, there is no denying its subsequent influence and what one historian of medicine has recently called its “phenomenal popularity.”61 Although occasionally republished in its own right, it was included in Fernel’s Universa medicina (1567), which appeared in 32 editions up to 1680.62 A crucial factor in its success, for Fernel’s contemporaries and the succeeding generation, was the fact that the De abditis

59 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, pp. [3] 117 and [3] 119 See also Bk ii, Ch. 6, p. [79] 473: “And in case this looks like my own view and consequently lacking weight …” 60 Copernicus does exactly the same in the preface of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). See Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolutions (1978), pp. 3–6. 61 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 174. 62 For details of the editions see Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 191–194 (De abditis causis), and 195–200 (Universa medicina). The fact that editions of Fernel’s Universa medicina went on appearing until 1680 led Lynn Thorndike to the conclusion that “ideas were not changing much nor science progressing”; History of magic and experimental science, vol. v, p. 7. It is worth offering as a counter to this that one of the most assiduous readers of the De abditis causis was William Harvey (1578–1657), who drew on it extensively for his De generatione animalium (1651). See Harvey, Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals (1981), for example, pp. 282, 375, 383.

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causis expounded an important aspect of medical theory, an aspect which was newly revealed and yet which, as Fernel took pains to show (though not always convincingly for some of his more conservative readers) emerged logically out of the traditional theory. Being, for the most part, an extension and refinement of current beliefs, it was an innovation which was not in any way iconoclastic. Consequently, its arguments could be easily accepted by many in the medical profession, and its author Fernel immediately fêted. It also meant, however, that Fernel’s claims slowly disappeared along with the rest of the Galenic system of medicine, after the twin onslaught in the seventeenth century following the work of William Harvey (1578–1657) and René Descartes (1596–1650).63 If Fernel’s work was not iconoclastic, it was, as one recent commentator has remarked, undeniably provocative.64 It is still possible, therefore, that Fernel’s innovatory approach to some diseases played an important role in the downfall of Galenism. Although Fernel could not be said to have revealed mistakes in Galen, as did Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Harvey, his work on what he called “occult diseases,” the key to understanding which lies in the “total substance” of both the disease and the afflicted body, did draw renewed attention to serious shortcomings in the Galenic account of disease. It is at least arguable, therefore, that Fernel should be seen in the same light as Girolamo Fracastoro (1483–1553), who has been ranked alongside Paracelsus (1493–1541) as the only other sixteenth-century thinker to have “altered or added significantly to the ancient and medieval conceptions of disease and illness.”65 If 63 Sherrington tells us, for example, that Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738) dismissed Fernel’s Physiologia in a book list for students, on the grounds that nothing prior to Harvey was any longer of use. It is a sign of the divorce between theory and practice in medicine at this time, however, as well as a sign of Fernel’s fundamental conservatism, that Boerhaave, still a committed humoral pathologist, recommended Fernel’s Pathologia. Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 183. 64 Hall, Theories of Life and Matter, i, p. 188. 65 Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease,” at p. 22. It should be noted that Professor Nutton is not here expressing his own view, but summing up the standard view among historians of Renaissance medicine. Evidently, Professor Nutton deems Paracelsus to be “the only innovative medical theorist of the sixteenth century” (ibid., p. 23), denying Fracastoro an equal place on the grounds that: “Fracastoro is working within the same classical and Hippocratic framework as the great majority of his fellow doctors, and his theory of seeds and contagion gains in acceptability precisely because of the ease with which it could be grafted on to standard views.” In view of what has been said above, it seems to us that precisely the same could be said of Fernel and the influence of his work. Unlike Professor Nutton, however, we suggest that they should still be seen as innovators, albeit of a less flamboyant kind than Paracelsus.

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Fracastoro’s theories about seeds of disease are accepted as part of a new conception of disease, then so must Fernel’s theories about occult diseases of the total substance. Indeed, it seems fair to say that, in spite of the recent historiographical emphasis on the revolutionary importance of Fracastoro, which has seen his name linked with that of Vesalius and Copernicus,66 Fernel was at least as influential in his own time, and in the succeeding generation, as Fracastoro.67 Like Fracastoro’s, Fernel’s theory moved closer to what has been dubbed an ontological, rather than a physiological concept of disease.68 Hippocratic and Galenic theory saw all disease in terms of a disturbance of the four humours such that the normal healthy temperament (the balance of the humours in the body) was disrupted. It follows from this that diseases do not have a separate existence in their own right. To be sure, diseases can be characterised, and can be seen to have their own specific natures: scabies is different from rabies. But the nature of disease is rooted in the general nature of mankind. In the end, different as the diseases might be, they are all the result of a severe imbalance in the four humours. Since each person is different, it follows that the precise composition of their humours will be different; the name given to this unique composition is temperament – each of us has a unique temperament. The Hippocratic or Galenic doctor, therefore, must always take into account “the peculiar nature of each individual” when dealing with a patient. Where modern medicine has been taken to task for treating diseases, dealing impersonally with a case of shingles or of depression, or whatever, pre-modern medicine has been praised for being holistic and considering the general well-being of the patient.69 This is all well and good, but the problem with the individualistic approach to sickness, seeing every illness as the special problem of one patient, is that it cannot easily explain contagion. Why should 66 See A. Castiglioni, “Gerolamo Fracastoro e la dottrina del contagium vivum,” at p. 65. We cite this from Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” p. 30. 67 See Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” pp. 28–31, and “Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion,” for assessments of Fracastoro’s influence. This should be compared with the discussions of Fernel’s influence in Deer Richardson, “Generation of Disease,” Lonie “Fever Pathology in the Sixteenth Century,” Stettler, “Jean Fernel, Felix Platter, und die Begründung der modernen pathologischen Theorie”; Brockliss, “Seeing and Believing”; Schweikhardt, “How do Cathartic Drugs Act?”; Siraisi, “Giovanni Argenterio and Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation,” pp. 161–162; and Nutton and Nutton, “Noël du Fail, Cardano, and the Paris Medical Faculty.” 68 See Temkin, “The Scientific Approach to Disease: Specific Entity and Individual Sickness,” in idem, Double Face of Janus, pp. 441–455, at p. 442. 69 Most notoriously in Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis.

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one patient’s problem be capable in some cases of being passed on to others with very different temperaments? The problem is especially difficult for Galenic theory to deal with in the case of epidemic diseases. Contagious diseases, especially epidemic ones, strongly seem to suggest that diseases have a kind of life of their own, they are real, distinct entities, which can pass from one person to another. This is where Fracastoro’s seeds of contagion come in. They remind the modern reader of bacteria or viruses and seem to suggest that Fracastoro, like all great geniuses, was “ahead of his time” in seeing the real nature of disease. The anachronism of the modern view is all too obvious, but what is not so apparent is the fact that there were ancient precedents for the idea of seeds of disease which always remained in the background simply because of the dominance of the Galenic theory.70 The fact that Fracastoro sought to bring these ideas to the fore when he did can be seen as yet another example, so typical of the Renaissance, of the revival of ancient ideas going hand in hand with a rejection of the previously dominant ancient authority. The increasing tendency, during the Renaissance, for thinkers to break away from the dominating authorities of Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy, meant that Paracelsus was not the only medical thinker to take this problem with the Galenic theory of disease more seriously. The nature of contagion, according to one recent commentator, had already become the subject of lively debate by 1540.71 Inadequate discussions in the ancient authorities, meant that it was difficult to understand the nature of contagion and its relationship to miasmas or corrupt exhalations in the air, which were generally held to be the causes of contagious diseases. It was in an attempt to understand these and other epidemic diseases that both Fracastoro and Jean Fernel entered this debate. It is beyond all doubt that these two thinkers developed their ideas independently of one another, but it is possible that Fernel was finally persuaded to send De abditis rerum causis to the press as a result of the appearance of Fracastoro’s De contagione in 1546.72 Although Fernel tells us in his preface that he needed to print his first medical work because “the separate account of medicine I am giving needed this as a kind of explanation, and would be puzzling without it,” it 70

For an excellent account of this hidden history, see Nutton, “Seeds of Disease.” On Paracelsus, see, for example, Walter Pagel, Paracelsus. The lively debate on contagion is noticed in Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” p. 26, and fully substantiated in idem, “Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion.” 72 Girolamo Fracastoro, De contagione (Venice, 1546). 71

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seems too much of a coincidence that he should choose to publish in 1548, some ten years after the work had been completed, but six years before the appearance of the Pathologia, which partly relied upon its ideas.73 In the De abditis rerum causis, Fernel suggests, without exaggeration, that “there are three kinds of disease which hardly anyone seems to have investigated in detail.” These three sorts of “hidden disease” are designated as “poisonous, contagious, and pestilent.”74 All three present the standard physiological concept of disease of the Galenic tradition with severe difficulties, and this state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that Galen himself tended to gloss over, or remain vague, about these kinds of disease. Indeed, it has even been suggested that Renaissance scholars found Galen’s account of plague “distressingly unhelpful.”75 Apart from the fact that these were the categories of disease which tended to be the most violent and pernicious, they also presented an unvarying pattern and so suggested that an ontological concept of disease was more appropriate than the standard view based on humoral imbalance. Irrespective of their age, sex, lifestyle, or type of temperament, all patients responded in essentially the same way – this seemed incompatible with the idea that each and every case of disease was a personal physiological response to disturbing stimuli. Consequently, Fernel rejected the idea that such diseases were the result of dyscrasia, a destructive imbalance of the normal temperament, and offered his own alternative account.76 According to Fernel, diseases of these types did not act on the humours but on the substantial form of the body, which Fernel called the total substance. What’s more they did so by some occult power. The model for all of them was essentially disease caused by poison. A substance entering the body from outside, either through a bite or a wound, or simply through contact with the skin (and the ability to soak through), or by ingestion or inhalation (sometimes in the De abditis causis, explicitly in the form of seeds), could wreak havoc in the healthy body and could work with such immediacy that 73 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [1] 105 On the role of the theory of disease expounded in De abditis rerum causis in the Pathologia, see Deer Richardson, “Generation of Disease,” and Lonie, “Fever Pathology in the Sixteenth Century.” 74 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 9, p. [89] 513, and Ch. 11, p. [98] 555. 75 Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” p. 18. 76 It is important to note that Fernel’s contention is not that the traditional edifice of elements and humours is in any sense a fantasy. He was a humoralist through and through, but conscious of the inadequacy of humoralism as an account of the causes of these particular very prominent diseases.

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it was impossible to believe that it acted through an accumulation of corrupt humour, which would have been required on the precepts of humoral pathology.77 It is significant that the operation of poisons had long been attributed to their occult qualities, and so Fernel was drawing on an idea that his contemporaries would have recognised. Furthermore, the extension of poison to explain plague and other epidemics (as the result of a poisonous substance in the air) had already been taken, for example by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) in his Epidemiarum antidotus.78 The problem with Fernel’s theory, of course, was that its recourse to occult qualities would have been dissatisfying to many of his readers – no better than a confession of ignorance (the position later satirised by Molière when he made a doctor in one of his plays pompously intone that opium puts patients to sleep because of its dormitive virtue).79 Accordingly, Fernel devotes much of the De abditis causis to explaining as fully as he can what these particular occult qualities or powers are, where they come from, where they reside, and what they can do. It is evident, however, that Fernel did not believe that his arguments about these matters were sufficient to persuade all his contemporaries, and as a consequence another major effort of the book is directed to justifying in more general terms recourse to occult powers, and trying to throw doubt on the validity of the distinction between so-called manifest qualities (hot, cold, dry and wet) and occult qualities. In a self-professed jesting way, for example, Fernel has one of his characters, Philiatros, describe a mysterious kind of philosophers’ stone: 77 Poisons as substances which attack the total substance of the body by their total substance are discussed in De abditis rerum causis, chiefly at Bk ii, Ch. 15, “Poisoned Diseases,” but see also, Ch. 11, p. [97] 549, and Ch. 14, p. [110] 609, where poisons seem to provide a more general model for diseases of the total substance. Seeds of disease are mentioned at Bk ii, Ch. 10, p. [96] 547, Ch. 11, p. [97] 551, and Ch. 12, p. [103] 577. A reading of Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” makes it less surprising that Fernel should have come up with this idea independently of Fracastoro – as Nutton shows, the idea had clear ancient precedents. It is clear, also, that Fernel only puts these forward as a possible mechanism of infection. He never discusses them in detail. His exposition is almost exclusively concerned with the broader category of total substances which are destructive to the total substance of the body. 78 Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” p. 25. But see also Nutton, “Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion,” p. 205, where Giambattista da Monte’s (1498–1551) distinction between poisons and the principles of transmission of contagion is discussed. 79 Molière (1622–1673), Le Malade imaginaire (1673), Third Interlude. See Hutchison, “Dormitive Virtues”; and Dandrey, La médecine et la maladie dans le théâtre de Molière.

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introduction A friend of mine recently imported from India a marvellously luminous stone, which glows all over as if fired with a wondrous brightness, and throws out rays that fill the air around with light in every direction. Intolerant of the earth, it flies away into the sky spontaneously, with no delay. And it cannot be closely confined, but must be kept in a wideopen space. There is supreme purity in it, supreme sheen; it is fouled by no filth or stain, there is no sure form of its shape, but a varying and fast-changing one. And being extremely beautiful to look at, it does not let itself be handled, and if you keep trying it will hit hard; if a bit of it is taken away, it turns out no smaller. He also used to say that its power is for many [purposes] both useful and highly essential.

As Brutus remarks, this is “a novel and wondrous thing, and its property must be reckoned occult, if anything else’s property is.” But the answer to the riddle is fire, the elemental source of the manifest property of heat.80 The only difference between fire and that quintessentially occult object (for Renaissance thinkers) the magnet, is that the property of fire is “defined by the special name of heat … but no name has yet been attached to the properties of the magnet.” But real knowledge, Philiatros insists, “is drawn from acquaintance with things, not with names,” and our knowledge of magnetic behaviour, Fernel is suggesting, can be just as secure and extensive as our knowledge of the behaviour of fire (or the behaviour of fire no less mysterious than magnetism).81 Fernel’s theory of occult diseases has no easy association with modern ideas and for that reason, perhaps, it has failed to attract the kind of attention from historians of medicine accorded to Fracastoro’s seeds of disease. On the contrary, because Fernel’s ideas were bound up with Renaissance theories of the occult they have been treated by his modern commentators, until very recently, with some embarrassment.82 It is important, however, to judge Fernel’s theories not according to our lights, but according to the standards of his own time. Fernel’s explanations, drawing heavily upon supposed occult properties, were controversial, but they were not regarded 80 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 17, p. [124] 681. For a discussion of similar arguments see Millen, “Manifestation of Occult Qualities.” 81 It is important to note Fernel’s use of the word “defined.” The reader who suggested the word “magnetism” for the property of the magnet would be missing the point. In the scholastic system the property of heat is a manifest quality by definition – it is effectively a term of art, and Fernel sees it as one which prevents understanding, rather than enhances it. On the status of the magnet as an occult object, see, for example, Henry, “Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Physics and the Origins of William Gilbert’s Experimental Method.” 82 On this, see Henry and Forrester, “Tradition and Reform,” pp. 1–4.

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as in any way absurd or ridiculous. Indeed, the Renaissance was a time of re-assessment of the validity of the notion of occult qualities, and Fernel’s claims about occult diseases, and occult qualities more generally, undoubtedly fed into that wider debate, helping many to accept them as essential for a proper understanding of the natural world, by enabling the natural philosopher to go beyond what was allowable in scholastic Aristotelianism, or traditional Galenic medicine.83 It is worth remarking, in this regard, that the title Fernel chose for his “Dialogue” – On the Hidden Causes of Things – suggests that he saw it as concerned with occult qualities in general, not merely those relevant to contagious or epidemic diseases. In many ways, therefore, Fernel was a fellow-traveller with the Paracelsians and other iatrochemists, who were developing new ideas of their own about the occult nature and causes of disease. One commentator has discerned, for example, a direct line from Fernel to Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644), and Fernel’s influence on a number of important figures in the succeeding generation of alchemical writers has also been demonstrated.84 What is remarkable about Fernel, however, was that, because he was working, albeit critically, within the tradition of Galenic medicine, he was able to win the respect, and in some cases the minds, of comparatively conservative thinkers, who would have been repelled by the iconoclasm of the iatrochemists.85 Here, then, we can see the importance of De abditis causis within Fernel’s own work, and in the history of Renaissance medicine more generally. If Fracastoro deserves a place alongside Paracelsus as an innovator in sixteenth-century theories of disease, so does Fernel.

83 On the wider role of occult qualities in Renaissance natural philosophy see Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?”; Millen, “The Manifestation of Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution”; and Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy.” 84 See Lonie, “Fever Pathology in the Sixteenth Century,” p. 30, also, pp. 32, 34, on the link to van Helmont. See Matton, “Fernel et les alchimistes” for his influence on alchemists more generally. See also Hirai, “Humanisme, neoplatonisme et prisca theologia dans le concept de semence de Jean Fernel”; and Bianchi, “Occulto e manifesto nella medicina del Rinascimento.” 85 Orthodox opposition to iatrochemistry was rife. See, for example, Rattansi, “Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution”; Webster, “Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine”; and Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Paracelsian Movement.” A comparison of the reception of Fernel with the iatrochemists can be found in the leading French Galenist of the following generation, Guy Patin (1601–1672), whose admiration for Fernel knew no bounds, but who despised the iatrochemists. See Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 59, and Francis R. Packard, Guy Patin and the Medical Profession in Paris.

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Fernel should be acknowledged as one of the prime movers in the development of theories suggesting an ontological, as opposed to a physiological view of disease. It seems likely, therefore, that his works would have encouraged others to take a more critical view of traditional Galenic medicine. History does not allow counter-factual speculations, and it is impossible to know precisely what difference Fernel’s work made in the history of the decline and fall of Galenism. It seems hard to deny, however, that his influence upon his contemporaries was at least as great as Fracastoro’s, and may even have rivalled that of Paracelsus, particularly among more conservative readers.86 From our own perspective, however, Fernel’s significance should not be confined to the history of medicine. Fernel really was a médecin philosophe and the De abditis rerum causis can be seen as an important work on Renaissance natural philosophy in general and, in particular, a major work on the transformation of traditional ideas on the natures and properties of things.

The Divine, and Secondary Causation in the De abditis rerum causis Fernel’s “Dialogue” is divided into two books. In keeping with Aristotle’s suggestion that physicians “who exercise their art philosophically take their departure from what concerns nature,” the first book is concerned almost exclusively with natural philosophy, and the second with medicine. Accordingly, the dominant authority in the first book is Aristotle, while in the second it is Galen.87 At the outset it looks as though the major focus of concern might be the relationship between medicine and religion. Philiatros initiates the proceedings, gathering the speakers together, because he wants to know the answer to a question posed by Hippocrates: “may

86 Nutton, “Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion,” p. 229, makes the point that Fracastoro’s influence was partly due to the fact that, unlike Paracelsus, his ideas did not excite controversy or thoughts of medical revolution … In short, contemporaries viewed him as one of themselves, a learned Galenist, invoking and interpreting the sound authority of the past in order to deal with the urgent problems of the present.” Surely, precisely the same could be said of Fernel. 87 Aristotle, Parva naturalia i, 436a19–436b1. There is another marked difference between the two books. In the first the debate is often heated and aggressive in tone, with Eudoxus and Brutus in serious disagreement. In the second, while there is some element of debate, for the most part Eudoxus is allowed to speak more continuously, and Brutus and Philiatros merely listen, or add things in support of Eudoxus’s view.

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what is divine in diseases need divine assistance?” It soon becomes clear, however, that Fernel is not reversing the usual academic tendency to maintain disciplinary boundaries, and to keep medicine and divinity separate. In fact, Fernel uses the words “divine” and “divinity” throughout in what might be regarded as a highly philosophical manner. Furthermore, the philosophical exposition required to answer this Hippocratic question covers a vast amount of ground. As Fernel commented in his Preface, Hippocrates’ affirmation that there is a divine aspect in diseases was “a very concise opinion [that] needed a very great effort of assessment.”88 It is important to note at the outset, therefore, that whenever the divine is invoked by Fernel, it is clear that he is not talking about, or in any way assuming, direct intervention by God. On the contrary, Fernel is simply using the term divine as a shorthand way of referring to God’s use of secondary causes, when those secondary causes are unknown. In short, he uses the term “divine” interchangeably with “hidden” or “occult”: “So this single little work will examine and distinguish how much of the divine, that is, of hidden causes, lies in both natural philosophy and medicine.”89 There is nothing unorthodox about this. Fernel makes it perfectly plain that he accepts the primary causation of God, but also assumes that God now operates in the world (except of course when choosing to intervene miraculously) through secondary causes. The heading for Book i, Chapter 9, announces it plainly and insists that all is “compatible with Holy Writ,” and in the following chapter he makes the point explicitly, in a way that was perfectly conformable to the doctrines of his church: What God long ago started work upon by his particular actions, he has now entrusted to heaven to carry on its management, as if he were taking time off. And all that we say comes into being by the laws of nature, did first proceed from God; God certainly nowadays generates fairly

88

De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 1, p. [4] 123, and Preface, p. [3] 117. On the disciplinary separation of medicine from divinity see, for example, Luis GarciaBallester, “The Construction of a New Form of Learning and Practising Medicine in Medieval Latin Europe”; and Joseph Ziegler, Medicine and Religion c. 1300. 89 De abditis rerum causis, Preface, p. [3], ?, emphasis added. In case the reader should think that Fernel is being cavalier in interpreting the Hippocratic usage of “divine” in this way, it is worth noting that modern scholarship on the meaning of “divine” in Hippocrates has tended to the same interpretation. See Edelstein, “Greek Medicine in its Relation to Religion and Magic”; Thivel, “Le ‘divin’ dans la Collection hippocratique”; and Hankinson, “Magic, Religion and Science: Divine and Human in the Hippocratic Corpus.”

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introduction few things directly without mediation by nature or seed, but regulates everything through heaven, having established nature’s laws.90

Fernel even provides one of the standard arguments to justify the idea that God is now somehow removed from His Creation. Quoting the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo, Fernel indicates to his readers that, just as it is out of keeping for a king to run everything by his own actions, so it would be for God: We should therefore reckon it more dignified and seemly that God is located in the supreme position, yet in such a way that the power of his influence, extending through the whole world, can both move the sun and moon, and rotate the whole of heaven, and at the same time provide the cause of the health and safety of earth’s inhabitants.91

Fernel even manages to find a similar argument in the more recalcitrantly pagan Galen: the way in which he declared that above nature, God is the original creator of all things, is revealed here, because he says that gods in the past prepared seeds of plants and animals suited to the perpetual prolongation of movements, so that they [the gods] did nothing themselves later.92

If we were “investigating with minute consideration what is supernatural,” then, Fernel says, we would follow Plato “in distinguishing the cause of everything as God the craftsman.” Nothing more would need to be said. But Fernel’s concern is with the natural world, not what is beyond or above it, and therefore he has to consider the nature of secondary causation.93 To the modern reader, used to a more secular way of thinking, much of what Fernel says about secondary causes may seem to be inspired by mystical religiosity. He speaks, after all, of 90

De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 10, p. [53] 355. Fernel’s use of the concept of “laws of nature” here is an example of the increasing Renaissance use of the term in a vague way, simply to refer to the regularity of operation of secondary causation. The concept was soon to be radically transformed by Descartes. See Henry, “Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science.” 91 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 10, p. [53] 357. The De mundo was, of course, thought to be genuine at this time. Pseudo-Aristotle, De Mundo, Ch. 6, 398b3–10. On the analogy between God and kings more generally, see Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order. 92 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 3, p. [70] 423. Fernel was by no means alone, of course, in trying to turn Galen into a theistic, even a quasi-Christian, thinker; there was very definitely a concerted effort along these lines. On Fernel’s role in this movement, see Hirai, “Alter Galenus”; for a more general survey, see Nutton, “God, Galen and the Depaganization of Ancient Medicine.” 93 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 7, p. [44] 305.

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“the divine spirit … sent down from heaven” when describing procreation, or says that God imparted a procreative power to individuals “by scattering the seeds of His divinity.” He quotes from Aristotle’s De mundo the belief that “God is divided among all natures, and all things are full of Gods.” Near the beginning of the second book he reiterates in especially flowery style: everything in us is from God and through God; assume that He is the creator of all things and maintains the beginning and the end and the middle of all things; asssume that everything is full of Gods, and divine excellence and power makes its way through everything, as everything exists and continues through it; assume that when God was filling up this universe, initiating the perpetual coming of things into being, He was divided up through all natures by their particular seeds according to kinds and species; and assume that at the time he bestowed the breath of life on individual things; will anyone still doubt that there is something in these things that is genuinely divine and is called so?94

Seen in the context of the whole work, however, it is easy to see that these are merely pious expressions, no doubt for rhetorical effect, of a concern which is not mystical but is genuinely aimed at understanding natural phenomena. In expressions like these, Fernel is acknowledging the role of God in creation but his main concern is with what we can infer about the precise nature which the scattered “seeds of His divinity” have since taken in the natural world. The main focus is on the secondary causes, not the primary cause. Accordingly, Fernel talks of “the divine spirit and heat in the seed” which are capable of preparing “the substrate matter of the seed in such a way as to induce a mingling and tempering appropriate to the individual parts.”95 There is no denying the vagueness of this, but he was discussing the development of new offspring from a seed, a formidable problem. Similarly, he tries to explain how the corporeal vegetative and animal souls, responsible for the development of individuals, can slide into a seed “from heaven without a body” His explanation here shows remarkable ingenuity: From the Sun, for which light is inborn, there flows out not the light itself, but the illumination and radiance which bathe visible bodies and render them not just brilliant but also clear; in the same way, all efficient causes, and particularly those lofty and heavenly bodies [the stars], prompt the coming into being of things and impart forms to

94 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 8, p. [46] 319, Bk i, Ch. 9, p. [50] 335, Bk i, Ch. 10, p. [52] 351 and Bk ii, Ch. 2, p. [66] 417. 95 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 8, p. [46] 319.

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introduction things; they do not in fact emit from themselves these enduring ideas and forms of things that are located in themselves, nor bestow any of their substance on things that have been generated, nor send down a form, already created and perfected in the heavens, alone and on its own into a suitably prepared substrate; but they stimulate and produce new things for this sole reason, that those lofty powers of the heavens, carried hither by motion, illumination and spirit as their conveyances, and shed around us, introduce themselves into a substrate prepared by potentiality, and instil into the freshly generated thing the power and nature of the substances from which they emanated, and insert a form in such a way that the illumination radiating from the Sun’s light into a visible and prepared body, and bathing it, introduces into that body not just illumination, but also in the end some light of its own too.

Souls are not sent down from heaven, in other words, merely a power capable of producing a soul within suitably prepared matter. Fernel was drawing inventively upon the Neoplatonic tradition of emanationism which is usually referred to as “light metaphysics” – a philosophy which regards light as the medium by which God created the world, and in which light is still held to have secondary formative powers.96 Elsewhere, Fernel brings in the Platonic notion of a world soul to serve his purposes: The spirit of nature is the one that all the philosophers and poets combine to celebrate, the one that Plato called the soul of the world, and Galen called the mind drawn down hither from above; the one that Aristotle in his discourse on the world defined more explicitly thus: “Spirit is the name of a substance in both plants and animals, an animate and fertile substance penetrating everything.” Dispersed far and wide, it embraces everything, it cheers everything, carrying along with it the vital soul of the world, and nature itself; it renders vital everything into which it has extended.97

This spirit is the vehicle of the soul, “a foundation for the soul and its faculties,” and an intermediary required, according to Fernel, to link the incorporeal rational soul with a corporeal body, and making it possible for the complex organism to come into being. For many of Fernel’s readers this spirit was superfluous to requirements, an extra layer of being which was not needed, and indeed it is difficult to fully 96 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 8, p. [47] 321. On light metaphysics see, for example, Baeumker, Witelo, ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des xiii. Jahrhunderts; Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Modern Science; Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler ; and idem, “The Science of Optics.” 97 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 7, p. [81] 481.

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understand Fernel’s conception of spirit and its precise relationship to the soul.98 What is important from our point of view, however, is why Fernel felt that he needed this concept. It seems there can only be one answer; as in his earlier speculation involving the precepts of light metaphysics, Fernel was using the dialogue form to allow him to put forward alternative views, each of which might have held the key to understanding precisely how a divinely originating secondary cause operated in the natural world. The precise importance of the notion of a spiritual vehicle for the soul, for Fernel, would lie in its usefulness, on the one hand, as a bridging concept between Aristotelian hylomorphism and Christian theology, and on the other, as a more literal bridge between the material and immaterial realms, whose categorical separation had been emphasised by Neoplatonists.99 In spite of the appearance of light metaphysics, the world soul, and spirit vehicles in the De abditis causis, the major mechanism, if we can use that word, of God’s secondary causation was undoubtedly the stars, or the heavens. One of the first statements of this draws upon a famous comment of Aristotle, in his De generatione animalium: Listen to the rest; he says, “But in fact every special property or potentiality of the soul is deemed to have a share of another body, and a body more divine than the so-called elements.” And what this divine body is like is revealed by the next statement: “In the seed of all things is something that makes seeds fertile, namely something called heat, a heat that is not fire, nor some faculty of that sort, but a spirit, which is present in seed and the foamy body, and a nature that is in that spirit, corresponding to the element of the stars.”100

He reminds us of this in the second book, “Aristotle had pointed clearly to the spirit of the soul and the body of the faculties, and that its nature is divine and celestial, corresponding to the element of the stars.”101 98 For criticisms of Fernel along these lines see Walker, “Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine,” pp. 127–133, and Walker, “Medical Spirits and God and the Soul.” 99 We disagree with Walker’s view that Fernel “probably did not accept the theory [of a spirit vehicle] wholly or literally, but would have regarded it … as a mythical, ‘fabulous’ presentation of a philosophical truth …,” see Walker, “Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine,” p. 125. See also, for a general discussion, Walker, “Medical Spirits in Philosophy and Theology from Ficino to Newton.” For a more general discussion of the concept of medical spirits throughout the Middle Ages, see Bono, “Medical Spirits and the Medieval Language of Life.” 100 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 6, p. [34] 257. See Aristotle, De generatione animalium, ii, 3, 736b30–737a1. 101 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 7, p. [81] 481.

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Later, when trying to understand how generation takes place, he draws upon Aristotle again, this time invoking the Sun: “Aristotle said it is the Sun, and the First of All Things, that moves everything.” Accordingly, Although Aristotle maintains there that the form of each thing is neither generated nor made, he will not deny that it is introduced into things, either from Heaven or by that eternal original Mover of all things. This is what he says: “A human being and the sun beget a human being.” And again: “A human being is begotten by a human being too, and in addition by that which is the original Mover of everything.”

And a little later: Each natural thing is produced from two principles: matter and form. But if you look at its procreation, a third principle is added to these, which is called the efficient cause and the cause of coming into being, and he [Aristotle] recorded that it is heaven, in beginning his consideration of nature … it is right for that body which revolves in continuous perpetual movement and unresting circuit to be the cause of all the bodies that are generated. And the endless ages of the generations establish that the Sun, setting up its annual cycles with regular rotation, by its approach to us or withdrawal both brings on the births of things, and accomplishes their declines and deaths.102

Whether it is the element of the stars, or the Sun, or simply heaven itself, Fernel clearly believes that earthly phenomena, particularly those involving life processes, cannot be understood without considering these superior influences: heaven introduces the form and the supreme completion into that prepared [matter], and kindles life in all things. And as the outstanding heavenly powers of this sort have flowed directly from God, for that reason we declare that they are genuinely divine; and that indeed “celestial” is no different from “divine,” and these terms meant just the same to Hippocrates, Aristotle, Plato and Virgil.103

The importance of grasping these ideas for understanding what Fernel meant by his use of the word “divine” is perfectly apparent. “Please tell us briefly what you wish the word ‘divine’ to convey,” Philiatros asks at one point, only to be told: “Anything that Aristotle had previously said corresponded to the element of the stars.”104 The 102

De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 7, pp. [41, 42] 297; Bk i, Ch. 8, p. [44] 307. See Aristotle, Physics, ii 194b13; Meteorologica, i, 2, from 339a22. 103 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 10, p. [53] 355. 104 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 7, p. [84] 495. Presumably the fact that Aristotle’s name is deliberately invoked here – Eudoxus might simply have been made

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De abditis rerum causis is, therefore, a book which gives a ringing endorsement to astrology, by seeking to explain phenomena such as generation, growth, and epidemic diseases largely in terms of celestial influence. For Fernel and his contemporaries the influence of the stars on events on the Earth was widely accepted. What’s more, it was accepted because the stars were regarded as an undeniable means of secondary causation used by God. The key to understanding this is the principle, both philosophical and theological, that God does nothing in vain (as Aristotle put it in De caelo, “God and nature create nothing that does not fulfil a purpose”): the stars must be there for a reason.105 Further, the precise configuration of stars must also be deliberate – it would have been unthinkable to suppose that God had simply scattered them randomly across the sky. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), one of the greatest mathematical astronomers the world has ever seen, and one who penned his own revision of astrology, On the More Certain Foundations of Astrology (De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus, 1602),106 insisted that God had reasons for placing the stars as he did, because otherwise “we shall be driven to admit that God acted arbitrarily in the universe, even though perfectly good rational procedures were open to Him. And this is a conclusion I will not accept on anyone’s authority …”107 This compares with Fernel’s comment, after observing that yearly variations in summers must be due not only to the Sun but also “to a diverse combination of stars,” that “the supreme creator of things has assigned to them by fixed laws movements that are not futile and beyond reason.”108 There were opponents of astrology in Fernel’s time, of course, as there had been for centuries, but these were, for the most part, opponents of so-called judicial astrology, which was subject to a number of debilitating criticisms and (perhaps even more off-putting) attrac-

to say, “Anything that corresponded to the element of the stars” – is meant to reinforce the message that we are dealing here with natural philosophy, i.e. secondary causation, not direct divine intervention. 105 Aristotle, De caelo, 271a33. 106 See Field, “Astrology in Kepler’s Cosmology”; and idem, “A Lutheran Astrologer: Johannes Kepler,” which includes a translation of Kepler’s revision of astrology. 107 Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1597), Cap.II, p. 21. Similarly, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the most celebrated naked-eye observational astronomer, who provided Kepler with his data, “devoted the greater part of the inaugural lecture of his famous course at the University of Copenhagen in 1574 to a detailed defence of astrological prediction” (Wightman, Science and the Renaissance, vol. 1, p. 117). 108 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 11, p. [101–102] 573.

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ted a great many charlatans.109 It is very hard to find opponents of judicial astrology extending their arguments, however, to dismiss the foundations of the more philosophical astrology to which Fernel, Kepler, and most other érudits subscribed. It is difficult to imagine what they might have said in response to Kepler’s point, for example, without embroiling themselves in serious heterodoxy about the nature of God. If a philosophical astrology lies at the heart of what Fernel is trying to do in the De abditis causis, it is because it provides him with the most familiar kind of occult influence, and one which seems intrinsically to fit the designation “divine” used in Fernel’s Hippocratic source: “may what is divine in diseases need divine assistance?” After all, Fernel does not attempt to describe the precise effects of planetary positions (conjunction, opposition, trine and the like); his concern is not to show exactly what the astrological effects are, but merely to demonstrate that they must be playing a role in life processes,110 including some diseases, which – remember – Fernel sees as having a life of their own, being real entities and not merely epiphenomena of an unbalanced temperament. This raises the question as to why Fernel felt the need to demonstrate this at all. Why did he need to invoke such occult secondary causes?

109

Judicial astrology was supposed to help in the making of decisions about courses of action and propitious times for carrying out those courses of action; based on horoscopes. For a recent study of arguments against judicial astrology, see Vickers, “Critical Reactions to the Occult Sciences During the Renaissance.” For a more sympathetic assessment of the history of astrology, see Tester, History of Western Astrology. It was also possible, of course, to accept the foundations of astrology but reject judicial astrology. This is why Kepler wrote his De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus. Presumably, Plancy’s claims in his Vita that Fernel rejected astrology were confined to judicial astrology. See “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 158–159. Note also: “quite a number of people have polluted Astrology with superstitious and futile things, others have sprinkled it with unspeakable senile inventions, others have wrongly tethered freedom of mind and our activities to the constraint of the stars,” De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 18, p. [130] 705. In Fernel’s Therapeutice, Bk ii, Ch. 13, p. 378, however, there is a brief mention of astrology in relation to bloodletting: “Astrologica etiam obseruatio vt non parum efficax tenenda” (“astrological observation should also be pursued, being of significant value”). 110 This point is also made by Walker, “Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine,” pp. 125–126. For a general discussion of astrological influence see North, “Celestial Influence.”

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Forms, Souls, the Total Substance, and Astrology in De abditis rerum causis The answer to this question is easy to see. Quite simply, Fernel recognises that the kind of phenomena he is interested in, primarily generation, growth, and these “three kinds of disease which hardly anyone seems to have investigated in detail,”111 cannot be satisfactorily explained in the standard terms of scholastic Aristotelianism, or Galenism. Another approach is required. Right at the outset, Fernel declares that the starting point must be to understand the origin of forms: This new and unexpected view is so difficult and recondite that if you are willing to explain it and take it apart as it deserves, then before you get to medicine, you must examine all the hardest and outstandingly beautiful principles of nature, and explain the principles of all things, and the initial origins of the forms.112

In a long, complex, and convoluted argument Eudoxus leads his companions “by the hand,”113 as he tries to establish that “the body is created for the form’s sake, not the form for the body’s sake,” that forms are pure substances in their own right, and that, although in a complex individual, such as an animal, there must be many different forms, one for each of the parts, there must be, nevertheless, a form of the whole creature: my view is that the forms of individual parts are like stages of progress towards that ultimate form of the whole, and they are imprinted on the substrate solely in order to pave the way for the introduction of that form.114

Through the course of this discussion Fernel goes into many of the complexities deriving from the basic assumptions of Aristotelian hylomorphism which had arisen in scholastic commentary, but always believes that his conclusions are “drawn from Aristotle’s mind.”115

111

De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 9, p. [89] 513. De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 1, p. [7] 135. 113 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 1, p. [7] 133. 114 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 3, p. [12] 161, Bk i, Ch. 4, p. [23] 211. 115 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 3, p. [12] 159. On Aristotelian hylomorphism, see McMullin (ed.), Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy; Lewis and Bolton (eds), Form, Matter, and Mixture in Aristotle; and the special issue of Early Science and Medicine: Lüthy and Newman (eds), The Fate of Hylomorphism: “Matter” and “Form” in Early Modern Science. 112

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What’s more, following Thomist tradition, Fernel assumes that at the higher levels of being, forms constitute souls. So, the form of plants and animals (including humans) are their souls. Fernel takes this so much for granted that there is no separate discussion of this. Sometimes Fernel’s characters talk of forms, and at other times of souls. Consider, for example, the form that is to be the creator of complex and varied motion is the one that will certainly be more complete, and of some higher status. Thus because an element on displacement moves only up or down, its form is regarded as the most incomplete and lowly; the form of a plant, which stimulates movement of nutrition too, of growth and of procreation, is evidently more complete and noble. Again, the form of an animal is more perfect still; it contributes sensation in addition, and voluntary forward movement. Finally, the form of a man is the supreme one and the most perfect of all, which in addition to everything mentioned so far has acquired from the immortal gods the divine gift of mind.

By the following page, the discussion has simply slipped into talking of souls: “a soul is prior to a body and more excellent, and as it has preeminence and dominance in the body, it controls and moves it.”116 The discussion now turns back to the question of the origin of forms, or souls. In Book i, Chapter 4, Eudoxus suggests that there are three prerequisites “for the reception of the form”: a suitable temperament (“derived from a mingling of elements”), suitably configured organic parts, and “a spirit pervading the whole in which the salutary vital heat resides,” which is said to be “both the nearest thing to the nature of the soul, and the soul’s perpetual and inseparable companion.” Eudoxus is willing to accept that the first of these, the temperament, “is the offspring of the elements”; the others, the shaping of the bodily parts into a suitable configuration, and the spirit, “take their origin not from there but from a more divine origin.”117 116 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 3, p. [12] 159, and [13] 165. According to St Thomas Aquinas, the rational soul is the substantial form of the human body; this was accepted as doctrine at the Council of Vienna (1311–1312). See Kessler, “The Intellective Soul.” It is notable that Fernel frequently discusses the scholastic concept known as substantial form but he never uses that precise term, preferring “simple form,” “pure form,” and even “total substance.” See note 127 below. It should be noted, of course, that although all souls are forms, in Thomist tradition, not all forms are souls. According to the precepts of Aristotelian hylomorphism everything has its form, but only the higher forms, vegetative, sentient, and rational, are also souls. For detailed discussions, see Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance, and Des Chene, Life’s Form. 117 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 4, p. [24] 215.

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The subsequent discussion sees Eudoxus defending this notion of divine origins, in which he argues, for example, that a form “is introduced complete all at once, none at all of it having been there previously,” and that the form of a plant or animal cannot be produced from a seed, even though the plant or animal itself is. The conclusion, for Eudoxus is that “the form … is inserted from outside.”118 In keeping with what was said in the previous section, however, it should not be concluded that in talking of divine origins Fernel was merely resorting to supernaturalism, calling upon a deus ex machina to solve all problems. This would have been an utter betrayal of his identity as a natural philosopher. The following chapter begins with Brutus asking: at the time when the chick is starting to live and move, where is it getting its soul from? What is its source? Or who puts it in? Where is that extraneous craftsman of yours to engrave his own form on the egg? Is it not here that the emptiness of your remarks shows up? Is it not clearer than daylight that it [the form] emerges from the potentiality of the egg, as does the whole chick from the same egg?119

After a great deal of discussion about views which Fernel clearly takes to be unacceptable, Eudoxus provides the essentially astrological answer, although he presents it, typically, as an Aristotelian view: Although Aristotle maintains there that the form of each thing is neither generated nor made, he will not deny that it is introduced into things, either from Heaven or by that eternal original Mover of all things. This is what he says: “A human being and the sun beget a human being.” And again: “A human being is begotten by a human being too, and in addition by that which is the original Mover of everything [the Sun].”120

In his exposition of the precise role of these two very different begetters in procreation, Fernel argues that the role of the earthly parent is merely to contribute to the preparation of the offspring’s body to make it suitable to receive the form. “And so, as this preparation of the body may be complex and diverse,” Eudoxus says, there is a tempering created at the time from those four original sources of things [namely the elements], sources in no way corrupted, but very finely and completely mingled together; there is a harmonious shaping of the body at the time, and a well-adapted linking of parts together;

118 119 120

De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 5, p. [27] 227, [28] 233, [30], 239. De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 6, p. [30] 239. De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 7, p. [42] 297.

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introduction and there is a controlling of the whole of the inborn spirit; all this array of potentialities will depend upon the faculty and power of the seed, and on him who ejected the seed.

Only then, Eudoxus insists, is the form introduced: “But when the whole preparation is fully complete, at the time when we speak of the perfecting of the potentiality, then the form itself arrives from outside.”121 In case his readers are in any doubt about what is being said, Fernel repeats this point. Aristotle, Eudoxus tells us, establishes a double originator and craftsman for things: the one for the whole composite, for instance a human being for a human being, the other the originator just of the form, whom he claims is eternal and immortal … he thinks that forms are inserted into things by that famous fifth nature, to which he refers by the name of Sun, and he includes the orbits and unchangeable paths of all celestial bodies.122

At the Creation, God “imparted a procreative power to individual things,” and He did so by implanting “seeds of His divinity,” as it were, seeds with their own creative power, but He did this in a twofold way: “for He implanted these seeds of generating, general ones into the heavens and stars, their own special ones into individual things.”123 It was the general ones, in the heavens, which were responsible for creating the forms, or souls, of things. In the early pages of the second book Fernel reiterates the same points. “The origin of forms is credited proximately to heaven,” Eudoxus says. It isn’t long, however, before Brutus raises the inconvenient fact, for medical studies at least, that Galen makes no mention of these things. Accordingly, Eudoxus tries to show how these doctrines do appear even in Galen, providing you know how to read him correctly. “Whatever the morning debate established,” he insists, “Galen affirms it all too, and Plato, Aristotle and Galen do not [each] lay down a different principle and cause of the generation of forms.”124 121

De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 7, p. [42] 299. De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 7, p. [44] 305. It should be noted that, at this point, Fernel acknowledges that there is a supernatural cause, “the cause of everything,” namely God, but his concern is to understand the secondary causes which God uses; in this case, the Sun and other celestial bodies. 123 De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 9, p. [50] 335. 124 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 3, p. [70] 433. The endeavour to reconcile divergent but equally respected ancient authorities was an inevitable outcome of the commentary tradition and flourished in the Renaissance. Consider, for example, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–1494) Conclusiones (1486) and De ente et uno (1491) and Jacopo Mazzoni’s (1548–1598) De comparatione Platonis et Aristotelis (1597). 122

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It seems evident that Fernel is rather proud of having been able to tease these things out of Galen’s writings. This can be seen, surely, in this exchange between Eudoxus and the usually obstructive Brutus. Eudoxus. … see how your friend Averroes establishes that there are faculties in us other than those that emerged from the temperament, and that they are called souls. Because if they are neither elements nor have a share of elements, the remaining possibility is that they are entirely divine and heavenly. Brutus. I identify this as the view of Averroes, and go along fully with its truth. Hence I am astonished at how I have never understood the passages of Galen already quoted, despite often studying them, nor disentangled the truth lurking within them. I suppose my mind was overwhelmed, either by noticing the permeating elements, or by people’s general common judgment, from which one cannot readily deviate without jettisoning one’s reputation.125

It was evidently while trying to find his ideas prefigured in Galen (which, remember, Fernel would have felt the need to do, if his ideas were to have any credibility), that Fernel noticed Galen’s talk of the “total substance.” Galen “has distinguished three kinds of diseases … according to their seats,” Eudoxus says at one point; “we ourselves call them immoderateness of matter, impaired temperament, and corruption of the whole substance. I would now like to set these not just before the minds but also before the eyes and gaze of everyone, and clarify them with instances.” Whereupon, Brutus is made to implore Eudoxus “to investigate what you term the diseases of the total substance with the same vigorous exposition.”126 The total substance was identified by Avicenna with the Aristotelian substantial form, and so for Fernel diseases of the total substance were simply diseases of what he called the simple form.127 Since 125

De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 6, p. [80] 477. De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 9, p. [91] 531. For earlier discussions of the diseases of the total substance, see Deer Richardson, “Generation of Disease,” and Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic.” It seems likely that Fernel came across this notion, if he did not find it in Galen, through discussions in Avicenna, or in the third book of Marsilio Ficino’s De triplici vita (1489). See Copenhaver, “Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino.” Nancy Siraisi has also suggested that there may be links to the scholastic conception of “specific form,” which Arnald of Villanova, for example, invokes to explain occult remedies which act as a whole, rather than as a result of their temperament. See Siraisi, “‘Remarkable’ Diseases, ‘Remarkable’ Cures,” pp. 227–228; and for a fuller account of specific forms, idem, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, pp. 159–162. 127 Fernel uses “simple form” so frequently it is effectively a term of art for him. See, for example, Bk i, Ch. 2, p. [9] 143, Ch 3, p. [13] 163, Ch 4, p. [19] 191, and so on. It seems to signify the same as the more usual “substantial form,” a term which Fernel does not seem to use. It is possible that Fernel avoids the use of this term 126

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these forms originated from heaven, it seems reasonable to assume (according to Fernel, anyway) that any disease capable of affecting the total substance, the form, should also be divine or celestial. Accordingly, Fernel immediately links this to Hippocratic discussions of divine diseases. Consider, for example, What I here propose as disease of the total substance exists sometimes as simple and solitary, but usually is intermingled with other affections, among which it can scarcely be evident. Hippocrates called this whole kind divine, advising everyone to study and watch in case something divine is present in diseases …

And a little later, A number of the divine and hidden diseases that occur in us possess an efficient cause diffused throughout the whole of the air, like some scattered seed of evils, with a power to generate diseases that is huge. Hippocrates termed it a morbid excretion and a sort of nursery of diseases; he maintains that it does not come to exist out of the primary qualities nor proceed from them, but has a loftier and heavenly origin.128

Fernel takes care to dismiss any suggestion of the ordinary, elemental, effects of astrological influence: If Hippocrates noticed that these stars bode ill and were unsafe for medication, on what basis do you reckon this occurs, pray? Excessive heat? But the winter solstice is very cold. Severity of cold? But the summer solstice and the Dog Star possess great power of heat. Or by any other excess or defect of qualities? But the vernal equinox is very temperate, and the rising of the Pleiades not much different. So these stars presage the evils that Hippocrates mentioned, if not through excess of heat, cold, moistness or dryness, yet certainly through some more recondite power.

So, that power clearly emanated from the heavens, but it did not operate by influencing the weather, and so causing conditions in the environment which might lead to the formation of unhealthy miasmas, capable in the ordinary way of disturbing susceptible temperaments. Something else must be at work in the case of pestilential and epidemic diseases, something “with a power to generate diseases that is huge.” These stars, then, have power enabling them to because, in the case of humans, it was equated with the immortal soul, and Fernel wanted to be able to talk freely of the somatic aspects of life, disease, and so forth. We owe this highly plausible conjecture to Christoph Lüthy. See also Nadler, “Doctrines of Explanation in Late Scholasticism and in the Mechanical Philosophy.” 128 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 10, p. [96] 545. Fernel mentions “seeds of disease” at Bk ii, Ch. 10, p. [96] 549, Ch. 11, p. [97] 551, and Ch. 12, p. [103] 563.

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disseminate the notorious morbid excretion, the cause of occult diseases, and scatter into the air seeds, as it were. And posterity has confirmed the powers that Hippocrates observed in the stars, and added others too, more notable, to which that past age had not yet made its way.

Brutus concedes to this: “I think you have now shown sufficiently that some diseases of the total substance exist, which can corrupt the form of the body.” These diseases do not operate by disturbing the balance of the humours, they attack the body’s form; that is to say they attack what makes the body what it is, its total substance. A humoral pathology which sees disease exclusively in terms of an internal disturbance of the healthy temperament (albeit one setoff by an initial external cause, like a corrupt miasma in the air) cannot possibly account for these diseases.129 It must be recognised, therefore, that they are real entities, with their own characteristics, and they operate by entering the body from outside, and attacking its whole integrity.130 The importance of the kind of astrological influence, distinct from a meteorological influence, Fernel has in mind is reiterated later: People who maintain that the stars introduce nothing by their light and movement into the air but heat or cold, showers or dryness are distressingly stupid. If the stars when well-patterned guard and preserve the life of all, why would they not interfere with life when ill-patterned? From there comes the primary main health and preservation of all things, and death too. Only people who are inexperienced in this study [astrology] remove these causes and powers from the scene and ignore them as if there were none. Truly fortunate are those who become very wise through this more recondite knowledge, which is surpassed by none for putting us on guard against pestilential diseases and for thoroughly curing them. Thus the cause of a pure pestilence in the simple sense is a celestial configuration bringing power to bear, a configuration that cannot be detected by change of weathers or by any overt quality, but only by the outcome.131

129

For a succinct account of “initial causes” and the role of external factors in the essentially internalist humoral pathology, see Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” pp. 3–5, and 15. 130 Not everyone was persuaded by Fernel’s arguments, however. Girolamo Cardano, for example, believed that this group of diseases too were due to imbalance of primary qualities. See Siraisi, Clock and Mirror, p. 168. See also Deer Richardson, “Generation of Disease,” pp. 187–194. 131 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 12, p. [102] 573. See also Ch. 12, p. [105] 589, where Eudoxus asks “How can anyone … fail to appreciate the notorious cause

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Although Fernel undoubtedly accepts astrological influence as a major and significant factor in generation and in the cause of especially virulent diseases, he nowhere tries to provide details of how particular configurations of stars, or movements of the planets through the zodiac, actually bring things about. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that this shows a failure in Fernel’s endeavour. We do not have to assume that Fernel would have done this if he could; that he perhaps intended to write a sequel in which he would provide the technical astrological details. Nor do we have to suppose, as Sherrington did, that he changed his mind about astrology and repudiated it sometime (presumably) between his last revision of De abditis causis in 1551 and his death in 1558.132 Internal evidence in the De abditis causis clearly shows that Fernel believed not only that he had said enough, but also that he had effectively said all that could be said. The key to understanding this is a proper appreciation of how Fernel regarded occult qualities and powers. Occult qualities were so-called in contrast to the manifest qualities of hot, cold, dry and wet, the primary qualities of the four elements (fire was hot and dry, earth cold and dry, air hot and wet, and water cold and wet). According to Aristotle the passive qualities of wetness and dryness gave rise to secondary qualities. Fernel summarises this view: Aristotle established that moistness and dryness are passive qualities, but earth and water, in which a great deal of those [two] is present, is the matter of natural bodies. And so the secondary qualities that he enumerates, qualities sprung from the passive ones, and the states that he usually names bodily states – we too will evidently be on sound ground if we term them powers and qualities of matter. Of this sort are hard and soft, thick and thin, coherent and crumbly … smooth and rough, loose-knit and dense, and those of this group, all wholly sunk into matter.133

So, the secondary qualities were held to be aspects of the primary ones. Dryness seemed to be more usually associated with hardness, and softness with wetness, smoothness with wetness, rough with dry, from above, and reckon that it runs riot on earth? Hence like carbuncle and pestilent bubo, exanthems and ecthymas surely have their cause from above …” 132 Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 24–37. 133 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 1, p. [64] 407. See Aristotle, Meteorologica, iv.

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and so on. These qualities were manifest in so far as they could be attributed to a particular body by the use of the senses. Liquids were clearly wet, metals were palpably smooth, and wax soft, for example. It was recognised, however, that some bodies had qualities, or powers, which were not directly discernible by the senses, and could not convincingly be reduced to aspects of the four primary qualities. These were designated indiscriminately as occult qualities. The classic example was magnetism. It was perfectly clear that magnets attract iron, and it was equally clear that they did not do so because of being hot, or dry, wet or cold. Some other quality was involved, something hidden. Significantly, it was in the medical tradition that occult qualities were most frequently invoked. Many pharmaceuticals were assumed to operate by virtue of their manifest qualities. In the standard humoral pathology, a patient’s temperament might be skewed dangerously to the hot, or to the cold. Accordingly, drugs that were known to be “cold,” or “hot” would be employed to bring things back to the balance point (pepper, for instance, rather obviously was held to be hot134). Many drugs were known to be effective, however, without it being known why. As in the case of the magnet, it was impossible to explain how they did what they did in terms of wetness, dryness or any of the manifest qualities. In keeping with his comment in the Preface that he is dealing in the De abditis causis with “the divine, that is, … hidden causes,” Fernel sometimes calls occult qualities, “divine”: If there are some particular powers of elements and qualities, there will certainly be much greater ones belonging to divinity, and divinity, which is of the most outstanding status and perfection of every kind, will be incapable of losing powers. And all its functions and deeds fall within the grasp of the senses and cannot escape our notice; but their source and how they come from it, and what sort of substance their effective cause or faculty have, is a point on the whole as hidden and unknown as the very essence of divinity. We see that a magnet attracts iron, and rhubarb attracts bile, and agaric phlegm, and epithymum black bile; in addition, an ostrich corrodes iron by digestion, and a human being is killed by the poison of viper or scorpion; hellebore and hemlock are poisonous to man, but quails feed on hellebore and starlings on hemlock.

Another sign that occult qualities are at work is provided by the unpredictable behaviour of drugs. Scammony, for instance, taken by mouth acts as a purge. One might expect that the same result 134

Paulus Aegineta, Seven Books, Bk. ii, sect. 3, vol. 3, p. 294.

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would follow when it is rubbed onto the skin. But according to Fernel at any rate, the opposite ensues: a dysentery already present is relieved.135 It is important to note, however, that inexplicable though these things are, their operations are none the less matters of fact. Magnets really do attract iron, scorpion venom does kill human beings, and ostriches, Fernel has on good authority, can digest iron. As Fernel noted all the functions and deeds of occult qualities “fall within the grasp of the senses and cannot escape our notice.”136 For many in Fernel’s day, and for a long time after, this was sufficient justification for basing aspects of one’s natural philosophy, or one’s medicine, on occult qualities. Even Isaac Newton, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, justified his occult concept of gravity, capable of acting over vast distances of space without any intervening connections, on the grounds that its existence, and precise behaviour were known, even though he could not give any account of its cause: “it is enough,” he insisted, “that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”137 Fernel takes the same line and this helps us to understand why he did not feel the need to enter into technical details of astrology to complete his account of The Hidden Causes of Things. Consider, for example, what he wrote just after his mention of magnets, rhubarb, ostriches, hellebore and hemlock: The causes of these [phenomena] are however not known, and so hidden that no one can discern them and they defy any sure explanation. They stay hidden in the gloom of veiled nature, and being beyond clear discernment or verbal description, we call them the occult qualities of 135

De abditis rerum causis, Bk. ii, ch. 2, [67] 417–419; and Ch. 17, p. [127] 693. Modern commentators have a tendency to decry the credulity of pre-modern writers for uncritically accepting occult claims. This is surely unfair. Even today it is impossible for each of us to test everything for ourselves, and so we take many things on trust. The history of science, after all, is a history of changes in what counts as a plausible explanation. Besides, in Fernel’s day the general assumption was that ancient authorities were correct and true; our own notional (notional, it has to be said, rather than real) scepticism of authority figures had not yet emerged. 137 Newton, The Principia (1999), p. 943. This appears in the “General Scholium” which Newton added to the second edition of the Principia (London, 1713). See also Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover, 1952), pp. 401–402. It is a further sign of modern scholarly inability to accept the use of occult ideas by past scientific heroes, comparable with Sherrington’s failure to understand Fernel’s reliance on astrology, that many Newton scholars have sought to deny that he believed in actionat-a-distance in spite of his clear statements that he did. On this see Van Lunteren, “Gravitation and Nineteenth-Century Physical Worldviews,” pp. 161–173; and Henry, “Pray do not ascribe that notion to me.” 136

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things, as the Greeks did in Greek. As Alexander of Aphrodisias says, “It is not only authorities on the art of medicine that have to establish the properties of things; philosophers, and grammarians too, often reach the same point. Indeed, one has to come to it whenever the reason for anything that has come about defeats the wit of even the sharpest person to explain it, and cannot have light shed upon it, nor be put down in any way at all to the natures of the primary elements.” And so, as they have exceeded the powers and natures of the elements, we shall fairly and rightly say that they lie beyond natural philosophy (which is wholly concerned with them [the powers and natures of the elements]), and are not confined within the barriers of demonstrations.138

This may look like a testament of despair: there is no point even trying to understand these things. At this point, however, Fernel is merely dealing with a technical aspect of Aristotelian natural philosophy in order to dispose of it. Strictly speaking, within the scholastic tradition, occult qualities were by definition inexplicable, and would always remain so.139 Accordingly, Fernel was perfectly correct in saying that occult qualities were “beyond natural philosophy,” because they were, as far as an Aristotelian thinker was concerned, outside the realm of what could be demonstrated. Aristotelian demonstrations had to be manifestly true, and so had to be based on the manifest properties of things. This was simply a matter of definition: “This was Galen’s definition of hidden things, it was Aristotle’s too, and he located them beyond the grasp of the human mind.”140 Operating within the scholastic framework as he was, Fernel accepted these constraints on what was possible within natural philosophy, and concluded that these occult qualities must always remain inexplicable.

138

De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 2, p. [67] 419. Emphasis added. The status of occult qualities underwent a dramatic change with the advent of the so-called “new philosophies” of the seventeenth-century, usually variations on the mechanical philosophy as developed by Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes, of course, believed he had accounted for all occult qualities, but even those who remained unconvinced by Cartesian explanations held out a hope that an explanation would be forthcoming, perhaps after the microscope was improved, or chemical techniques, or some such development. See Millen, “Manifestation of Occult Qualities”; Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy”; and Wilson, Invisible World. 140 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 8, p. [85] 499. On the requirement of demonstrability in Aristotelian natural philosophy, see Dear, Discipline and Experience, especially pp. 22–23, 36–46. It should be noted that the “new philosophers,” who rejected these Aristotelian prescriptions, could base their philosophies with impunity on the behaviour of invisibly small particles, which were absolutely not manifest, but merely inferred for the purposes of theoretical explanation. Fernel could not have anticipated this radically different approach. See Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities?” 139

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This did not mean, however, that they were supernatural. Nor did it mean that any mysterious occult quality could simply be invoked at need to explain whatever was at issue. Being beyond natural philosophy did not mean the same as being beyond nature itself. Natural philosophy was devised by humankind and so scholastic philosophers were at liberty to circumscribe it as they liked, but nature was devised by God.141 That was why Fernel took such pains to explain the meaning of divine in terms of secondary causation. In one of the last chapters of the book, therefore, we should not be surprised to see Fernel emphasising that “these occult and secret powers reside in things, and are held within natural limits.” Furthermore, he calls upon the notion of “total substance” or form to show how these things can be natural, while remaining outside traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy: “the total substance of a thing is not an addition to the qualities of the elements, nor to their matter, but has acquired special powers from itself alone.” He calls on Galen to show how he too was forced to operate outside natural philosophy when he dealt with qualities emerging not from the elements, but from the total substance: He accepts there, unwillingly indeed, a great truth, that a resemblance of total substance is something different from the qualities of elements, and is the major cause of attraction, and is assisted only by elemental heat. If these are two causes – resemblance of substance, and heat – they are surely different and have acquired a different origin? So Galen cannot help getting into these occult properties of things, whatever their causes may be … Every time he happens to get involved in this, he is compelled, whether he likes it or not, to resort to the occult properties of things, and, so to speak, to call for their help.142

“And so we actually discover from Galen,” Fernel writes, “many special powers and occult properties of things, though they lack a basis for investigation.” Fernel goes on to report how Galen carps at his teacher Pelops (fl. 150 ad) for wanting to know why burnt river crabs cure “those bitten by a mad dog,” while Galen takes the empiricist line that if it works, this is all we need to know.143 141 There are a number of places in the De abditis causis where Fernel discusses the distinction between art (devised by humans) and nature. See, for example, Bk i, Ch. 1, p. [5] 127, Ch. 2, p. [9] 147, Bk ii, Ch. 3, p. [69] 429. 142 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 17, p. [123] 677. 143 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 17, p. [124] 679. In a personal communication, Professor Nutton has pointed out that Galen actually objects to Pelops claiming to know, not wanting to know. Galen, De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus, xi. 34; xii. 358 [Kühn].

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Fernel uses the figure of Philiatros to provide the standard empirical justification for the use of occult qualities (it is during the course of this that Philiatros gives the riddle about the mysterious shining “stone” which turns out to be fire). Philiatros is even allowed to say, in defiance of scholastic principles, that “there is no reason for you to suppose that the beginning of every philosophical proof is drawn from these main qualities [hot, cold, dry and wet] and from nowhere else.”144 Fernel also uses the concept of total substance, or form, to explain the general phenomenon of sympathy and antipathy, one of the foundational ideas in natural magic: This is the source of sympathies and antipathies, that is, agreements and disagreements, which are implanted in everything; they are concealed and remote [features], which nature wished us to admire rather than understand. They are reckoned the causes of all the occult results that are credible on no obvious grounds. So the reason why different medicaments either help or harm different bodily parts is sympathy or antipathy.

In the example that he provides, Fernel shows how these things can be seen not to work through the manifest qualities. Peony, at least the male peony, fastened to the neck of infants cures epilepsy. This must be due to its total substance because if it healed by drawing off phlegm, which is the supposed cause of epilepsy, it would be effective against other diseases where excess phlegm was the trouble. What’s more, medicaments which do draw off phlegm are usually ineffective against epilepsy. Consequently, “This power it [peony] possesses emanated not from the manifest qualities, but from a splitting up and repugnance of the total substance, by which it entirely antagonises not phlegm, not sluggishness of humour, but the essence of epilepsy, which is unseen and occult.”145 Sympathies and antipathies were always regarded as highly specific in their operation, and Fernel’s introduction of them into his discussion demonstrates his belief that, with regard to the occult diseases, humoral therapies are inadequate, and that what is required are specific remedies, capable of acting directly on specific diseases. In spite of the fact that occult properties cannot be explained, and so are outside natural philosophy, Fernel has no doubt of their 144 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 17, p. [124] 681. When Philiatros says “every philosophical proof” he is talking of natural philosophy, of course. 145 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 17, p. [127–128] 691–695. See Copenhaver, “Tale of Two Fishes.”

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usefulness, particularly in medicine, and particularly against the occult diseases which do not operate in accordance with the manifest qualities, making the temperament too hot, or too dry, but in entirely inexplicable ways, affecting the total substance. “Nature must have provided powers contrary to the occult diseases of the total substance,” Fernel writes, “powers themselves occult, and opposed to the splitting of the total substance.” Believing in the benevolence of God, Fernel does not need to spell out the answer to his own question: “Are such horrid diseases possibly going to stay deprived of special remedies?”146 Similarly, Fernel sees no necessity to go into the details of planetary movements and star configurations. Knowledge of such details does not help us to develop cures for the occult diseases, nor how to reach an understanding of the inexplicable powers of those configurations. The occult qualities of the total substances of things may derive from the heavens, but we shall never be able to understand precisely how. What was more important, for Fernel, was to discover the things which nature must have provided (again through the agency of the heavens) to combat diseases of the total substance. In other words, to find the things, like peony, which are effective against occult diseases. At the end of the book, therefore, we find Fernel encouraging his readers to search into the hidden properties of things. As Brutus remarks to Eudoxus, “You are firing us with remarkable enthusiasm for discovering properties.” Here, then, at the end, Fernel too takes the empiricist line, justifying the use of occult remedies – in spite of their being beyond natural philosophy – on the grounds that they are effective. In the closing words of the book we read: And though they lie hidden, veiled in nature’s secrets and in deep shadow, they are not to be let alone through idleness, but investigated rather carefully, not through the primary tactile or the secondary qualities, not through their taste, smell, sound or colour, but simply from their effects and actions, which are to be gathered and confirmed, both by long observation of performance and from the records of the best authorities.

Accordingly, Eudoxus says to his companions, what Fernel wishes to say to his medical readers: “when you have more leisure you must one day devote yourselves more keenly and seriously to learning about hidden properties.”147

146 147

De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 17, p. [122] 673. De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 19, p. [136] 735.

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It is perhaps just this kind of research into the hidden properties of things which Fernel himself was pursuing when he pleaded with the new King Henry to be allowed to continue “his quest for yet more knowledge … and his devising of new methods of treatment for still more difficult cases.”148 Be that as it may, it is certainly true, as Sherrington remarked, that “the spirit of experiment was there” in Fernel.149 Though it is unlikely Sherrington would ever have guessed that the impulse towards experiment went hand in hand with efforts to codify the working of occult qualities and powers.150 This is certainly the case, however, and precisely because Renaissance thinkers recognised, as Fernel himself did, that there was no other way of discovering how occult operations took place. Indeed, the historical evidence suggests that attempts to understand occult operations played a major role in helping the more innovative natural philosophers to develop a new experimental methodology for natural philosophy. What was required was a method of science which was empiricist while managing to escape the obvious inadequacies of the work of the “empiric,” who was usually dismissed as someone who did not know what he was doing or why. Part of the problem, as Francis Bacon discerned, was to know what was significant in one’s experiments and what was not. As Bacon put it in his Novum organum, For the Alchemist nurses eternal hope, and when the thing fails, lays the blame upon some error of his own; fearing that he has not sufficiently understood … or else that in his manipulations he has made some slip of a single scruple in weight or a moment in time (whereupon he repeats his trials to infinity) …151

Fernel recognised the same problem much earlier: When one person gives a remedy to a fasting patient and another to a fed one; one at the outset of the disease without preparatory purging of the body, another with the disease already abating; one in a simple affection, another in a complex one; one in a more trivial and easy case, another in a stubborn one; both are actually testing it, but not in the same 148

“Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 163. This is also suggested in Bono, “Renaissance Theoretical Medicine: Harvey versus Fernel.” 149 Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 139. 150 On this historical phenomenon see, for example, Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy”; Henry, “Magic and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”; Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature; and Henry, Knowledge is Power. It is also the main theme of all eight volumes of Thorndike, History of Magic. 151 Francis Bacon, New Organon (1620), Bk i, Aphorism 85.

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Similarly, Girolamo Cardano, in his comments on the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places, reckoned that to consider every “astrological, environmental and physiological influence bearing on a case of disease would involve taking 2,936 factors into consideration, a number that he subsequently upped to 3,194.”153 Fernel makes Philiatros take the dismissive line, equating empiricism with the work of the ignorant “empiric” who works by trial and (mostly) error: This is a brief and speedy basis for healing, relying neither on philosophical nor on medical propositions, nor on any method, and with it anyone from the common people could turn out as an excellent physician in half a year.154

Eudoxus utters a swift response: “Where has this ignorance of the facts and stupidity got you?” Acknowledging that Hippocrates “said at the very entrance to the Art that experience is deceptive,” and that Empirics “take up some exceptional remedy without judgment or skill, in whatever fashion chance has impelled them,” Eudoxus nevertheless insists that experimental study can be made useful. After all, he points out, the powers of medicaments that work by their total substance are not discovered by methods in the way that those involving heating, cooling, moistening and drying are. You could not discover them by reason, from odour or taste, but only from experience. For (as Galen says), we have no idea why a particular stone, when applied to a wound from which blood bursts forth, suppresses and restrains its flow … And so

152

De abditis rerum causis, Bk. ii ch. 19 p. [134] 725. Stuart Clark (Scientific Status of Demonology, p. 353) mentions another instance of organised trial: “In the further case of the investigation of demoniacs, it has even been suggested that exorcists, possibly displaying an empiricism beyond that of their medical colleagues, carried out what amounted to controlled experiments in order to test for the marks of true possession.” Wightman’s remark that “it is difficult on the one hand to find any branch of human knowledge which is not at least referred to by Aristotle, whereas the one activity of which we find little trace – experimental science – makes, as I shall try to demonstrate, but a poor showing in any of the ‘renaissances”’ (Science and the Renaissance, vol. 1, p. 2), is contingent upon the fact that he failed to pay attention to the occult sciences. 153 Siraisi, Clock and Mirror, p. 131. 154 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 19, p [133] 721.

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the occult faculties, which cannot be known by manifest demonstration, can still be applied by method and reason to the cure of diseases.155

Because of his concern with occult powers, therefore, Fernel became convinced, as Francis Bacon did after him, that the experimental investigation of nature can be a totally reliable and important enquiry, to make us extremely knowledgeable, but having a difficult and uneven approach, it gets passed over as if it were abandoned … Only acquaintance with properties sets things themselves in action, all other acquaintance is little more than verbiage. When I set this before my gaze, I am now virtually bored with my earlier exertions and deeply regret them … I wish that things would talk to humanity and explain what they are like, so as to drive contrived conversations far away.156

It is in connection with this empiricist enterprise that Fernel allows Brutus to provide an extended account of alchemy. Although Brutus is the practising alchemist, Eudoxus, the mouthpiece for Fernel, is portrayed as clearly believing in the usefulness of alchemy. It is Eudoxus, for example, who sets off Brutus’s account by pointing out that “steam or water extracted by technical skill from a plant retains the plant’s power and property” – properties deriving from the total substance are implanted with such a grip that they can still remain even though the total substance has been destroyed.157 Clearly, Fernel believes that alchemical techniques are useful for creating new medicines, which may be effective against the virulence of the hidden diseases. At the end of Brutus’s account, Eudoxus dismisses the gold-making aspect of alchemy, saying “let it be enough for us to coax out from individual things something sound and very pure, for the supreme power of occult properties to reside in.”158 So far, then, we have seen nothing of the supernatural in Fernel’s use of occult arts and sciences. Everything is in keeping with his emphasis upon secondary causation. And Fernel can be seen, therefore, to be 155 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 19, pp. [133] 723, and [134] 723. The Hippocratic allusion, of course, is to the famous first Aphorism: “The art is long, and life short, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.” 156 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 18, p [130] 707. On the connection between magic and experiment in Bacon’s work, see Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, and Henry, Knowledge is Power. 157 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 18, p. [131] 711. 158 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, ch. 18, p. [133] 719. Fernel’s comparatively brief discussion of alchemical matters was surprisingly influential among alchemists. See Matton, “Fernel et les alchimistes.”

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a thinker who always pursued the enterprise of natural philosophy – seeking to explain all physical phenomena in naturalistic terms, and always avoiding (in spite of a devout religious belief, and in spite of his frequent use of the term “divine”) recourse to God and the supernatural. There are two chapters, however, in which there are extended discussions of demons and magical effects which seem, on a superficial glance at least, to belie this naturalistic approach. It is important, therefore, to consider these chapters, in case we need to revise our assessment of Fernel and his work. We should remind ourselves at the outset that it would have been extremely surprising if Fernel had not believed in demons. As a devout son of his church, Fernel was bound, in more senses than one, to believe in demons. He did not, however, have to believe that they were relevant to natural philosophy or to medicine. Indeed, the chapter devoted to demons in Book i, the natural philosophical book, is effectively curtailed when Eudoxus says, “perhaps we have already gone too far about matters that can seem not much related to the practice of medicine.”159 What’s more the discussion in this book is little more than a summary, firstly of church doctrine on the fall of Lucifer and the organisation of the different orders of angels and their roles, drawn from the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite; and secondly of Platonic beliefs in demons, drawing chiefly upon the Epinomis, the Laws, and the Symposium. The only significant points made in this chapter are, on the one hand, that attempts to summon demons to do one’s bidding are at best useless, and at worst highly dangerous, and on the other, that belief in demons is useful for religion. At the end, for example, Philiatros points out that, if we have made the discovery that any spirits flit about and wander in the whole world, and are not accessible to sense, and are incorporeal, immortal, and with a share of intelligence, it must be certain and sure that the mind we discern in ourselves as capable of intelligence is incorporeal and immortal together; and that when it has moved out of the body, it lives for ever, and is enrolled in the companies of spirits.

In other words, demonology is good for proving the immortality of the soul. Certainly, those who denied the existence of demons were regarded by the orthodox as atheists.160 159

De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 11, p. [61] 395. De abditis rerum causis, Bk i, Ch. 11, pp. [60] and [61] 393–395. The association between belief in demons, ghosts, witchcraft and belief in the immortality of the soul, and in God, was still being utilised to combat atheism at the end of the seventeenth century, and into the eighteenth. See Prior, “Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft 160

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It seems likely that Fernel did not think it was appropriate to say much about demons here in the part of the work devoted to natural philosophy, because of the disciplinary separation between natural philosophy and theology. Eudoxus points out that what Christian and Platonic sources say about angels and demons cannot be fitted into what Aristotle says in any detail, and since natural philosophy is effectively drawn from Aristotle, little can be said. Fernel might well have agreed with the notorious approach of Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), therefore, in his De incantationibus, who tried to show that everything attributed to demons can be explained by natural causes, and that therefore, as far as natural philosophy was concerned, demons did not exist (though he was careful to accept, in accordance with orthodoxy, that their existence was demonstrated by revelation).161 Let us turn to the chapter in the second book where Fernel discusses things that are said to be “beyond nature” (trans naturam). After acknowledging that it is in God’s power to inflict disease supernaturally, and that He sometimes gives permission to “the evil Demon” to inflict them, Eudoxus then talks of ways of inflicting disease by magical procedures (by incantations, amulets, pricking an effigy of a particular person, the “evil-eye,” and so on). The chapter now seems to alternate between discussing diseases inflicted by demons and those by self-professed or would-be magicians. Generally speaking, Fernel accepts demonic disease, and possession, but is a bit more sceptical of magical disease. He dismisses talk of the evil-eye on naturalistic grounds, for example, but does accept “fettering” of people by magicians in ways which we would now call psychosomatic (putting the victim off sex or food, for example). Similarly, “of remedies that are beyond nature, some are genuinely divine, and others are magical.” Once again, Fernel calls on authority, particularly Scriptural authority, to affirm the reality of magicians capable of “mimicking” genuine miracles. Mimicking now seems to be crucial to Fernel’s understanding of magic, because he then goes on to say that demons cannot create things by their magic arts but only “images and spectres [species et spectra] of things, to trick human minds.” How this fits with the stories we have just been told of genuine illness caused by de-

and Seventeenth-Century Science”; Edelin, “Joseph Glanvill, Henry More, and the Phantom Drummer of Tedworth,” pp. 186–192; Jobe, “The Devil in Restoration Science”; Clark, “The Scientific Status of Demonology.” 161 Pietro Pomponazzi, De incantationibus (Basel, 1556 – but written in 1520). On this see Thorndike, History of Magic, v, pp. 98–110; and Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi.

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monic possession is not clear. Magical cures frequently turn out to be temporary, and leave the patient worse off afterwards, he tells us.162 It has to be said that there are confusions and inconsistencies in Fernel’s account of demonic and magical disease, perhaps indicating a tension between his naturalistic approach and his need to uphold religious doctrine. The familiar consistent search for genuine secondary causes re-emerges, however, when he turns to consider what he calls superstitious remedies, “remedies for which no one can say where they get their supposed powers, nor why.”163 Now we are told categorically that magical chants, spells and rituals do not work. Interestingly, Fernel is also keen in this section to show that his own ideas about total substances cannot be used indiscriminately to give credence to superstitious remedies. The idea of curing toothache by scraping the gums with the tooth of a person violently slain, for example, must be mere superstition, and not a genuinely occult remedy. If it was due to the total substance of the tooth, then the tooth of any other human being would be active with the same property, Fernel insists, not just the tooth of someone violently murdered.164 In spite of some confusion in Fernel’s attempts to deal with demonic and magical disease, it seems safe to say that there is nothing here which reveals Fernel to be a credulous and irrational thinker, prone to retreat into supernaturalism to explain anything which he cannot easily understand. The fact that he can readily distinguish between genuinely occult effects, on the one hand, which are entirely natural and clearly established by experience even if they cannot be understood in terms of Aristotelian natural philosophy, and superstitious beliefs, on the other, shows his awareness of how far natural explanations can be taken. Indeed, it seems reasonable to conclude that Fernel’s interest in what might be called the fringes of occult beliefs, demonology and superstition, was all part of his overall attempt in the De abditis rerum causis to understand and codify occult, but nonetheless real, qualities and to show what they could tell us about the nature of the world and the nature of disease.

162

De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 16, p. [118–121] 645–660. De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 16, p. [121] 663. On the role of superstition in helping natural philosophers to sort out genuine effects from spurious claims, see Clark, “Rational Witchfinder.” 164 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 16, p. [122] 667. 163

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Another De abditis causis, a Precursor of Fernel’s? The De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causis (1506–On Some Hidden and Remarkable Causes of Diseases and Cures) of Antonio Benivieni (ca. 1443–1502), a Florentine physician, has previously attracted the attention of historians of science and medicine, as well as the distinguished historian of the occult sciences, Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965), and the doyen of Fernel studies, Sir Charles Sherrington.165 Benivieni’s approach to his medical work has been seen as innovatory because he was a physician who also successfully used surgery.166 Perhaps because of this, and his reputation for performing numerous autopsies, he has frequently been praised as a founder, or at any rate a precursor, of pathological anatomy.167 What’s more, as Thorndike’s interest in him indicates, his work drew on occult ideas. It is perhaps worth considering, therefore, whether Fernel’s De abditis causis owes anything to Benivieni’s. In fact, although the title is so close to that of Fernel’s, the work is strikingly different. Fernel, as we have seen, specifies in detail what he means by hidden causes, providing as much argument as he can about their origins, how they work, and why they must be accepted even though they fall outside the remit of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Benivieni does nothing remotely comparable. Essentially, Benivieni’s book consists simply of a hundred and eleven case records, with no attempt to discursively link them together as illustrative of any specific medical or natural themes.168 Benivieni’s title is evidently meant to attract not medical readers but the curious with a taste for the fantastic. All the reports are of highly unusual cases where the marvellous and even the sensational are emphasised. There is, however, no attempt whatsoever to draw any conclusions 165 Antonio Benivieni, De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causis. On Benivieni’s work see the edition translated by Charles Singer, with a biographical appreciation by Esmond R. Long (1954); and, for example, Gurlt, Geschichte der Chirurgie und ihrer Ausübung, 3 vols, i, pp. 905–909; Thorndike, History of Magic (1934), iv, pp. 586–592; Sherrington, Endeavour, especially pp. 101–102; and the items in the note after next. 166 For example, Benivieni, De abditis causis, case 28 (p. 75), contains a very authentic record of successful incision of an imperforate hymen. 167 Costa and Weber (eds), L’inizio dell’anatomia patologica nel Quattrocento fiorentino; and Rosa, “Eine ‘moderne’ Beobachtung von tödlichem Gallensteinleiden durch Antonio Benivieni (1443–1502).” For a more restrained assessment of Benivieni, see Siraisi, “‘Remarkable’ Diseases, ‘Remarkable’ Cures.” 168 A further 49 or so cases were removed by his original editor, his brother Girolamo, but have been recovered and included in the 1954 edition of the work.

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from these cases about the nature of occult influences, the role of demons, or any other aspect of medical theory or practice raised by these incidents. Indeed, in many of the cases the mechanisms of the illness, so to speak (blockages, wounds, ruptures etc.), are entirely obvious. The use of the adjective “abditus” in the title is therefore somewhat misleading – there is often nothing occult here. As one recent commentator has pointed out, “hidden” in Benivieni’s work often signifies nothing more than that the problem is internal to the human body, and so cannot easily be determined.169 Benivieni is highly unlikely to have chosen the title of the work himself. Compiled after his death from a notebook which he used to record cases worthy of note, the title was probably chosen for sensationalist reasons by his brother when he prepared it for the press. Even in those cases where the occult does figure, there is no attempt to analyse what has happened, or how it might have occurred. Demonic possession is simply assumed where necessary (such as the case of a woman who repeatedly vomited nails and needles embedded in wax balls, and pieces of food so big that they could not have been swallowed whole). In one case, where an arrow was extracted by a magician who then placed his fingers on the wound and uttered a charm, we are simply told that the patient was “duly cured and recovered” – nothing is made of the use of a spoken charm. Benivieni’s little book mentions two other instances in which the recitation of a form of words led to cure, but in these the proceedings are part of an explicitly Christian ceremony.170 Benivieni draws no distinction between religious and magical rituals, however, but merely recounts them without comment.171 Fernel, as we have seen, discusses such matters at length in a critical way. It is a further sign of the lack of concern of Benivieni in examining medical procedures that he makes almost no use of drugs at all in his hundred and eleven recorded cases, or at least he does not record them (though he

169 Siraisi, “‘Remarkable’ Diseases, ‘Remarkable’ Cures,” p. 240. For a major study of the background to this kind of sensationalist concern with “wonders of nature,” see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Benivieni’s work, correctly described as idiosyncratic, is discussed briefly, pp. 145–146. 170 Benivieni, De abditis causis, cases 8 (p. 37), 9 (p. 39), 26 (p. 71) and 45 (p. 97). 171 It seems clear, however, that Benivieni accepts the divine origins of diseases in an entirely religious way. While the word “divine” for Fernel triggers a search for the nature of secondary causation, for Benivieni it is simply accepted as a supernatural phenomenon. Evidently this is not unconnected with Benivieni’s belief in the doctrines of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498); see Siraisi, “‘Remarkable’ Diseases, ‘Remarkable’ Cures,” p. 241.

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occasionally mentions the drugs used by other practitioners). Fernel has a profound interest in the use of a large repertory of medicaments, and much of his De abditis causis is concerned with whether drugs work by manifest or occult means, or in Fernel’s terms, according to the composition of their elemental qualities or to their “total substance.”172 In about fifteen cases, however, Benivieni was sufficiently puzzled and intrigued by a patient’s death that he resorted to necropsy to try to reveal the origin of the disorder.173 It is these few cases, of course, which have earned him his place as a founding father of pathological anatomy. Earlier instances of necropsy are known; for instance, a celebrated early record of a necropsy dated 1302 describes that it was carried out to explore the possibility of poisoning, perhaps “a suspicion only too reasonably attached to sudden deaths in general in Italy in medieval and Renaissance times.”174 Necropsy might nowadays be expected frequently to illuminate obscure causes of disease. However, when the ruling theory of physiology and pathology was humoral, necropsy’s role was less prominent; the question was not usually the state of solid organs, but the possibility of abnormal fluid constituents or obstruction of their transit. Fernel’s own definition of disease, for example, was not in terms of structure or function of organs, but a more general “violation of the body, contrary to nature.”175 Even so, not uncommonly, the question of poisoning and the search for evidence in that regard did lead to autopsy. It has been claimed that Fernel too was a notable pioneer of necropsy. Sherrington held that Fernel “made necropsy, as far as he could, a routine practice for elucidating disease,”176 and it is true that in his Physiologia Fernel describes in detail a procedure for necropsy.177 But its manifest aim there is to reveal the structure of the normal human body, not the presence or nature of disease. “We have laid down the strongest foundations for the art of medicine,” he wrote, “by having described the dissection of the human body 172

Fernel discusses the “occult powers of medicaments” in Bk ii, Ch. 17. On the interventionist impulse in Fernel’s medical practice, see Brockliss, “Seeing and Believing,” p. 78. 173 For example, in Benivieni, De abditis causis, case 79, p. 157, disease of femur and uterus was found only after autopsy. 174 Long. History of Pathology, pp. 27–28. For a full account of the history of necropsy, see King and Meehan. “A History of the Autopsy.” 175 Fernel, Pathologia, Bk. i, Ch. 1. 176 Sherrington, Endeavour, p. 101. 177 Physiologia, Bk. i, Ch. 16.

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and brought all its parts one by one into view.”178 Again, in his Pathologia Fernel takes account of all the phenomena of disease in order to classify and explain it; he considers everything that can be seen or felt, including the urine, all possible symptoms, the course of the disorder, and so on – but not findings from necropsy, except in the instance of a child whose bowel was fatally blocked by a quince fruit.179 Obstruction of the passage of humours or of bowel contents was eminently comprehensible in the terms of humoral pathology, as was obstruction by supposed polyps found at autopsy in veins or arteries.180 Fernel can hardly be represented, therefore, as often drawing on necropsy for the resolution of pathological puzzles.181 Indeed, his De abditis causis discloses use of autopsy only four times, and to no notable purpose. It is mentioned in Book ii, chapter 10: “From the evidence of your eyes, in the dissected body you will barely notice defect in temperament in these [organs], but notice their putrefaction easily.” In Book ii, chapter 13 we are told that, “there were cases dissected after death where liver, spleen, lungs and all the internal organs abounded with revolting oozing spots, just like the skin.” Similarly, in Book ii chapter 14 we hear of “the viscera themselves, which (as was described in connection with the exanthemata) in dissected corpses are seen to be foul with pustules and ulcers.” And in Book ii chapter 15, Fernel says, “we decided to dissect another man who had perished from apoplexy without external cause, in whom thick and sticky humour was found similarly near the retiform tissue.”182 More use appears to have been made of necropsy by Fernel’s contemporary and friend Girolamo Cardano while he was at Bologna, not long after the publication of the De abditis causis.183 Indeed, Cardano ex-

178

Physiologia, Bk. i, peroration. According to Sherrington, the history of the unfortunate child whose case is described in Fernel’s Pathologia (Bk. 6, Ch. 9) had been held to be a uniquely early description of appendicitis; but as Sherrington himself points out (Endeavour pp. 184–185), she much more probably perished from intestinal obstruction. 180 See Forrester, “Malpighi’s De Polypo Cordis.” 181 Pace Siraisi, Clock and Mirror, p. 113, Fernel’s own Pathologia is remarkable for its very slender content of reference to necropsy findings and its rich store of clinical phenomena. 182 De abditis rerum causis, Bk ii, Ch. 10, p. [94] 537, Ch. 13, p. [106] 591, Ch. 14, p. [112] 619, Ch 15, p. [117] 641. Though a range of animals possess “retiform tissue” (the rete mirabile), it is absent from man, a fact most prominently stated by Vesalius in his De humani corporis fabrica published in 1543, five years before the publication of De abditis rerum causis, but perhaps five years after its composition, as discussed earlier in this Introduction. See Forrester, “Marvellous Network.” 183 Cardano, The Book of My Life, ch. 42. He was at Bologna from 1562 to 1570. 179

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plicitly called for attention to necropsy as a “postmortem diagnostic tool” and was closely associated with various instances of its use.184 In spite of Sherrington’s best efforts, the same could not really be said of Fernel. Bologna was, perhaps, an environment more tolerant of necropsy than the Paris of Fernel, but there is no evidence to suggest Fernel regretted this. This is not the place to reassess Benivieni’s contribution to the development of pathological anatomy. Our interest in his book is not as a study of autopsy but as a study of occult or hidden qualities in diseases and cures, with a view to comparing his achievement with Fernel’s. It is easy to see, however, even with only a cursory look at Benivieni’s book that, in spite of the similarity of title, there is no real comparison to be made with Fernel’s De abditis rerum causis. Fernel’s work was a carefully thought-out, well argued and erudite work which not only sought to add to the contemporary understanding of medicine, adding to Galen, but also to profoundly clarify and significantly exploit current ideas on the nature of occult qualities and associated occult sciences. Benivieni merely tells a few more or less sensational tales, some of them tall tales.185

Conclusion It should be recognised, then, that Jean Fernel’s De abditis rerum causis is one of the most important works of late Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine. In his efforts to offer a new understanding of the nature of certain kinds of disease, Fernel felt compelled to take the reader through a re-examination of the Aristotelian theory of forms, and souls, and related problems such as procreation and the development of the fetus, in order to be able to develop his essentially original ideas on the nature of total substances. Through these, in turn, he was able to develop a new and important approach to the properties of matter, developing the notion of occult qualities not just in medicine, but in natural philosophy. As the title of Fernel’s book suggests, the work aims to consider the hidden causes, not just of disease, but of anything whatsoever. 184

Siraisi, Clock and Mirror, pp. 27, 93, 96–97, 113–117. Thorndike points out that some of the cases reported as though Benivieni’s own are in fact stories with an ancient pedigree. Moreover, he also admits that Benivieni “makes heavy demands upon our credulity.” See Thorndike, History of Magic, iv, pp. 590, 587. 185

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It is well known that magical ideas achieved a new respectability in Renaissance philosophy. The discovery of the philosophical works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and the belief that they were written by a pre-Christian pagan who nonetheless was able to arrive by rational means at a foreshadowing of many Christian doctrines, ensured that the technical magical works also attributed to Hermes came to be seen in a new light. Magic, for centuries denounced by the church, now came to be seen as part of the original wisdom of the earliest ages, as close to the wisdom of Adam as the teachings of Moses, part of the prisca theologia.186 The Renaissance stage was set for a re-assessment of magical ideas. It seems clear from his influence in his own day and for immediately succeeding generations that Fernel was one of the most important contributors to this re-assessment. As Plancy suggests he was recognised as one of the most important writers on occult matters: Then, indeed, that nothing of his time might pass undevoted to the good of the community, he spent his evenings writing a remarkable treatise “On the hidden causes of things.” In it he dealt with the elements of all things, and especially with a number of problems which are obscure in philosophy and medicine; these in each case he treated so learnedly and appositely that he is recognized as surpassing his contemporaries in this kind of writing.187

Fernel’s star went into eclipse, of course, after Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood which, being incompatible with the Galenic system, required a completely revised physiology. Furthermore, the advent of the new corpuscularian and mechanistic philosophies, vigorously anti-Aristotelian, dealt with occult qualities in a completely different way to Fernel’s, and indeed completely supplanted them.188 186

See, for example, Brian Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science”; idem, “Introduction,” in Copenhaver (ed.), Hermetica; Walker, Ancient Theology; Schmitt, “Prisca theologia e philosophia perennis”; Hirai, “Humanisme, neoplatonisme et prisca theologia dans le concept de semence de Jean Fernel.” 187 “Plancy’s ‘Life’ of Fernel,” Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 160–161. 188 This should not be taken to mean that occult qualities were rejected in their entirety by seventeenth century thinkers. Certainly Descartes and Hobbes, in their mechanical systems, tried to do without occult qualities, claiming that their systems could explain everything in terms of particles in motion; others, however, insisted that occult qualities, or powers, of particles of matter could be accepted, as long as those qualities could be established by empirical investigation. With regard to the empirical foundations of occult qualities, then, these later thinkers shared much with Fernel. As far as we know, however, none of these later thinkers took up Fernel’s ideas about total substance, and used them to make occult qualities philosophically respectable.

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It is somewhat ironic that when interest in Fernel’s work was revived in the first half of the twentieth century his interest in the occult seemed to be an embarrassment and was played down or excused as Fernel was turned into a more “modern” thinker. This was never really convincing, however, and consequently Fernel remained outside the pantheon of great minds who contributed to the Scientific Revolution. It is hoped that the appearance of this new edition of his most original and powerful work, the De abditis rerum causis, will add to more recent efforts to reassess Fernel’s work once again.189 It is also hoped that this edition will contribute to on-going scholarly efforts to understand the relationship between “magic” and “science,” and to determine whether, and if so to what extent, magic played a part in the formation of the modern scientific worldview. As has been remarked before, it is impossible to deny the presence of magical ideas in Renaissance thinking about the natural world, and our attempts to analyse the role of these ideas must be based “on a firsthand knowledge of the primary texts.”190 This translation of Fernel’s major attempt to reassess occult qualities and to make them a legitimate part of natural philosophy should now enable a greater number of scholars to acquire that firsthand knowledge. It seems clear that Fernel’s arguments about occult qualities, and how they can be understood, endorse the claims of modern scholars who have sought to show the links between magic and the development of the experimental method in the late Renaissance period. Far from being at odds with one another, with proponents of each side supposedly “aware of the threat to its existence posed by the other,” it is in fact abundantly clear that those thinkers who promoted the experimental approach did so as a means of trying to deal with the occult qualities which, they had come to believe, were too important to be excluded from natural philosophy. It should also be clear from the De abditis rerum causis that it is dangerous to talk of two clearly defined mentalities – one occult and the other scientific.

Total substance was too closely associated with hylomorphism, which was rejected by the corpuscularian philosophers. On the empirical emphasis in later attempts to understand the operations of occult qualities, see Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy.” 189 Evidenced most recently by the papers in the special edition of Corpus, 41 (2002): Kany-Turpin (ed.), Jean Fernel; by Jean Fernel, Physiologia (1567), translated by Forrester; and the papers by Hiro Hirai listed in the Bibliography. But see also, Walker, “Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine”; Deer Richardson, “Generation of Disease”; Bono, Word of God; Brockliss, “Seeing and Believing.” 190 Vickers, “Introduction,” p. 13.

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In the case of a scientific mentality, at least (and we would say in the case of a contrasting so-called “occult mentality” too), this is to hypostatise something which has not yet come into being.191 An important aspect of the scientific mentality is the belief that the truth is best arrived at by empirical testing rather than by recourse to authority; but this belief emerged, at least in part, as a result of recognising the role played in natural phenomena by occult qualities – qualities which could only be codified by empirical investigation. It should also be clear that it is wrong to see “occult mentalities” as somehow irrational, or perhaps simply woolly-minded, compared to a more rigorous scientific mentality. Fernel was nothing if not rational in his approach to the questions which exercised his mind. He did not light upon occult qualities as a whim, or because of some mystical or fantastic tendencies in his psychology. On the contrary, as is clear from the De abditis causis, he drew upon them as a result of his dissatisfaction with the standard accounts of contagious and epidemic diseases, or rather with the inadequacy of the standard accounts of explaining those diseases. It was Fernel’s acute critical faculties, not woolly-mindedness, which led him to develop his views on occult qualities, and to try to explain them, in accordance with the rational categories of his day, as aspects of the “total substances” or the forms of things. It has been suggested in this introduction that Fernel’s De abditis causis is at least as important as Fracastoro’s contribution to 191 Ibid, pp. 9–10. A dichotomy between “the occult and the experimental scientific traditions” is also upheld in Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity,” pp. 95, and 136. It should be noted that Professor Vickers acknowledged that it is wrong to believe there was a clear differentiation in ways of thinking, by pointing out that “precisely those scientists who delivered sharp and acute attacks on the occult mentality … themselves retain many instances of occult beliefs and thought habits.” With a metaphorical shrug of his shoulders, Professor Vickers concluded that “Renaissance scientists were able to operate for a while, at least, in two finally incompatible traditions” (“Introduction,” p. 13). Professor Vickers seems to believe that because these traditions proved, in the long run, to be incompatible, they must always have been incompatible. This is whiggish and ahistorical. There’s no denying these traditions became incompatible, but they did so as the result of a long historical process in which, for example, attempts were made to separate real occult effects (such as gravity and magnetism) from spurious effects (such as the alleged effect of garlic on magnetism, or the supposed difference of effect between the opposition of two planets, and the conjunction of the same planets). In other words, occult qualities ended up on both sides of the divide, some being deemed legitimate, others illegitimate. Clearly, it would be wrong to say that occult qualities were irredeemably part of some inherently despicable “occult tradition” and were incompatible with the scientific tradition.

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the emergence of new ontological theories of disease. Moreover, it should also be seen as one of the major contributions to the Renaissance reassessment of occult qualities and their usefulness in natural philosophy. This reassessment played a key role in the critique of scholasticism, prising open the fetters of Aristotle’s definitions in natural philosophy and the bonds of Galenic medicine, and clearing a path towards the amalgamation of the experimental method with traditional natural philosophy, to provide its practitioners with a more certain way of acquiring knowledge of the natural world. With hindsight, we can see that what Fernel and the other innovatory thinkers who introduced the experimental method into natural philosophy did was to turn the traditional natural philosophy into something much closer to modern science. Although there is much else in Fernel’s book that has not been discussed here (for example his ideas on generation, and on the physiological role of medical spirits), it is in these far-reaching changes in Renaissance science and medicine, which would ultimately facilitate the change into early modern science and medicine, that Fernel’s great importance is to be found. John Henry John M. Forrester

ON THE TRANSCRIPT AND THE TRANSLATION

The Transcript This has been prepared from the text presented in the 1567 edition of the Universa medicina (see Bibliography), and at certain points the text from the 1586 edition of the Universa medicina (published at Lyons) has been consulted to resolve doubt, but no formal collation of the numerous editions of De abditis rerum causis has been made.1 Various ligations and abbreviations are employed which by Fernel’s time were fairly well agreed among printers, and they have all been expanded in the transcript and not otherwise noted. Assistance in interpreting Latin abbreviations has been drawn from McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, in which Appendix 4 supplies an extensive list, and shows how Renaissance compositors would use or not use an abbreviation to facilitate justification of a printed line. On Greek ligations, transcription was greatly assisted by Drysdall’s list of them.2 The margin of the original text contains summary headings which have been omitted in the transcript, but marginal references to previous works have been reproduced. The margin also contains symbols to indicate the extent of quotations. These have been replaced in the transcript by the insertion of quotation marks within the text, although the practice of Fernel’s printers was not consistent and some discretion has been necessary in placing these marks.3 The Latin orthography of the time is now unfamiliar, and the orthography of the transcript has been changed in certain respects for this reason, although care has been taken to preserve all that signifies Fernel’s meaning. In detail: 1 I have indicated the original page numbers of the 1567 edition in the margins of both transcript and translation. Our citations in the Introduction include this page number, in square brackets, as well as the page number in this edition. 2 Drysdall, “Abbreviations et lettres ligaturés utilisés dans les imprimés grecs de la renaissance.” I am grateful to Dr Stephen Rawles of the University of Glasgow for bringing this resource to my attention. 3 For the diverse practices of printers and scribes in relation to quotations at the time, and earlier, see Parkes, Pause and Effect, pp. 42 and 58.

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At numerous points, U has been converted to V and vice versa; thus the unfamiliar “vua,” a bunch of grapes, has become the familiar “uva.” No doubt ever arose here about what Latin word Fernel intended; for instance, an original “volui” was not converted to “volvi” unless the context obviously related to rotation and not to wishing. Similarly, “ij” at the end of a word is changed in the transcript to “ii”; the “j” no doubt served its purpose in the past by signalling the end of the word, but with the introduction of spaces in printed works, this function is no longer required. Similarly, the “(-)sequutus” of the original has been altered to “(-)secutus.” Paper is nowadays more readily available than in Fernel’s time, and so a new line with an indent has been provided for each change of speaker in the dialogue, and some paragraph markings have been provided to break up otherwise very long speeches. Transcription reproduces to some extent the manoeuvres of the original compositors and proofreaders, although it is now done not with separate metal types but on a keyboard. It kindles a warm respect for Andreas Wechel’s compositors, who were exceedingly accurate, but not beyond occasional apparent lapses, many of which were probably in conformity with the practice of their press. For instance, sometimes a sentence opens with a lower case letter instead of a capital letter. This has been silently corrected in the transcript. But it is notable that capital letters are occasionally present after a colon or comma, and appear to signal a marked change of the direction of thought. These capital letters have been left in place. The transcript reproduces the accentuation present in the original text (except the acute accent over the letter Q, which does not appear to indicate anything material to the meaning). This accentuation, absent from classical Latin, does serve specific purposes of the author and his printer: for instance, it is often present as an indication of the part of speech; “hîc” is not a pronoun; “éque” is equivalent to “et ex” and has nothing to do with a horse nor with equality; “venêre” is equivalent to “venerunt,” and has nothing to do with love; nor does “penè” in “ut totus penè turgeas,”4 since the grave accent indicates that it means “almost,” often spelled “paene.” Steenbakkers has provided a full account of the roles of accentuation

4

On p. [40] 284 in the present work.

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in Latin.5 IJsewijn and Sacré, in their Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, point out that to retain the accentuation merely in the interest of the “flavour” and the external appearance of the text is hardly worth the effort.6 Our effort here has been towards preserving the signals about the meaning that the original printers thought worth their effort. The spelling “quum” has been retained in the transcript where present in the original text, since in this work it seems consistently to indicate conjunctival “cum,” while Fernel’s printer spells prepositional “cum” as we do now. At the end of page 10 and elsewhere there are instances where conjunctival “cum” is represented by “cùm,” the grave accent evidently providing a clue (if one were needed!) to distinguish it from prepositional “cum,” and “cùm” being shorter than “quum”; perhaps the justification of the compositor’s line was facilitated in these instances. The punctuation of the original has not been altered. In particular, semicolons are not used. Although the first semicolon ever printed appeared in 1494 in Bembo’s De Aetna published by Aldus Manutius the Elder in Venice, it took much longer to gain general acceptance from printers, and the first semicolon recorded in Paris appeared in 1560.7 Although there are occasional inconsistencies in the use of punctuation marks, fidelity to the original has been preserved, in respectful defiance of the advice in IJsewijn and Sacré’s Companion to Neo-Latin Studies that “a good punctuation will show if the editor has well understood the text he publishes”; it is hoped that in the present case the translation will serve this purpose, and it displays no rigid link to the punctuation of the text.8 Partly no doubt to meet the requirement of justifying each line to the same printed length, the original text is inconsistent in its representation of the abbreviated names of the participants in the dialogue: “Brutus” is most frequently br, but less often brv or brvt or even brvtvs. These abbreviated names have been cut uniformly to two characters. 5

Steenbakkers, “Accent-marks in Neo-Latin.” IJsewiijn and Sacré, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, ii, p. 473. 7 This and much other detailed information is to be found in Parkes, Pause and Effect, p. 52. 8 IJsewiijn and Sacré, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, ii, p. 473. 6

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A certain number of words are not spelled uniformly throughout the work, for instance “sydera”/“sidera.” Uniform spelling has not been imposed throughout, since the reader is unlikely to be confused by these instances, and will be made aware of a feature of Renaissance printing practice as it was at Paris, which had by the 1520s taken over from Venice the lead in fine typography and the production of scholarly books.9

The Translation Fernel’s Physiologia has recently been translated into English,10 but no other work of his. The Physiologia was translated into French, however, in 1655, at the entreaty of “ceux qui n’entendent pas la langue Latine,” and this translation was republished in 2001.11 The aim has been to produce a translation into English as readable as possible. Fernel is well able to use the inflected language of Latin in long yet lucid periods, which English cannot handle, so that syntax has to undergo substantial recasting. The translator hopes that readers will not feel he has been high-handed, like Hilarius the Confessor mentioned by St Jerome, who “quasi captivos sensus in suam linguam victoris iure transposuit” – triumphantly carried off the meanings as captives into his own language.12 Though by no means verbose, Fernel very often uses pairs of near synonyms which tax a translator’s patience. Undoubtedly to him, as to his contemporaries, they represent a demonstration of a well-stocked larder of words (“copia verborum”13), and a traditional rhetorical device (“hendiadys”), rather than mere duplication; saying exactly the same thing in different words was matter for contempt then as now. Erasmus thought ill of public speakers who might expound a psalm as “Create in me a clean heart, a pure heart, an unsullied heart, a spotless heart, a heart free from stain, a heart untainted by sin, a purified heart, a heart that is washed, a heart white as snow …,” 9

Elton (ed.), The Reformation, p. 366. Fernel, Physiologia (1567). 11 Fernel, Les vii livres de la Physiologie composez en latin … 12 Saint Jerome, Epistulae, pars I: Epistula lvii ad Pammachium de optimo genere interpretandi, ch. 5. 13 The phrase “copia rerum ac verborum” dates back to Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, 10.1.6). King and Rix (eds), The De Copia of Erasmus, suggests that it covers variation of a single expression or thought by use of different forms of speech etc., as well as abundance, eloquence, and the ability to vary or enrich language. 10

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and so on.14 The present translator has not felt obliged as a matter of course to reproduce two Latin near-synonyms by two English words, nor to avoid repeating the same English word within a short interval if this aided clarity. Fernel, according to his biographer Plancy, took great pains in early life to acquire a sound Latin style, and like any orthodox Latin stylist of his time, does not like using the same Latin word twice in proximity. It may be that in oratory the use of two words nearly synonymous ensured that the meaning was transmitted by one or the other, but perhaps stylistic practices hammered out over centuries for oratory turn out unsuited to the printed word, where in case of initial doubt about the significance of a word, the reader can always try a second time immediately. So far as practicable, the verb tenses used by Fernel are reproduced in this translation; they appear occasionally anomalous to modern eyes, but present no impression of oversight on his part. A number of comparable anomalies occur in his Physiologia, but could not be reduced to any simple pattern, despite helpful advice from Professor David Langslow of the University of Manchester, U.K. One type of anomaly, in which the author’s standpoint in time alters during a sentence, occurs in Fernel’s writing, and also in the work of a distinguished military historian of to-day: The surrender of Poteidaia had not ended the rebellion of Athens’ allies in the region, and the dispersal of its inhabitants will, [my italics] if anything, have added strength to the rebel cause … The peltasts from Krousis may well have been native Thracians, and even if they were not, they and those from Spartolos and Olynthos will [my italics] probably have been relatively highly skilled since peltasts originated in Thrace.15

No attempt has been made to translate any Latin word by the same English word on every occasion – with one exception: “genus” has a clear-cut taxonomic association now, but not to Fernel; “kind” has been kept as its equivalent throughout, as the only obvious alternative to repeating the Latin word with inverted commas round it. It reads clumsily, but signifies an entity for which modern English provides no precise equivalent, except perhaps the Latin word itself. The Latin “temperamentum” presents a problem with no universally accepted solution; it indicates that a sum of elements acquired something that was not originally in them separately, and has degenerated into the 14 Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 24: Literary and Educational Writings 2, De Copia, edited by Betty I. Knott (Toronto, 1978), p. 321. The work, first published in 1512, is translated in King and Rix (eds), The De Copia of Erasmus. 15 John F. Lazenby, The Peloponnesian War, p. 43.

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mere “characteristic” of nowadays. The translator has nevertheless translated it and the associated “temperies” by “temperament,” but is aware that “constitution” was favoured by Sherrington; it seems reductionist. Sometimes “balance” has plausibility. “Complexion” has sound justification as an orthodox contemporary rendering of the Greek “crasis” and an equivalent to “temperamentum,” and appeals to the distinguished historian of medicine, Nancy Siraisi.16 Three dictionaries have been of particular use. The Oxford Latin Dictionary’s coverage ceased some twelve centuries before Fernel, but Cicero was still a style model, hence its persisting value. Castelli’s medical dictionary is an invaluable scholarly compilation, from a rather later period than Fernel, but one still wedded to a great deal of earlier lore.17 A third dictionary, Robert Stephanus’s Dictionarium Latinogallicum (1544), has proved very useful as an indicator of how Fernel’s contemporaries in France interpreted Latin words at the time. John M. Forrester

16 17

Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 102 ff. Castellus, Lexicon medicum.

DE ABDITIS RERUM CAUSIS: A SYNOPSIS Preface Addressed to the newly crowned Henry ii, Fernel declares that these studies, long kept from the public, advance the healing art and go beyond the teachings of the ancients. He reminds his readers that this is possible by rehearsing the Renaissance view that the moderns have gone beyond the ancients, in the arts, in the invention of gunpowder, the printing press and paper, and in the discovery of the New World. He also points out that pagan philosophy has been improved upon as a result of seeing it in the light of Christian doctrine. This brings him to the starting point of his theme in the De abditis causis, the claim of Hippocrates that “there is a divine aspect present in diseases.” Fernel’s book is the result of the “great effort of assessment” required to comprehend this opinion. This led Fernel to an understanding of the “hidden diseases,” which were not properly discussed by the ancients. His book will assess for the first time “how much of the divine, that is, of hidden causes, lies in both natural philosophy and medicine.”

book i Chapter 1 The elements of the world provide the only matter for each thing that is brought into being. The characters of the dialogue are introduced as Philiatros, wishing to know whether “what is divine in diseases needs divine assistance,” seeks out his learned friend, Brutus, and proposes that they call upon Eudoxus, a philosopher who does not believe that all the powers of things derive from a mixture of the elements. Philiatros asks Brutus for a short primer about the principles required for their debate with Eudoxus. Brutus, drawing upon the distinction between art and nature, suggests that natural, as opposed to man-made, objects have their own principle of coming-to-be. These natural objects come to be out of a substrate which consists of matter and form, but matter always remains unchanged and unchanging, and so “while something

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is coming into existence, only its form is born and appears.” In the case of complex bodies, they are composed not directly from unformed matter but from matter which has already been formed into the elements. The substances of the four elements persist through complex bodily changes and provide the real substrate for complex bodies. When Eudoxus appears Philiatros asks him about “the divine remedies for diseases” and expresses his confidence that Eudoxus will prove everything he says “as mathematicians do.” Chapter 2 The form of a natural thing is substance, not accident. The three speakers all agree on the basics of hylomorphism until Eudoxus declares that forms are substances in their own right. Brutus points out that since forms are always in matter, they could be said to be almost like accidents, that is to say (in the Aristotelian sense) merely properties of a substrate thing. [Consider the case of a thin man who puts on lots of weight. His thinness or fatness are said to be accidental, merely contingencies; they do not change the fact that he is a man, so his substance as a man remains unperturbed by these accidental changes.] Brutus puts forward the view, supported by Alexander of Aphrodisias, that form is nothing more than the collection of qualities of a body. Eudoxus shows that the relevant passages of Alexander reveal his commitment to the view that forms are real substances. He goes on to point out that, according to the principles of Aristotelian hylomorphism, matter is always the same and so the distinctiveness of things must be due to their forms. Accordingly, the forms are more excellent than matter and so are “the first and outstanding part of all things,” and by implication must be substantial. Chapter 3 The substance of the form of every natural body is simple, and has not arisen from the forms of the substrate, contrary to Alexander’s position. It is pointed out that in complex bodies the different parts must have their own forms: bark, pith, leaves and berries, or nerves, bones and flesh, for example, have their own “essence and form.” Brutus takes this to mean that complex bodies have a composite form; the more complex the body, the more forms there will be in the composition of its overall soul. Eudoxus, claiming the support of Aristotle, insists,

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however, that the form of a complex body is nonetheless simple. The complexities are to be found in “the substrate it [the soul] took over”; so, “the body is created for the form’s sake, not the form for the body’s sake.” Drawing upon Alexander again, Brutus insists that the form of a complex whole must be put together “like some harmony of blending forms.” Eudoxus uses Aristotle, and the substantial nature of forms, to refute the suggestion that a form can be a harmony of any kind of things. Indeed, he insists that if diverse things combine to form one thing, “they have to be gathered, linked, and contained by the power of something else, so as not to disperse.” The something else is the soul, which must be “one and simple.” But Brutus now says that this combining power, attributable to the soul, derives from the “tempering and mingling of the bodies substrate to it.” Eudoxus quickly points out that, if this were so, the form would be “called forth,” or created, by the combining of the substrate bodies. Taking it for granted that the form of man is his mind, or soul, Eudoxus insists upon the impiety, and absurdity, of this view. Brutus tries to stick to his guns, until Eudoxus reminds him that forms are substances and that his view implies that forms arise from qualities, which no substance could do (since substances have qualities, they must precede the qualities, not emerge from them). Eudoxus goes on to suggest that, although the bones, nerves, membranes, etc., of a mule have their own forms, there is still a form of the whole mule. He now says this is a compound derived from the substrate forms of the parts. This seems to concede Brutus’s point, but the differences between them are clarified by an analogy with theriac, the famous compound polypharmaceutical. The curative power of theriac, according to Brutus, derives from the powers of the various ingredients, “so the forms and powers of composite bodies proceed and take their origins from the substrate natures.” For Eudoxus, by contrast, theriac should be seen as “a single thing.” The ingredients taken all together “have acquired a new form of the whole, a simple one, embellished with its new powers of its own.” Similarly, in plants and animals, Eudoxus says, the elements and the original parts stay intact when the simple form of the whole takes up its role. Plants and animals have many powers which cannot derive from the powers of the elements, so they must have a simple form which has taken none of its essence from the forms of their parts.

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introduction Chapter 4 The forms of the individual parts that are in a composite are as it were preparations for the introduction of a form of the whole, and they are multiple.

Brutus objects to the implication that different parts, bone, flesh, nerves, etc. will all have one superimposed form. Eudoxus points to the fact that a living creature has a form responsible for its vital functions which can be destroyed at death, leaving the forms of bone, flesh, etc. transiently the same as before. “Whatever it is from which we receive the functions of life, is called both the soul and the form of a thing.” It should be noted that there is no separate discussion of whether souls are forms anywhere in the De abditis causis; this is always simply assumed. Eudoxus uses the distinction between potentiality and actuality to support his view. A body can potentially take a number of forms but there is always one form present in actuality. He then brings in the notion of natural spirit, which is entirely uniform and distributed throughout the creature. It is through the mediation of this spirit that the soul resides in the whole creature; hence the soul, like the spirit, has to be everywhere in the animal. Eudoxus dismisses Brutus’s objection that bone and flesh have their own special spirits, and therefore souls, by suggesting that the same soul can bring about different outcomes when using different instruments. Brutus asks how the same form can be responsible for different and contrary effects (he provides examples of the various medicinal uses to which plants or parts of animals can be put). Eudoxus simply points out that these effects derive from the parts, used after the plant or animal is dead, and therefore have nothing to do with the proposed simple soul responsible for the functions of life. The forms of the parts, according to Eudoxus, merely prepare the substrate body for the introduction of the form of life, or soul. The bodies of all living things must conform to three requirements or preparations. The combination of elements must provide a proper and suitable temperament. It must have suitable organic parts (such as bones, flesh, liver, heart, etc.), and a spirit pervading the whole which has vital heat. The spirit bearing vital heat is said to be the most essential prerequisite, the nearest in nature to the soul, and its constant companion. When Brutus suggests that the spirit could emerge from a combination of the elements, Eudoxus replies that both the faculty responsible for shaping the body into organic parts, and the spirit, have a “more divine origin.” The temperament, due to the qualities of the four elements, remains the

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same immediately after death, but the heat and spirit are gone. The chapter finishes with a brief mention of seeds. The seed has powers that were present in the parent, for generation and the bestowing of life, and so it is the deputy for the adult form, possessing the same faculties. Chapter 5 It is not the potentiality of a natural thing to proceed to a form through its own initiative; but just as an actuality is summoned from a disposition, a form is summoned from the potentiality of the matter. Philiatros asks whether the seed has the power to prepare matter to receive a definite form, and therefore embodies potentiality. There follows a discussion of what is meant by potentiality. Philiatros then asks whether the form simply emerges from a suitable potentiality in matter. Brutus says yes, and that no other explanation is needed for the origin of form. Eudoxus, however, insists that whatever emerges from potentiality does so little by little, like a boy growing up, but “a form is introduced complete all at once.” Accepting the Aristotelian point of view, it is agreed that potentiality is a quality, but no quality “can operate at the start and of itself, but all activity is associated with a form in command of substance.” For a potentiality to develop into a form, therefore, there must be a prior form as the efficient principle of that development. Brutus demurs by claiming a potentiality can grow by its own power, being of a more excellent kind than other qualities. Eudoxus insists that a potentiality cannot produce a form from itself, and a seed cannot produce an animal. He does concede, however, that it is a good analogy to say that a form is summoned from a preceding potentiality “just as an actuality is from a disposition.” This is illustrated by the case of a musician playing a lyre carelessly as he emerges from sleep. The playing requires the command of the soul but it also requires a disposition to play, “imprinted by practice.” According to Eudoxus, in procreation the soul, or form, is imposed from outside by an external cause, but the cause could not do this without the assistance of the potentiality. A seed is stimulated to develop by the heat of the womb, and being augmented with other matter it provides this substrate matter with “every kind of preparations” – the three preparations discussed in Chapter 4 (temperament, organic organization and spirit) – “so that the form finally gets a share of substance and is inserted from outside.”

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introduction Chapter 6 There was not the smallest contribution previously in matter towards the generation of a form, and there is no potentiality of a form, nor can it be assigned to the kind of a substance.

Brutus now asks from where Eudoxus supposes the form comes. In the case of a hen’s egg it seems clear that the form emerges from the potentiality of the egg just as the whole chick itself does. Eudoxus reiterates that in a seed or an egg is a potentiality, a nature much less complete than a soul, being merely an advance preparation for importing one. There is no soul in a seed and so a seed cannot be said to be animate. Brutus invokes Aristotle, holding that there is a barely perceptible portion of soul in a seed, prevented by its initial weakness from setting about any of its normal functions. Eudoxus dismisses this as a misreading of Aristotle, as well as a violation of the principle that causes must always act, and cannot switch themselves on and off. When Brutus points out that the soul in a four month fetus cannot evoke running or speech, or perceive by sight, Eudoxus retorts that this is due to lack of organs suited to carrying out its actions. So it is with the soul in the original seed, says Brutus. Drawing again upon the authority of Aristotle, as well as Themistius and Plato, Brutus insists that it is the soul which is responsible for the growth, augmentation, and differentiation of the seed into the fetus. Eudoxus argues that Brutus misreads his sources (citing Plato where he is discussing not the individual soul but the world soul, for example), and argues that they all support his view, that the soul is intruded from outside. Brutus again asks where the soul comes from. At this point Eudoxus cites Aristotle’s De generatione animalium, where Aristotle seems to talk of a body and a spirit “more divine than the so-called elements,” and concludes that the soul is carried into the body “with the divine body and spirit.” So, “there is not even the least bit of soul in the seed.” This view is reinforced when Brutus admits that the despicable creatures assumed to be generated spontaneously out of rotting matter must acquire their souls from heaven. Eudoxus points to the absurdity of having the imperfect animals, born of foul filth, having a more divine origin than those perfect ones born from seeds. And yet, Brutus still insists that “the very form of a thing is already present in the seed” – albeit only potentially. So, Eudoxus tries another tack. Is the whole soul in the seed, or just part of it? It must be as a whole, Brutus admits (since a soul is indivisible into parts), but in an incomplete way. Brutus is first of all forced to defend this position by declaring the putative incomplete soul to be neither substance nor

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accident, but somewhere in between; a procedure which Eudoxus ridicules as a case of inventing categories to suit one’s argument. Subsequently, Eudoxus asks whether Brutus considers himself to be more a human being than a boy is. When Brutus says no, Eudoxus pounces: if human beings are not more or less in their humanness, then the form of a human being must likewise always be complete. The chapter ends with Eudoxus reasserting his position that in the process of generation there is no pre-existing form in what is being generated. Chapter 7 The form of what has been generated could not emanate from the parents. The character and source of the true origin of forms. Brutus drops his talk of incomplete forms which he says he only put forward to test Eudoxus, and suggests that the soul is implanted into the seed by the father, but only gradually begins to perform its functions as the body, its instrument, develops from the seed. Eudoxus is able to have some fun with this. Is there a single soul in ejaculated semen? Or one for each particle of seed? After all, from dog semen one puppy may result or several. If a large portion of the semen gathers at one point in the uterus and results in a single dog, would this dog have many souls? If a man keeps his own soul when he ejaculates semen, where do the souls in the seeds come from? If they come from his own soul, how does this procreation of numerous souls take place? Are we to suppose that there is a vast troop of human beings pre-existing inside Brutus, or inside any man? Or do souls have intercourse and become pregnant? Brutus responds by considering Aristotle’s views on the role of semen, concluding that “things are procreated in such a way that in the seed resides all its power, and the principle of generation itself.” Accordingly, a seed can generate a son even though the father is no longer present, and must contain the soul within it. Again, Eudoxus denies this, and this time introduces what Brutus calls “an esoteric philosophy” to explain where the soul comes from if it isn’t already in the seed: “Aristotle said it is the Sun, and the First of All Things, that moves everything.” Drawing upon the Metaphysics, Eudoxus tells us that Aristotle believed that in procreation neither matter nor form were generated or made, and that form is introduced into things, “either from Heaven or by that eternal original Mover of all things.” What Aristotle actually says, according to Eudoxus, is that “A human being and the sun

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beget a human being.” Accepting this exegesis, Brutus asks what the begetter contributes to procreation if neither matter nor form. The answer seems to be the potentiality to receive a form: “anyone who contributes a potentiality by which these [matter and form] can join to unite as one, must with full justification be regarded as the cause of the procreation.” Brutus, on the verge of conceding to Eudoxus, withdraws to ponder what he describes as “at once controversial and obscure.” Philiatros sums up. Everything is composed of matter and form, but form is far more important, and so is more usually regarded as providing th essence or nature of a thing than its matter is. Forms do not remain in matter for good – they enter suddenly at the creature’s origin and leave in a moment at its death. Before the form could move in, the matter had to be embellished and prepared. This preparation is called a potentiality, an equipping ahead of the appearance of the form. A begetter of something should be seen as contributing this potentiality, either on its own, or in association with a seed. The form arrives from outside, blown in “as if by a breath” by “a higher and more excellent craftsman.” All that is left, Philiatros declares, is for Eudoxus to explain where the form comes from. Brutus comes in and comments on the obscurity of these matters and that “to know for sure is a hopeless quest,” but is excited about what he is now learning: “a human being begets a human being and the sun does.” Eudoxus tells us that Aristotle held a human being to be the begetter of the whole composite human being, but the form itself he believed to originate from an eternal and immortal source. Physically speaking, this eternal source is the sun and “the orbits and unchangeable paths of all celestial bodies.” But, behind such secondary causes is the cause of everything, “God the craftsman.” Brutus closes the chapter by asking for more details about the secondary causation: “when and how Aristotle came to think that the natural origin of forms was of the heavens.” Chapter 8 The forms and original substances of everything are derived from heaven, according to Aristotle. Eudoxus reports Aristotle’s view that all things are produced from matter and form, but the efficient cause, the cause of coming into being, is heaven. Experience tells us that the annual cycles of the Sun “brings on the birth of things, and accomplishes their declines and deaths.” Eudoxus denies that the four elements contribute all of

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the substance of things, and insists upon the role of heaven, which otherwise might be regarded as being “created in vain.” Referring again to Aristotle, he says there is a “celebrated heavenly power, diffused into the whole universe,” and penetrating into the “remotest recesses of earth,” and “the most close-knit and solid bodies.” Brutus finds it easier to accept that the kinds of creatures which emerge by spontaneous generation may be procreated “by the power of the heavenly spirit,” than that creatures generated from seed are. Thinking in astrological terms, Brutus points out that humans, horses, lions, and the like, “are born and endowed with soul and form, at any time of year or state of heaven.” Eudoxus assents to a belief in an “uncommon assembly and combination of stars” which once resulted in the spontaneous generation of even “the more perfect animals,” and could do so again. Such universe-changing heavenly circumstances are so rare, however, that “nature in her wisdom and foresight … placed a nursery of life in the heavens,” and enclosed a vital power in seeds. These seeds could not only prepare matter and suit it for the generation of things but “for all time” could “attract in from heaven the celebrated power associated with the soul.” Brutus has one more difficulty: all forms are corporeal (except for minds, or rational souls) and yet they are supposed to be sent from heaven “without a body.” In response Eudoxus invokes an analogy with light. Just as the Sun can illuminate a prepared body in such a way that the body begins to emit a light of its own (examples might be luminescent bodies, or even a candle ignited by concentrating the sun’s rays with a lens), so the stars, or the heavens, do not have to emit already created forms from themselves, nor send down substance, they merely have to stimulate suitably prepared matter so that a form appears. Satisfied, Brutus now asks how we can put our knowledge of the heavenly origin of forms to use. Chapter 9 In philosophising upon Nature, Aristotle established the divine origin of forms: that greatest God created the heavens and stars, and bestowed on these the powers of begetting things; these are Platonic views too, compatible with Holy Writ. The chapter begins with Eudoxus and Brutus showing that Aristotle and Plato both acknowledge God as the underlying primary cause of all natural phenomena. Philiatros then suggests that they should show “how neatly the writings of the philosophers concur with each

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other.” Eudoxus begins by describing Aristotle’s belief in a “double world” – a material world and an incorporeal world “beyond the reach of our senses.” He then discusses Aristotle’s account of the nature and attributes of God. Brutus remarks that Aristotle must have been influenced on these issues by Plato before outlining Plato’s views on the nature of God. Philiatros now asks them to consider whether these ancient philosophers believed the universe to have been created at a particular time, or to be eternal. Acknowledging the Aristotelian arguments for the eternity of the world, Eudoxus quickly goes on to show that in the De mundo [now known to be spurious] he acknowledged that the world was created by God. He is then led to talk of the “unbroken procreation” resulting from the fact that God imparted a procreative power to all organic things, “by scattering the seeds of his divinity.” There were general seeds of generation implanted in the heavens and stars and special seeds implanted in individual things. Finally he links this to Aristotle’s belief in astrological influence. Brutus then takes over, showing that Plato believed in a created world, but one that was also endowed with a procreating power. This power too was established by God scattering “seeds of reasonings [semina rationum] and the power of begetting things.” Brutus even interprets the famous passage in Timaeus (41D), in which the Creator assigns souls to the stars, to fit Eudoxus’s account of the heavenly origin of forms. Philiatros finishes the chapter by showing the similarity between Plato’s ideas and Christian teachings (presumably Fernel did not feel any need to do this in the case of Aristotle, since his readers would have been used to scholastic assumptions about the compatibility of Aristotle with Christian doctrine). Chapter 10 All transient and mortal things were divinely originated in the past; they are now both begotten and controlled by heavenly excellence, which is itself manifestly divine. Eudoxus continues the same theme by asking how God scattered seeds by which procreation would proceed indefinitely, seeds of his divinity, into all living creatures. He makes the point that God not only creates but also preserves all life. He quotes Theophrastus: “The origin of things, through which everything both exists and endures is, is divine.” Brutus sees similarities in Plato, and Philiatros in Moses and in St Paul (Acts, 17, 28): “God that is the giver of life … is not far from each of us, and in him we live, move, and have our being.” Eudoxus sums up, saying “celestial” is no different from “divine” and

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that these terms meant the same not only to Aristotle and Christian writers, but also to Hippocrates, Plato, and Vergil. “What God long ago started work upon by his particular actions, he has now entrusted to heaven to carry on its management.” He also reiterates the Sun’s role: shining on bodies, it makes them shine in different ways. To some things it only imparts existence, to others the possession of a soul as well, be it nutrient, sentient, or intellectual; “it [the sun’s light or influence] is not taken up in one fashion by all.” Brutus suggests that Plato’s Ideas are similar to Aristotle’s idea of the form, being established by God and residing in heaven. He then goes on to summarize notions which he heard personally from a Platonist teacher. Ideas emanate from the divine mind, he taught, “And from them trickle down the patterns of ideas introduced into the soul of the world, and from the patterns seeds of patterns are dispersed into the heavens and the stars.” During his exposition, Brutus returns to the idea of a spirit vehicle and instrument of the soul (see Chapters 4 and 6), whose companion is vital heat. “Percolating into the whole body of the world, and mingling itself with individual things, this spirit carries along with it … both the world’s soul, and the patterns of ideas, and the seeds of patterns from heaven and the stars.” Eudoxus reproves Brutus for being so heated in earlier debate, even though it is now clear that he fundamentally agrees with Eudoxus. Brutus makes the excuse that he did it for the sake of argument, but also to arrive at a fuller unanimity. Chapter 11 The spirits by whose rudders people say the world is controlled. Philiatros suggests that, for the sake of completion, some account should be given of angels and demons. The account starts innocuously enough with the standard tale of the fall of Lucifer, a brief notice of the Dionysian celestial hierarchy, and the notion of guardian angels. Finally, Philiatros tells us how the angels who fell with Lucifer have become evil spirits, deceiving mankind. Brutus then takes over to summarize Platonic ideas on demons. Like angels, Platonic demons are intermediaries between God and mankind, are arranged in hierarchies, and one is allocated to each person, as a guardian. Plato did not distinguish between good and bad demons but Proclus, Iamblichus and other late Platonists did. Talk of evil demons leads to a discussion of sorcery. Those who try to summon demons for their own ends are merely falling into a demonic trap – demons are not really summoned but appear voluntarily “to enmesh

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us in their deceits.” Eudoxus is clearly uncomfortable in the realms of demonology, though he does make a half-hearted attempt to suggest Aristotle held similar ideas about good and evil spirits. Philiatros concludes the chapter, and the first Book, by insisting that proof of the existence of such incorporeal beings helps us to be sure that “the mind we discern in ourselves” is also incorporeal and immortal.

book ii Preface Because the causes of things are not always obvious, but lie hidden, different philosophies have emerged. Thinking now in terms of medicine, Fernel says the two most notable are those espoused by the Methodic physicians, who subscribed to the atomist explanations of Democritus, and by the Dogmatics, who upheld the four-element theory of Hippocrates. Fernel says that he wants both of them to recognise “how precarious and how grounded in uncertain belief is all that is usually debated about the original causes of things.” Dismissing atomism, Fernel admits that he would not go so far as to deny the powers of the four elements. Nonetheless, he believes that the attempt to derive every efficient cause from these elements, “established by no more than plausible reasoning,” is deluded. “The causes of many [natural] events belong elsewhere.” Chapter 1 Powers reside in each generated thing that are some of them due to the matter, some of them to the temperament of the qualities, and some to the form. Brutus sets up the main item for the afternoon’s agenda: to decide how much influence hidden causes have in the medical sphere. The starting point, according to Eudoxus, should be to understand how the qualities or powers of things derive either from the temperament, the matter, or the form. Qualities deriving from the temperament are the manifest qualities of hot, cold, moistness and dryness. Bare, unformed matter can have no qualities, but Eudoxus attributes to matter, rather than temperament, the second-order qualities which derive from moistness and dryness, and which are all concerned with consistency (hardness, softness, coherence, friability, roughness, smoothness, and so forth). Although ultimately these all derive from

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the elements, the temperamental qualities are crucial to medicine in a way that the qualities of matter are not. This leaves the powers deriving from form. Eudoxus admits to believing that all the effects we discern in natural phenomena proceed primarily from forms. Drawing upon an analogy with a craftsman and his tools, Eudoxus suggests that the form is the main efficient cause, but the powers of the temperament and matter often come to its aid. Sometimes, however, the form brings something about “to which neither the matter nor the temperament contribute anything.” Chapter 2 The powers that a form displays, like the form itself, are manifestly divine and are referred to as such, there being no sure and evident basis for them. Eudoxus recapitulates the conclusions of the morning’s debate: the body, or matter, of composite things is composed of the four elements, but the form is imposed from the fifth element, heaven. The origin of forms “is credited proximately to heaven, then to the intelligences, and then to God, who is the perpetual fount of life.” Divine excellence and power makes it way through everything. Accordingly, “the simple form of a thing is the divine thing we are enquiring into.” The functions and actions of a body which derive from its form “fall within the grasp of the senses and cannot escape our notice” but how they operate “is a point on the whole as hidden and unknown as the very essence of divinity.” They defy any sure explanation, therefore, and are called occult qualities. Aristotle and his follower Theophrastus, Eudoxus tells us, did not believe that everything that happens could be explained by the four elements, and they did not claim to attain to the causes of the occult qualities of things. But what about Galen? Brutus asks. He only very sparingly and uneasily mentions hidden properties. Eudoxus now determines to show “how great were the status and powers Galen allotted to the hidden causes of things.” Chapter 3 The structure of the human body and of every living creature is divine. Eudoxus begins his Galenic exegesis with The Shaping of the Fetus, showing how Galen acknowledges the wisdom and power of the designer of the human body. The ancient physician also acknowledged

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that the way in which a soul shapes the parts is unknown, but clearly is not random. Up to his old tricks, Brutus counters with Galenic citations of his own. In these Galen attributes the shaping of the fetus to the seed and to the innate heat of the living body. Eudoxus merely draws a distinction between those parts of his oeuvre where Galen offers a popular discourse and those where he is more wellcrafted and subtle. When he seriously discusses the nature of the soul he always affirms it to be “clearly divine.” He even mentions the role of “higher bodies” in generation, meaning the Sun, Moon, and stars. Galen agrees with Plato and Aristotle in suggesting “that God was divided in particular seeds … so that his virtue travels everywhere.” Brutus points out that Eudoxus is piecing together recondite passages and that his interpretation is precarious. Ignoring this, Eudoxus continues to portray a Galen with ideas similar to his own. This Galen, for example, believes in a procreating cause, emanating from the parents, which “just provides the matter with a preparation and an influence over appropriate things, enabling it to be suited to receiving a form.” Brutus suggests the form might actually arise from this same cause, but Eudoxus denies this. Brutus calls upon the effect of the mother’s imagination in shaping the fetus (her obsession with her lover resulting in the child’s likeness to the father, for example), but while Eudoxus accepts that imagination can change the outward appearance of the child, it cannot “produce the substance of the whole form.” Brutus tries to use the unique form of an individual of every species as an indicator that the shaping power, bestowing form, is in the parent, but Eudoxus merely reiterates the morning’s conclusion that parents provide a suitable preparation but not the form itself. He reminds Brutus that the task in hand was to show that Galen accepted “divine and heavenly powers,” which Eudoxus believes he has accomplished. Chapter 4 Our soul is not sprung from the elements, on Galen’s judgment. Turning to Galen’s views on the soul, Eudoxus discerns a belief in an incorporeal soul whose primary instrument is the animal spirit (it should be noted that the soul in question is not the rational soul of humans but the animal soul). Brutus quotes Galen to the effect that the soul is the innate vital heat. But since the substance of heat is a spirit, and spirit has already been shown to be merely the instrument of the soul, soul cannot be innate heat. Eudoxus reinforces his view

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by calling upon Hippocrates, showing that he too believed “that the soul is from heaven” and its instrument is vital heat. The discussion the turns to the relationship between soul and body. Although the soul is incorporeal it is “unable to perform complete functions in the absence of a good and appropriate temperament of the body.” The speakers agree about this but differ as to the implications this has for its immortality. For Philiatros, if the soul is incorporeal it is, ipso facto, immortal. For Brutus, by contrast, if the soul suffers due to ill-effects of the body, “it is not free of the body nor immortal.” Eudoxus, predictably, agrees with Philiatros and insists that illness and disease affect the links between soul and body but not the soul itself. Brutus does not give up yet. He points out that if the body is the instrument of the soul, a disembodied soul would be completely incapable. But, since the soul is defined as an efficient cause, and causes must always act, then the soul must always be attached to body. But the soul can think without the agency of body, Eudoxus responds, so it does not require the body’s constant aid (only when performing bodily tasks). The association of soul and body is similar to that between God and the world. God discharges many of His functions by controlling nature, but there are many other things he performs without the aid of body or nature. As a final tack, Brutus raises the seeming incapacity of the soul in cases of brain damage. Eudoxus likens this to the inability of a craftsman to work in a badly lit or disordered house. Chapter 5 What the faculty of the soul is to Galen. Before trying to decide whether the faculties of the soul have a share in divinity, Philiatros asks what is meant by the term “faculty.” Brutus insists at some length that faculties are merely efficient causes, causes of actions. “There are as many faculties of a thing as it has actions.” Aloe purges, strengthens the stomach, coagulates fresh wounds, and dries up moistness of the eyes, therefore, it has a faculty for each of these actions. The substance of the faculty, according to Galen (or so Brutus claims), is a property of the temperament, but this links faculties to the qualities of the elements. Eudoxus says that Brutus fails to understand the term “property” in Galen’s usage. It is not the substance of the faculty but “a quality internal to the efficient cause.” Accordingly, “any cause that produces diverse results will undoubtedly gain a number of faculties equal to the number of things it does … because on certain bases it behaves differently towards the

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things it does.” Brutus likens this to a man who is simultaneously a father, uncle and grandfather, but Eudoxus points out that this is not a perfect analogy: a father could cease to be a father without any change in himself (if his son dies), but a faculty of something could not disappear without a change in that something. Philiatros, still unclear about the nature of faculties, asks Eudoxus to set forth his own opinion. Faculties are deep seated, resident properties of things, Eudoxus says. They can be distinguished from the substance of a thing because they can be diminished or augmented, whereas substance cannot intensify or remit. The term “faculty” is also used “where the essence of the efficient cause is not known.” A faculty cannot do anything on its own, but in practice we often talk as though it does. If Luke is good at singing he has a faculty of singing, but he it is that sings, not the faculty. Aloe purges, not its purgative faculty. “So what to a craftsman is an acquired skill, to nature is a power and faculty; except that the latter is innate, the former is won by use and practice.” Eudoxus makes the final point that the three parts of the soul have their own faculties – natural, vital, and animal. Whereupon Brutus challenges Eudoxus to demonstrate that these parts of the soul are also divine. Chapter 6 The substance of the three parts of the soul is divine, on Galen’s view. The challenge is not to show that the parts of the soul are divine, since Brutus has already conceded that the whole soul is divine, but to show that Galen believed the parts to be divine. The case is easy for the rational soul: “Not even Galen will deny that the principles of the soul that reasons have a simple and divine substance.” For the mortal parts of the soul, the argument is more difficult. Galen accepts that the soul which moulds a plant or animal during generation is “entirely divine,” but this is the same soul which controls the creature once it is fully formed, and so must remain divine in origin. The evidence for this rests upon statements by Galen to the effect that infants and baby animals can move parts of their bodies without being instructed how, and without knowing what muscles are responsible. “These cases appear to indicate that the soul that makes use of the parts knows their uses just as if it had made them itself, and was not using parts made by some other being.” Consequently, if a divine power “was that shaper of us, divine too is the power that controls us and regulates the functions in us.” Brutus will not be satisfied, however, until Eudoxus

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deals with the functions of the lowliest part of the soul – the natural functions. This calls for a bit of rhetoric: surely, Eudoxus asks, the functions of the sentient soul are neither more excellent nor more remarkable than the functions of the heart, stomach, liver, spleen, etc. While providing authoritative evidence, Eudoxus quotes Galen as saying that “the powers that it [an animal] acquired from seed itself and from no other source, it cannot possibly have discarded.” This emboldens Brutus to suggest once more that these powers emanated, like the seed itself, from the parent, and need not have any share in divinity. Eudoxus seems to be well prepared for this and easily quotes passages from Galen where he talks of the incorporeal soul entering “along with the seed” or being assigned “to the seed.” As Brutus concedes all he expresses his astonishment that he never understood these passages of Galen, “despite often studying them,” until guided by Eudoxus. Chapter 7 The spirits of the human body, like those of all living things, are divine, as is their innate heat. The focus turns to spirits. Originally signifying “wind” the word came to mean anything with power and impact, like the wind, but escaping our vision. It is so extremely rarified that it is declared to be “in the middle” between body and incorporeal substance. It is the gobetween, used by incorporeal substance for imparting its powers to the body. God and the whole of nature have their own spirits, and so does the soul. “The particular spirit of each mortal and solid thing is substrate for its form, and binds to a close-knit solid body, being endowed with a midway state between the two.” It is under the control of the world soul, or spirit of nature, but is also the vehicle for the individual soul. For the Platonists it was an ethereal transparent body, while for Aristotle it was a spirit “corresponding to the element of the stars.” For Aristotle this spirit was endowed with innate heat, a celestial heat. This allows Brutus to suggest once more that we are dealing with elemental, not heavenly, things. This innate heat of ours, he suggests, is “a fire born of the mingling of elements.” Eudoxus sets out to refute this, and in so doing to establish that the vital heat and the spirit in which it resides are celestial. He points out that the heat due to fire or air in the temperament cannot be the same as the vital heat because the admixture of elements remains precisely the same at death, but the vital heat disappears immediately. This is very evident in a pepper plant. It remains just as hot after it is dead because the

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combination of elements responsible for its temperament remain the same; it lacks the innate heat of a living thing, however. Fernel now anticipates a question from his scholastic readers. Is this vital heat a substance or an accident? It is an accident, Eudoxus declares, but divine and celestial, “like the light or heat of the sun.” Eudoxus even maintains this against an unknown recent authority who evidently denied the celestial nature of the vital heat because it could be found in rotting matter. Finally, there is a discussion of terminology. Galen did not use the term divine, which allows some to resist Eudoxus’s interpretation of his ideas. Eudoxus makes it clear, therefore, that by divine he simply means “Anything that Aristotle had previously said corresponded to the element of the stars.” Chapter 8 Very many functions and activities in us come from hidden causes. At the prompting of Philiatros, Eudoxus discusses the actions and functions “which are above the powers of the elements, and unrelated to their temperament.” Any function “whose remote, concealed and hidden cause and basis cannot be proven or explained with certainty” should be called “genuinely divine,” Eudoxus suggests. Aristotle and Galen are said to have agreed that things which have hidden and obscure causes admit of no explanation and are “beyond the grasp of the human mind.” But which functions arise from occult causes and which from manifest ones? Among natural functions, the occult ones are procreation, nutrition and growth. No more needs to be said about procreation, so Eudoxus turns to nutrition and growth. Digestion cannot be explained by heat because the lion’s heat is stronger than an ostrich’s or a pigeon’s and yet these birds can digest iron and stones respectively, which a lion cannot. “There can be no temperament of elements that can be the cause of the stomach’s tight grasp of the food, retaining it till it is fully concocted, and expelling it as soon as it has become concocted and reduced.” These and other bodily functions are clearly the work of some power more divine than the elements, a power implanted in the parts at their origin. Eudoxus denies the standard view that attraction takes place by heat and rejection by cold, and that the heart’s pulsation can be explained in terms of heat tempered by cold. After all, pulsation does not occur in other parts of the body where heat tempered by cold is likewise present. Eudoxus cites Galen to the effect that there is a distinct power and cause acting in relation to pulsation.

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Philiatros raises the question of paralysis – usually said to be the result of a disturbance of the temperament, since it can occur when the body is otherwise unhurt. Eudoxus points out that temperament cannot explain movement, so how can it explain paralysis? At this point Brutus suggests that, “at long last,” they should address what he now calls “the main topic of our whole debate,” the so-called occult diseases, in which something divine is present. Chapter 9 Not one but three kinds of diseases are present in a similar part, and which the diseases of matter are. Eudoxus says there are three kinds of diseases “which hardly anyone seems to have investigated in detail.” Taking the Galenic category of so-called similar diseases – those which result from a defect of temperament – there are four simple defects (too hot, too cold, etc.) and four compound ones (too hot and dry, too hot and wet, etc.). But Eudoxus suggests that defects in the matter or the form should also be taken into account. There have to be three kinds of disease: “one of the matter, a second of the temperament, a third of the whole substance.” By “whole substance,” it is evident that Eudoxus means the single form about which we heard so much in the first book. It seems to be equivalent to the scholastic notion of substantial form, although Fernel does not use this term. So, there are three kinds of diseases according to their seats: “we ourselves call them immoderateness of matter, impaired temperament, and corruption of the whole substance.” There is no need to dwell on diseases due to defect of temperament, so Eudoxus begins with defects in the matter. The focus here seems to be individual organs – some people’s stomachs cannot tolerate vinegar, mustard or pepper, those of others can; some have stronger bones or nerves than others; Galen says the matter of a similar part (such as the liver) “makes a major contribution to the strength of the powers.” He then moves on to discuss the dependency of health upon “essence and form.” The ostrich’s ability to digest iron is invoked once again. It can do this, not as a result of the elemental heat of the temperament (remember, lions have a hotter temperament and can’t digest iron), but thanks to “the nature of its whole essence.” Concoction, nutrition and the functions ancillary to these are performed by the power of the “whole substance,” which “we also call the form.” Brutus asks, first of all, for more detail on diseases of matter: “What distinct sorts of ill-regulated matter will you list for us?” Variations in bodily consistency fit the bill. Examples include

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a soldier whose bones turned soft and flexible, and a double-jointed girl. Eudoxus also finds support for his view in the operation of medicaments either by their primary, secondary or tertiary qualities. The primary qualities (hot, cold, etc.) work on defects of the temperament, the secondary qualities (soft, hard, rough, smooth, etc) on “immoderateness of matter,” and tertiary and even quaternary qualities (evidently properties which are impalpable but discerned by other senses) on diseases “which melt the power and strength of the total substance.” Chapter 10 Diseases of the total substance, and how significant they are in the art. Diseases of the total substance are said to be “unheard-of, and included in no art so far,” but they are of such close concern to medicine “as to be regarded as comprising its best part.” All change of substance is either procreation or corruption, and so diseases of the total substance are corruptions of the completeness and wholeness of the patient, and often result in death. Corruption and putrefaction are distinguished from one another. Putrefaction usually proceeds slowly. “Simple corruption does not proceed little by little … rather, through the great power of external causes it breaks down the particular substance with such speed that there is not enough time for putrefaction.” Some diseases of the total substance are “manifest,” arising from an obvious cause: sleeplessness, starvation, extreme pain, extreme cold, or strangulation. Other diseases of the total substance are hidden, and arise from remote causes, “beyond the state of the elements,” and are extremely hostile to us; they include “all plague-bearing, destructive and poisonous things.” It is a mistake to suppose that “epidemic pestilent, contagious and poisonous diseases” are the result of putrefaction, they come from “more hidden power.” Prompted by Philiatros, Eudoxus goes on to show where Galen discusses these matters, but it is recognised that Eudoxus is essentially putting forward new ideas here, only adumbrated by Galen and by Hippocrates. There is a discussion of the term “divine” in which Eudoxus argues that the ancient medical authorities were approaching an understanding of the diseases of total substance and their causes. During the course of this Eudoxus says that “a number of the divine and hidden diseases that occur in us possess an efficient cause diffused throughout the whole of the air, like some scattered seeds of evils, with a power to generate diseases that is huge.” In

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view of what has gone before, it is the stars which are responsible for these diseases; through a recondite power “they can disseminate the notorious morbid excretion [mentioned by Hippocrates as a cause of plague], the cause of occult diseases, and scatter into the air seeds, as it were.” Chapter 11 Distinguishing characteristics of occult diseases. It is hard to know what is the best condition of a form, or the ways in which a form may fall short of that condition. Manifest diseases of the total substance include scabies and phthisis, but many derive from hidden causes, and in particular from external causes. They all attack our total substances by their total substance, however. Some are taken in with the air we breathe, “like the seeds of plague”; others make contact from the outside (i.e. not from within our lungs), “like the poison of a mad dog and of poisonous beasts”; others are taken internally, in the form of food, drink, or even medicaments. The model for all three (by air, contact, or ingestion) is poisoning, although the poison enters by these different pathways, and so they can be labelled as pestilent, contagious and poisonous, respectively. There are other ways of categorizing them: pandemic, which can be simple or endemic; epidemic, which can be simple or pestilent (which can themselves be usual or unusual); and sporadic. Examples of these are provided before returning to the different causative pathways of occult diseases. Contagious diseases each have their own “special cause.” Poisonous diseases can develop from poison taken in, or from poison generated in the body, but either way, they differ from epidemic and contagious diseases because they cannot contaminate others by breathing or contact. Chapter 12 On the pestilent diseases: that their cause is hidden. Epidemic diseases can be caused by eating rotten food, drinking infected water, or from breathing air that has had harmful characteristics imparted to it by various pollutants. “But pollutants from heaven produce not only these diseases but pestilent ones too, which are the most catastrophic of the epidemic diseases.” Epidemic diseases in the simple sense usually appear in a population after a long series of causative factors, say, as the seasons change. “But those epidemic diseases that are called pestilent do not appear from this long

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sequence of causes, nor from a huge change of weather upsetting the bodily humours, but from a poisoned pollutant dispersed in the air.” The cause of pestilence creeps in so surreptitiously that it is never detected by any of the senses: “there are seeds of pestilence so completely concealed, undetectable, and alien to our senses, that they totally outwit us and strike unexpectedly, incapable of ever being noticed except by their consequences.” Pestilences cannot be the result of putrefaction because that would effect all animals alike, not just one kind of animal. There must be “a more hidden and particular cause,” which attacks specific kinds. “What is that,” Eudoxus asks, “but poison harmful by its total substance, not by a manifest quality.” Moreover, it must emanate from heaven, “from a specific combination of the stars.” “Only people who are inexperienced in this study [astrology],” he goes on, “remove these causes and powers from the scene and ignore them as if there were none.” Eudoxus sums up the kinds of “shared diseases,” that is diseases suffered by many at a time, whose cause is in the air: “endemic,” caused by earthly and lower exhalations; “epidemic” from violent change of seasons and weathers; and “pestilent,” from a hidden malignant quality sent down from heaven. The efficient cause of plague is obscure and hidden, and the passive cause in the body, which makes the patient succumb to the disease, is not the temperament but the patient’s total substance. Eudoxus then runs through the signs of pestilent fevers: they tend to get to the heart and arteries fast, making the pulse rapid and weak; he mentions other febrile phenomena, and says that if bubo and carbuncle appear before the fever it is evidence of mildness, and vice versa. His description is of a variable disease, leaving an impression that the identity of the disease hangs on its assumed cause rather than on any uniform course, and its diagnosis is evidently controversial. He offers “a plan of therapy,” in which venesection and powerful purges are to be avoided, and a list of apparently mild medicaments is suggested. The chapter ends with a consideration of the pestilential, and therefore occult, nature of exanthems and ecthymas, the sweating sickness, and something which Fernel refers to as “the gasping oppression.” Chapter 13 There is something hidden in epidemic diseases. Philiatros has asked Eudoxus whether there is anything occult in what he calls simple epidemic and endemic diseases. Eudoxus believes there must be. Citing various epidemics of dysentery, lientery,

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pleuritis, and other fevers, in recent memory, he points out that these could not be attributed to the normal causes (associated with change of weather or climate), but must be due to “something more hidden and calamitous.” Here again, the heavens must be ultimately responsible: “As the stars provoke pestilent qualities, so too do they sometimes provoke less destructive ones, hidden too, which become the causes of epidemic diseases.” Brutus accepts that all fevers “that rage in the general populace” seem to be due to something more than a “decay of humour,” but suggests that this could not be the case for intermittent fevers, such as tertians and quartans, which Hippocrates sees as entirely due to the balance of humours. Eudoxus, reminding his listeners that disease is often due to more than one cause, suggests that there might still be something hidden operating, but he is not certain enough to press this point. He does indicate, however, how baffling many cases of fever are, and seems to accept the efficacy of some “special remedies for fevers” (that is, ones which do not operate by restoring the balance of the humours) and which make “even old women” doubt the humoral therapy of physicians. The role of the stars is raised as a possible factor in the cyclical nature of quartan fevers. Finally, drawing upon works written at different parts of Galen’s career, he shows how experience can lead physicians to deviate from standard medical theory and practice in ways that seem to tacitly acknowledge the operation of hidden causes. Chapter 14 The contagious diseases. Eudoxus provides examples of creatures, plants and animals, which have a poison that can kill by contact with the intact skin, and the many more that pierce the skin in order to kill their victims. After a long discussion of the example of rabies, Eudoxus says that the same destructiveness and contagiousness that virulent animals have is hidden in venereal disease. “Poison is seen to underlie the evil, just like the venom of a scorpion or a mad dog, creeping into all of the body.” The ravages of venereal disease are described, including its effects on the viscera and other internal parts, as revealed in dissected corpses, “foul with pustules and ulcers.” It is often supposed that these symptoms merely spring from a corrupt humour, but it is necessary, according to Eudoxus, to recognise something else underlying the humour, “in which the main cause of the trouble lies,” namely, “the power of poison, quite rarefied and practically without body, escaping

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our senses,” and which attaches itself to the humour. Brutus and Philiatros point to the observed changes in the symptoms of this new disease (syphilis, although Fernel never uses this name – the symptoms of new bacterial and viral diseases do tend to change as the biological systems of the hosts respond to the new invader, but of course Fernel did not have any idea of microbes). Eudoxus attributes this merely to the prevalence of the standard mercury treatment, which although helping with some aspects of the disease brings new problems of its own. Eudoxus decries the treatment of this disease for failing to attack its source. It should be treated by the right antidotes and antagonists, he says, hinting that “things have been discovered by empirics” (“empiric” is usually a derogatory term, referring to an unlearned practitioner who might have hit upon a remedy by trial and error, or simply good fortune, but without knowing how it works – empirics were associated with occult remedies, therefore, and we might expect Eudoxus to be more sympathetic to them than other more orthodox physicians would be). The chapter finishes with a discussion of elephantiasis. Fernel makes Philiatros remind his readers that there is no need to discuss other major contagious diseases (such as phthisis and scabies), because they are manifest, “sprung from manifest putrefaction.” Chapter 15 Poisoned diseases. It should now be clear, Eudoxus insists, that there are a vast number of poisons that “start diseases in us that demolish the foundation of our life, not by manifest qualities, but by disintegration of the whole substance.” But how many distinctions of them do we need to consider? Some are rashly introduced internally, while others are generated within the body. Eudoxus admits that some of the examples of introduced poisons he now mentions are “powerfully disadvantageous by their manifest qualities,” but their operation on our total substance means that there is something else hidden in them. He uses the example of the generation of rabies in a dog as an indicator that “in a similar fashion a corruption can be spontaneously generated in us, one not only to match the powers of poison, but to be itself as a whole poison.” Blood or food or (within a woman) semen may decay internally and generate poison, with severe consequences. Small amounts of poison may have great effects. Eudoxus moves on to epilepsy, and Brutus refers to a Galenic passage referring to blockage of an interventricular passage by “sticky humour” as the mechan-

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ism. Eudoxus, predictably, argues against this humoral explanation and opts instead for one involving a poison “hostile with its total substance.” Philiatros offers a view that the target of poisons is only the heart, but Eudoxus cannot accept this; some attack the lungs, others other parts, including the brain, always dissolving their total substance. At the end of the chapter Brutus requests that they move on to consider whether there is anything relevant to medicine arising from the earlier discussion of demonology (see Book i, Chapter 11). Chapter 16 Diseases, and also some remedies, transcend nature. Eudoxus cites cases from Holy Writ of God’s miraculous intervention in the world, including miraculous diseases, which, although they might look like natural diseases, have “a cause not at all responsive to medical art” (namely, God) and so are supernatural. Some supernatural diseases are the work of demons, but only if God grants them permission (presumably for reasons of His own, as in the case of Job). This leads Eudoxus to mention sorcery, and other magical practices: incantations, chants, making magical effigies, and the so-called “evil eye.” He does not countenance the belief that old women past the age of menstruation pollute the air and harm children; if the suppressed menses could achieve this, pregnant women and those with amenorrhoea would do it too. However, some victims of female witchcraft have been rendered impotent and wasted, and only the bewitcher could undo the spell. Various instances of demonic attack or possession are related. In one of these, a “malignant poisoned vapour forced upon the dorsal spine” was held responsible for a patient’s illness, and a variety of medical expedients were tried, but without benefit, whereupon a demon revealed his presence by uttering Latin and Greek through the patient’s mouth, despite the patient’s ignorance of Greek. Such demonic possession is aided by depraved human beings, and is inaccessible to natural cures. Brutus asks whether there are remedies which are above nature. Eudoxus replies that there must be, but not all of them are genuinely divine, some are merely claimed to be magical. Divine healings are attested in the Bible, of course, and occur nowadays through “imprecations, prayers, sacred words, vows and fastings.” In contrast, other healings are attempted by magic, in imitation of miraculous cures. What appears during demonic interventions is often not real, since demons cannot create things, but is sufficient to trick human minds. Cures are often short-lived and leave the patient worse than before. Demons

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could cure by magic but are disinclined to do good, and so offer only fake cures. Even so, Eudoxus seems to accept that there are magical cures which work and are “beyond nature.” Other supposed cures are merely the result of superstitious beliefs, however. Superstitions depend upon an utter ignorance of legitimate causal connections, and a superstitious remedy is defined as one which cannot be explained in terms of temperaments or manifest qualities, nor total substances, nor even in terms of divine or magical powers. (This is not to say that God could not make, say, the throwing of some salt over one’s shoulder bring good fortune; of course He could. The point is, however, that it is clearly not the way God usually acts, and so belief in the efficacy of salt-throwing merely shows an ignorance of God’s use of secondary causes.) The use of charms and words and pictures and designs on their own is superstitious. Eudoxus presents a long catalogue of such procedures. Brutus is satisfied with this account and suggests a return “within the bounds of nature” to see what can help in the treatment of occult diseases. Chapter 17 The existence of some hidden properties of the form or of the total substance, and the number of their different sorts. For Fernel, medicaments are evidently the goal of the search for help – not prevention or dietary adjustment, for instance. Eudoxus declares that “occult and secret powers reside in things and are held within natural limits.” For occult diseases there must be remedies, and the remedies will be occult too: “there is nothing in this universe for which nature has not provided both its like and its contrary, even if it cannot be discovered by our efforts.” Since the occult diseases are diseases of the total substance, “nature must have provided powers contrary to the occult diseases … powers themselves occult and opposed to the splitting of the total substance.” All the bodies of animals, plants, stones and metals obtain, at their generation, qualities which derive from the elements, and qualities which derive from their matter, and, last but by no means least, qualities which derive from their total substance. Galen only talks cryptically of total substance, so Philiatros asks Eudoxus what he believes the total substance to be. Readers who have been paying attention will not be surprised to hear Eudoxus say it is “the form of the whole generated thing.” Eudoxus goes on to discuss places where Galen mentions “many special powers and occult properties of things, though they lack a basis for investigation.” Philiatros wonders whether there might be a way

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of demonstrating the properties of the total substance, based simply on our experience of its behaviour; in the same way that we know from long experience that a magnet attracts iron. Seeking to suggest that there is no real difference between our knowledge of magnetism and our knowledge of the behaviour of fire, Philiatros offers Brutus a riddle about a “marvellously luminous stone” which behaves in many surprising ways, but which turns out to be fire or flame. “Our admiration should be kindled just as much,” Philiatros says, “by effects [based] upon the elements as by effects [based] on the occult properties.” Brutus now accepts that the properties of things do not stem from the elements, nor from matter, but “solely from the form,” and they are correctly called, not occult properties, but properties of the form, or of the total substance. Even so, he wishes to hear more about the number and nature of these properties. Eudoxus, drawing on Galen, says that food nourishes us, and medicaments and poisons affect us, by the power of their total substance. Foodstuffs have a total substance similar to ours; “they contain in themselves a kindly spirit of life and heat, one congenial to us, and its influence fosters and supports our spirit and heat.” But not all that has life is food: “there are many things whose heat and celestial spirit are entirely adverse to ours, clearly hostile and noxious.” The total substance of these things is diametrically opposed to ours. In between are things like purges which, upon ingestion, are not converted into our substance but do not consume it either. Brutus asks about what he discerns to be a fourth category of things whose faculties must derive from total substances: “various medicaments either help or harm various parts of the body, as if from choice.” Eating animal brains is good for our brains, eating liver good for our liver, sea hare ulcerates the lungs, cantharides the bladder, some purges work only on specific organs. “These properties of theirs must in general agree together, through some resemblance and kinship, or disagree through difference and discord,” says Eudoxus before concluding that “This is the source of sympathies and antipathies … which are implanted in everything.” Sympathies and antipathies (a mainstay of magical traditions which Fernel is here endorsing) are properties which “nature wishes us to admire rather than understand,” and are “the causes of all the occult results that are credible on no obvious grounds” (those results being apparent from experience, of course). Brutus suggests examples of this: an amulet of peony (preferably the male plant) cures epilepsy, but it cannot be said to do so by drawing off phlegm from the brain because it is ineffective against other diseases due to excess of phlegm. Moreover, other medicines which eject phlegm

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have no effect on epilepsy. In the light of this discussion, Philiatros is emboldened to criticise Galen for too often striving to explain all the powers of medicaments in terms of “the ordinary faculties of the elements.” He prefers the more empiricist approach of Dioscorides, “who recounted the powers of simple medicaments in pure and sparing words, with no reasoning to follow … I would rate experience of medicaments above reasoning.” Chapter 18 From where the property of the total substance originated, and how it is distinct from the substance, and where it resides. The form of a thing is its “total or main substance or essence,” and they originate ultimately from God, but more proximately from secondary causes. In the beginning God created “the heavens with their stars and powers, and the elements themselves for the generating of things.” He did this out of his own immensity and divinity – but plants, animals, and “minds” (humans), not out of himself alone, “but by rousing the powers of the heavens and the elements.” “So that he would not devote efforts later to extending and perpetuating the procreation of things, he commanded his individual creatures to produce seed which would … contribute both matter and preparation for generating other [creatures]; and he commanded heaven itself to impart to them a form …” Platonists and theologians agree that heaven is scattered with the seeds of all forms.” God has handed over to heaven and the elements the power of procreation, and this is what Plato meant by the soul of the world, the most outstanding specimen of all the forms, from which the other forms originate. At this point Fernel makes Brutus interrupt Eudoxus to ask whether there is now any need of “further accession from above.” The “shared spirit of the whole world” is working all the time but not uniformly at all times and on all things. “The spirit flowing forth from heaven in all directions glides … into everything, yet not alike and in equal measure, but most abundantly at particular combinations of stars.” There follows a discussion showing the influence of the heavenly bodies upon earthly phenomena. In spite of the acknowledged pollution of astrology with superstitious and more overtly irreligious beliefs, Eudoxus asks his companions, “which of you would now question that the powers of the elements and of natural bodies are maintained and preserved by the motion and powers of the heavenly bodies?” The discussion now turns to the importance of discovering just what the powers, or properties, of things are. Eudoxus tells of

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many things which we would now regard as superstitious, but which for him are clearly explicable in terms of natural, if occult, causation. Eating a dove’s heart while still “alive and warm” is good for intermittent fevers, a dead scorpion placed over the wound it has made will draw its own poison back out, the tooth of a living mole will soothe toothache. Furthermore, because these properties derive from the total substance, they are implanted “with such a grip that even if the form passes away” the properties still remain. So, “steam or water extracted by technical skill from a plant retains the plant’s power and property.” This theme is taken up by Brutus, now revealed to be a practising alchemist, who gives a long account of how alchemical procedures can produce effective medicaments, and even the fabled elixir, capable of multiplying gold. Eudoxus does not wholly approve of the pursuit of gold but he clearly accepts the value of alchemy for being able to extract out of things “something sound and very pure for that supreme power of occult properties to reside in.” Chapter 19 Occult diseases should be treated with the secret property of medicaments, not by the Empirics’ procedure, but by skill and method. The key to using hidden properties in therapy is “the principle of contraries”: “a disease of total substance is defeated by medicaments that are contrary to the property of the total substance.” For each disease “some particular remedy is opposed, doing its work by a secret faculty.” Philiatros is concerned that there is no point in applying method and reason here – there is nothing for it but to resort to trial and error. Eudoxus is very short with him for denigrating this new branch of the medical art, which Eudoxus has done so much to discover. He shares the distaste for blind empiricism which was implicit in Philiatros’s comment, but argues that experience and reason can go hand-in-hand. Although in the beginning some discoveries were made by chance, or by imitating animals (allegedly the hippopotamus instinctively performs venesection on itself, and the deer treats poisoned wounds with dittany), Eudoxus stresses the importance of an experimental method. “There is then a pattern for making trials, and if it is overlooked, whatever one man finds beneficial, another will not approve at all.” It is clear from what follows that Fernel is not thinking of a general “scientific” method but a specifically medical method. Perhaps for that reason, what Eudoxus says is unspecific, and indeed vague. At the outset, we are told, a doctor

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must decide whether a disease is manifest or occult. If it is occult (he is not concerned with manifest diseases here), is it simple or complex? If complex, then the associated temperamental disorders should be cleared first, be it plethora, cacochymia, obstruction, or some other problem. If simple, “the appropriate remedies should be applied forthwith” – Fernel seems to have forgotten that part of the point, here, was how we discover suitable occult remedies. He does say, however, that if the cause of the disease has been carried in the air “it will be rectified by kindling a fire or by refrigerants, or by perfumes which are efficacious through their total property, or by every other technique, till purer air appears” [!] If it is caused by poison of some kind (either the cause of a contagion, or something taken internally) then the precise source needs to be established, and the poison needs to be drawn out somehow (Eudoxus provides examples of how to do this – some of which again strike us as superstitious, while others, such as cupping glasses, scarification and inducing vomiting, are standard techniques familiar from humoral pathology). Eudoxus invokes the claim of the professional physician throughout the ages, “the supreme power lies with technique, and every time it wins the prize,” before providing a list of medicaments which are held to have a general capability, and another of those which have specific capabilities. Once again, these are generally familiar from standard humoral pathology. As peroration, Eudoxus urges close attention to knowledge of hidden properties, which is to be carefully attained “not through their taste, smell, sound or colour, but simply from their effects and actions, which are to be gathered and confirmed, both by long observation of performance and from the records of the best authorities.” However, the general tenor of what has just preceded is rather that reasoned prediction of therapy is what matters. There is still much to do, and so his final charge to his two companions is: “And burning with zeal for debate and forgetting none of it, when you have more leisure you must one day devote yourselves more keenly and seriously to learning about hidden properties.” John Henry

DE ABDITIS RERUM CAUSIS

IOAN. FERNELII Ambiani, de abditis rerum CAUSIS LIBRI DUO.

praefatio si cui unquam scriptori Christianissime Rex, mihi certè uni cunctandi multúmque dubitandi occasio incessit, num has de abditis rerum causis lucubrationes diu suppressas, in apertum proferrem, paterérque in vulgus emanare. Id enim saepe mihi in animo versabatur, non levis esse momenti in arte omnium praestantissima, et quae in totius humani generis salutem comparata sit, abstrusum quiddam et reconditum depromere, quod à vulgari genere philosophandi, et à popularibus sensibus abhorreret. Non paucos idcirco esse, qui medendi artem veterum labore inventam satísque consummatam rati, non ultrà progredi contendant, velíntque posteros omnes uno quasi filo deductos, iisdem semper vestigiis insistere, de quibus nefas sit, vel transversum (quod aiunt) unguem decedere. Viam illi prorsus obstruunt inveniendis novis, et eos impudentiae graviter accusant, qui in eo omne studium collocarunt, ut aut novum quippiam conderent, aut traditas ab antiquis artes iam quasi vetustate collapsas fulcirent, aut illis adderent, quae partim diligentia, partim aetate essent progrediente consecuti et quae temporibus magis quàm scriptoribus defuerant. His ex causis ab hac editione deterreri poteram, omniáque lubens silentio obruissem, nisi quae de re medica seorsum à nobis traduntur, hanc quasi interpretationem desiderarent, sine quibus et obscura illa manerent, et non satis tuta ab improborum voce. Caeterùm si hanc vetustissimi philosophi viam tenuissent, ut semper maiorum pressis vestigiis, intra eosdem terminos subsisterent, neque

1

Two Books on the Hidden Causes of Things by Jean Fernel of Amboise

1

Preface Most Christian King,1 it was I alone who surely had cause to hold back and hesitate a great deal, if any writer ever did, over revealing these long-withheld studies of the hidden causes of things, and letting them become public. Indeed I used often to reflect inwardly that it was a serious thing to bring to notice abstruse matter, matter within the most distinguished of all arts (the art directed towards the health of all humanity), and likely to repel the common sort of philosophical thought and ordinary people’s sensitivity. I bore in mind that there are consequently a number of people who think that the healing art was discovered and brought to an adequate conclusion by the efforts of the past, and so they make no effort to proceed further, and intend that everyone later should always follow in the same track, as if pulled along by a thread – a track from which it would be wrong to deviate even a finger’s breadth, as they put it. These people totally block the path to new discoveries, and bring the serious charge of effrontery against those who have devoted their whole effort either to establishing something new, or to propping up the skills bequeathed by the ancients but now rusted through with age, or to adding contributions they had achieved partly through assiduity and partly through the advance of time – contributions that had lacked the [right] moments rather than authors. These reasons could have entirely deterred me from the present publication, and made me readily keep it all quiet, except that the separate account of medicine I am giving needed this as a kind of explanation, and would be puzzling without it, and rather exposed to unsound comment.2 But if the most ancient thinkers had always stuck to the tracks of their predecessors, stayed within the same bounds, 1

Henri ii, King of France from 1547 to 1559. So he had succeeded to the French throne the year before the publication of the present work. 2 Here is part of the basis for the view that this work was actually composed before Fernel’s De naturali parte medicinae (1542), though published after it (1548). See Sherrington, Endeavour, pp. 22 and 174–175. The De naturali parte became later Fernel’s Physiologia, the first part of his complete coverage of medicine, the Universa Medicina.

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penitùs in intimam naturae cognitionem penetrarent, demersa adhuc lateret multis in rebus veritas: et vix dum ullum in abdita naturae scientia lumen effulsisset. Si omnem laborem posteri collocassent, ut eas solùm artes et disciplinas exaedificarent, quarum fundamenta priores iecerant, nunquam tam multa disciplinarum copia crevisset. Si quae in veterum mentem non venerant, iuniores non aperuissent, neque illorum industriam suis vigiliis excitassent: nova ingeniorum lumina minimè lucerent. At quoniam philosophis alia via aliáque studiorum ratio placuit, neque obtrectatorum lingua, neque veterum ornata gravitas, et amplissima authoritas posterorum quenquam à scribendo deterruit: omnes certatim sic elaborarunt, ut aetates propè singulae, magnam et authorum novorum et artium copiam profunderent. Atque ut interim de hac nostra syncerè loquar, disciplinae et artes quae annis propè mille ac ducentis sepultae fuerant, aut quae veriùs extinctae occiderant, iam planè revixerunt, pristinum, ne dicam maiorem, splendorem adeptae, ut nihil ferè docto illi seculo debeat haec aetas invidere. Dicendi ratio summáque eloquentia nunc passim florescit, philosophiae genus omne excolitur: musici, geometrae, fabri, pictores, architecti, sculptores, aliíque artifices innumeri sic mentis aciem extulerunt, ut artes quique suas praeclaris magnificísque operibus exornarint, quae vetustioribus illis uno omnium ore celebratis nihil cedant. Neque inventis solùm ornamenta et incrementa adiunxit temporum excursio, sed et artes novas protulit, ad quas priorum nunquam vel ingenium vel industria penetraverat. Demetrium admirata est antiquitas, atque illum ab reperta machina quadam bellica, appellavit obsessorem. | Quanto ampliore nomine donandi nobis sunt 2

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and made no thorough advance into the closest acquaintance with nature, then on many matters the truth would still lie submerged; and hardly any illumination would have been shed yet on the hidden knowledge of nature. If their successors had devoted all their effort towards building up only the arts and studies founded by their predecessors, such a numerous supply of studies would never have grown up. If younger men had never revealed matters which had not entered the mind of their elders, and had not kindled their zeal by burning the midnight oil themselves, the new insights of their talents would be very dim. But philosophers chose another path and another basis for their studies; none of those who came later was discouraged from writing by the tongues of their detractors, nor by the overwrought influence and the weighty authority of the ancients. They all competed to such effect that virtually single lifetimes produced a great supply both of new authors and of [new] arts. To speak frankly for the moment about my own lifetime: branches of study and arts that had been buried for practically twelve hundred years, or, to be more accurate, had perished and been wiped out, are now clearly restored to life, and have resumed their original glory, if not a greater one. So the present age has virtually nothing it need envy in that learned past epoch. Oratory and the heights of eloquence are now flourishing everywhere; all sorts of philosophy are being cultivated; musicians, geometers, craftsmen, painters, architects, sculptors, and other practitioners beyond counting have displayed minds so keen that each group of them has adorned its art with noteworthy and splendid works, which match those of the ancients whom everyone agrees to honour. The advance of time has not only contributed lustre and additions to what has already been discovered; it has brought forth in addition new arts, to which neither the talent nor the diligence of our predecessors had ever attained. Antiquity admired Demetrius, naming him “the besieger” because of his invention of a military 2 contrivance;3 | how much more distinction we should award to the 3

Demetrius i of Macedonia, (336–283 bc), was nicknamed “Poliorcetes”; this Greek term means “Besieger,” to which the Latin “obsessor” used by Fernel corresponds. He won this name first by his conduct of a siege of Rhodes in 305–304 bc (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., 2000). What sort of “military contrivance”? Plutarch in his Life of Demetrius wrote (ch. 20) that Demetrius always wanted to construct more powerful battering engines, in which he took particular delight, as well as in huge ships. His most famous battering engine (ch. 21) had a base about 22 m. square, and, not surprisingly, was hard to move around – being moved about 370 m. in 2 months on one occasion (ch. 40).

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hoc seculo machinarum inventores, quibus ab ardenti quasi bombo, nomen bombardarum est inditum: quae dii boni, quanto vel ballistis violentiores, vel tormentis rapidiores, vel catapultis concitatiores feruntur? Arte librorum chalcographica quid utilius ad omnium disciplinarum propagationem? at illam protulit nostra haec aetas, ut et paulo superior, cerae, corticis, aut papyri vice, chartam hanc quam fabianam primi appellarunt: atque istorum ope in tantum fastigium evectae sunt literae. Quis ignorat non tam novarum rerum desiderio quàm navigandi peritia, classe perlustratum Oceanum? repertas Insulas? intimos Indiae recessus apertos? maximam continentis ad occiduum partem, quam inde novum orbem appellant, priscis ignotam, nostris magno suo commodo cognitam fuisse? Haec, ut cuncta astronomica Platoni, Aristoteli, vetustioribúsque philosophis non satis perspecta, Ptolemaeus dein plurimùm auxit et illustravit: qui tamen si nunc redeat, Geographiam non agnoscat, adeò novus orbis inductus videtur huius seculi navigatione. Ad quam nos non dico adiumentum attulimus, certè excogitavimus horarum aequinoctialium observatione, qua ratione quacunque sis orbis regione, illius eam possis internoscere, quam Geographi appellant longitudinem. Quod quidem de fontibus antiquorum non hausimus, sed de no-

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inventors of devices in the present epoch, which have been called “bombards” after their burning bomb, so to speak. Ye gods, how much more violent is their flight than a ballista’s, how much faster than a catapult’s or a tormentum’s?4 What is there more useful for the publication of all branches of study than the copperplate technique for making books? It is our epoch that has produced this, just as a slightly earlier epoch produced the paper whose earliest name was “fabian”,5 instead of wax, bark, or papyrus. These [inventions] have enabled literature to attain such a high level. Everyone knows that it is through navigational skill, rather than because of eagerness for new discovery, that ships have traversed the Ocean, discovered the Isles, opened up the innermost recesses of the Indies, revealed to our people (it did them much good) a great part of a continent to the West, hence named the “New World”, of which the ancients were unaware. This [skill], like all the astronomy that was not sufficiently visible to Plato, Aristotle and the older philosophers, was greatly built up and illuminated later by Ptolemy; but if he returned to life now, he would not recognise Geography, so much has a New World been brought to view by the sea travel of this epoch. I do not claim that we have helped sea travel along; but through observation of the equinoctial hours, we have certainly worked out the basis for recognising what Geographers call the longitude, wherever one may be in the globe.6 We have not drawn this from the springs of antiquity,

4

The Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum indicates that the ballista was a heavy military instrument to demolish walls, the catapulta was one to shoot darts to some distance, and the tormentum was one to shoot stones, balls and the like. Their identification is not entirely clear in Fernel’s time, when the crossbow was in use and also the trebuchet (like a seesaw with a heavy weight on one end and a sling for the missile on the other end). For such weapons in classical times, see Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery. By the early 1500s, cannon founders throughout Europe had learnt to cast good bronze cannon. Fernel is enthusiastic about artillery; Rabelais, in his Pantagruel (Bk. ii, ch. 8, p. 196, published some 16 years before De Abditis), was less so: “Printing likewise is now in use, so elegant and so correct, that better cannot be imagined, although it was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical suggestion on the other side was the invention of Ordnance.” 5 This word for “paper” is evidently derived from the fact that in the 1470s the town of Fabr iano [sic] in Italy was a centre for paper-making in the hands of the Agostini, a family of merchant bankers (Jardine, Worldly Goods, 145). And “early paper mills were located ca. 1268–1278 in Fabriano, province of Ancona.” (Sarton, Introduction to History of Science, vol. 3, 175). 6 The mechanical clock was invented shortly before ad 1300, and only then was it practicable to abandon the traditional practice of dividing the day and the night each into twelve hours, creating a seasonal difference in their lengths (Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, 3).

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stris rivulis primi (ni fallor) protulimus. Te quocunque vertas cogitatione, intelliges non decoxisse posteros, sed erecto ad contemplationem intentóque animo haereditatem veterum artium ampliasse et induxisse novas. Quid igitur inquiunt non esse huius nostrae aetatis, novum quicquam praestare posse? Incomprehensarum rerum immensa est multitudo, et multo maior quàm quae possit unquam percipi. Nulla autem ratio afferri potest cur ingeniorum laus nunc sit inferior: quid est igitur cur aliquis hanc aetatem tam inclementer damnet, ut ex tanta rerum copia nihil queat attingere? Quis hoc seculum tanti insimulet stuporis, tantae tarditatis, nihil ut novum cudere possit, nullarum artium afferre proventum? Quisquis mentis valens acumine inertia non torpebit, sed ad res cognoscendas tempus diligentiámque sumet, poterit orbitam eandem cum veteribus terere, et in eiusdem industriae curriculo versari, et illorum observationibus adiutus, inventis artibus magna addere incrementa, et nova condere multis profutura. Sic enim alia ex aliis trahi solent, et ex angustis fontibus perampla flumina derivari: tantáque est artium et disciplinarum series, ut apta ex sese omnia et connexa videantur. Si liberè quod sentio dicere licet, dicam, et quidem paucis: tam peccant qui à veteribus pervestigata omnia comprehensaque esse contendunt, quàm qui eisdem primam rerum cognitionem detrahunt, illósque de veteri doctrinarum possessione deiiciunt. His constitutis, velim ex aequo et bono accedant nobis honorarii arbitri atque disceptatores, qui malo invidiae puri, et profectus et consilii mei rationem colligant ac iudicent: nec enim tantùm ipse mihi tribuo, ut fidem haberi velim praeiudicatae meae sententiae. Qui primi inter veteres admirabili quodam ad philosophandum studio se contulerunt, in naturae angustias et quasi in carceres deducti, eò se revocarunt spatii, ut solis mundi elementis perpetuò inhaerentes, nimísque materiae dediti, longè intra modum constiterint.

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but if I am right, we have been the first to tap it off from our own streams. Wherever you turn in thought, you will learn that those who came later did not boil things down, but enhanced their inheritance of the arts of the past and introduced new ones, with mind alert and poised for study. So what is it that makes people say that this age of ours is incapable of innovation? There is a boundless host of things not understood, one much greater than can ever be grasped. No reason can be offered why the standing of today’s talents should be lower. Why then should anyone condemn this epoch so mercilessly, as being incapable of getting anywhere despite such a wealth of resources? Who would accuse this age of such sluggish dullness that it could forge nothing new, nor produce a harvest of arts? Any man of mental vigour who will not be numbed by sloth but will devote time and diligence to discovery, will be able to follow the same trail as the ancients, and ride the same purposeful chariot, and build on their observations to make large additions to the arts already discovered, and establish novelties of widespread future benefit. This is really the way that one thing is usually made to lead to another, and wide rivers start from narrow springs; there is such a sequence of arts and studies, that everything comes to look dependent on and linked to everything else. If I may say freely what I feel, I will do so, and briefly too: those who claim that the ancients investigated and understood everything are just as wrong as those who deny those ancients their original acquaintance with things, and dethrone them from their old-established ownership of their teachings.7 This being established, I would like informal umpires to be assigned to us on a fair and sound basis, people devoid of the evil of spite, to sum up and assess the extent of my proposal’s success; I do not in fact claim so much for myself as to wish my preliminary verdict to be taken on trust. The first people who long ago devoted themselves to philosophy with remarkable enthusiasm were drawn, so to speak, into narrow confines of Nature, and recovered themselves at such an interval that they were forever involved only with the elements of the world, and were too much concerned with matter,

7

Wightman remarks of this passage (Science and the Renaissance, vol. 1, p. 4), “One could hardly find a better blazon of the Renaissance myth both in its absurd exaggeration of the utter desolation of the whole period from the decline of the Roman Empire to the “present day” whenever that might be, and on the other hand the feeling of a new spirit abroad and of enterprises surpassing those of the ancients.”

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Alii deinde erectiore animo, suis non contenti finibus ad Aegyptios (quibus cum Chaldaeis et Hebraeis frequens erat commercium) commigrarunt, à quibus divina non pauca per umbram duntaxat caliginémque percepta retulerunt. His suam posteà philosophiam tanquam variis respersère figmentis, et quadam impietatis labe inquinarunt. Unde accidit, ut tum vel rudis et materiata nimis fuerit philosophandi ratio, vel si divinum quippiam attigisset, inconstans ac prorsus incerta. Nunc verò quando Dei Opt. Max. beneficio, nobis per Christum lux ipsa veritatis affulsit, multa simul nobis sunt divinitùs allata, à veteribus animo non integrè percepta. Quis nostrum immortalitatem animae, domicilium, vim, naturámque nescit? Quid porrò inter philosophorum greges magis controversum, aut diuturnioribus contentionibus exagitatum? Ordines coelestes, et illam supernae civitatis descriptionem, quis veterum sapientum subodoratus est? Haec autem si iam cunctis patent mortalibus, quis etiam non intelligat multa esse in philosophia extra elementorum ordinem, prorsus abstrusa et naturae arcanis involuta, quae neque oculis, neque auribus, neque ullo sensu deprehendi possunt? horúmque cognitionem non mihi modò, sed et nostri | ordinis nominísque cuilibet 3 notiorem, quàm Ethnicis philosophis esse debere? Video posteriores

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so that they have long been under constraints.8 Then others, more enterprising, spurned their own bounds, and betook themselves to the Egyptians, who used to have frequent interchange with the Chaldaeans and the Jews. From them they brought back a number of divine insights, dim and misty though they were. They scattered these later over their philosophy, like an assortment of fabrications, and fouled it with a disastrous taint of impiety. Hence it came about, that at the time the basis of philosophy would either have been crude and excessively material, or (if it had reached some divine topic) unsteady and quite unsure. But now, through the grace of God the Best and Greatest, the very light of truth has shone upon us through Christ, and much has been conveyed to us at once through divine agency which the mind of the ancients did not completely grasp. Is any of us unaware of the soul’s immortality,9 dwelling, power, and nature? What is there more debated among the groups of philosophers, or what discussed in longer arguments? Which of the sages of old got wind of the celestial orders, and of that memorable description of the heavenly City?10 These are matters now evident to every mortal man; if so, who could fail to understand that there is much in philosophy beyond the arrangement of the elements, much that is quite concealed and enclosed in the secret places of nature, beyond the grasp of eye, ear, or any sense? And that acquaintance with it ought 3 to be more familiar, not only to me but also | to anyone of our order and name, than to pagan philosophers? I notice that those later

8

This was an Aristotelian criticism of the pre-Socratic philosophers, often voiced later too: “most of the earliest thinkers recognized only material causes, i.e. that out of which all things are generated and into which they pass when destroyed. Because such a substratum persists, they think nothing is really generated or destroyed.” (Metaphysics Bk. 1 ch. 3, 983b6 onwards). And he remarks later (Bk. 3 ch. 5, 1010a2) that they supposed that only what can be sensed is real, and what can be sensed is a very indefinite object. On this topic generally, see Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy. 9 It was prudent of Fernel to insist on the soul’s immortality. Two years before publication of this work, Etienne Dolet was burnt in Paris for publishing a version of Plato’s Hipparchus and Axiochus which attributed to Plato a disbelief in the immortality of the soul (Highet, Classical Tradition, 118). 10 The “celestial orders” is probably a reference to the treatise on the Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius, a writer of unknown identity who lived somewhere between 50 B.C. and 100 A.D. To him is also attributed the treatise De Mundo which is frequently cited in the present work. On this writer, see Jill Kraye, “Daniel Heinsius and the Author of De mundo,” in Dionisotti, Uses of Greek and Latin, 171–197. The “heavenly city” is probably that of St. Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei (written 413–427 A.D.).

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illos Platonicos, Numenium, Philonem, Plotinum, Iamblichum, Proclum, quicquid de divinis rebus magnificum attigerunt, illud à Christianis viris, Ioanne, Paulo, Hierotheo, Dionysio furtim excepisse: ut inde abstrusa Platonis dicta clariùs lucidiúsque interpretarentur, et in verum sensum deducerent. Nobis verò non similiter liceat Hippocratis sensa nunc apertiùs reserare, ut vetus medendi ratio suscipiat incrementum? affigemúrne perpetuò his caducis? Nunquam concretum hunc crassumque aërem perrumpemus? Nunquam ex hoc tene-

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Platonists – Numenius,11 Philo,12 Plotinus,13 Iamblichus,14 Proclus15 – surreptitiously purloined anything remarkable they attained about theology from the Christians – John,16 Paul,17 Hierotheus,18 Dionysius.19 This enabled them to expound recondite sayings of Plato with greater clarity, and to reach the correct meaning. And would it not be in order for us to unlock the views of Hippocrates more lucidly in the same way, so that the old basis of healing acquires an addition? Or will we be stuck for ever with these obsolete interpretations? Will we never break through this thick steamy atmosphere? Will we 11 Numenius of Apamea in Syria (2nd century A.D.) is regarded as initiating the transfer from Platonic idealism to a Neoplatonic synthesis of diverse origin, and he interested Renaissance humanists by enquiring into primitive forms of theology. See Martano, Numenio d’Apamea, and Dillon, Middle Platonists, pp. 361–379. 12 Philo Judaeus, also called Philo of Alexandria (b. 15–10 B.C., d. A.D. 45–50), was a Jewish philosopher who initiated the reconciliation of revealed faith with philosophic reason, and so is regarded as a forerunner of Christian theology. See, for example, Berchman, From Philo to Origen, and Dillon, Middle Platonists, pp. 139–183. 13 Philosopher (A.D. 205–270) who effectively founded the Neoplatonic school of philosophy. Literature on Plotinus is vast, but see, for example, Armstrong, Architecture of the Intelligible Universe, and Gerson (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. 14 Syrian philosopher (A.D. ca. 250–330) who inclined to alter the purely spiritual and intellectual mysticism of Plotinus into “theurgy,” the magical conjuration of the gods. He extolled especially the virtues through which men obtain ecstatic union with the One, and so was subsequently referred to as “the divine” or “the inspired.” Marsilio Ficino (1433–1459), the metaphysician of Florence, had (among many other influential Renaissance translations) made a notable translation of his De Mysteriis. See Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul. 15 The last major Greek philosopher (A.D. 410–485). See Lucas Siorvanes, Proclus. 16 This is the New Testament author, but until recently no distinction was drawn between John the Evangelist, author of the fourth Gospel, and John the author of the Book of Revelation, who were regarded as one and the same person until long after Fernel’s time, though not now. 17 The apostle Paul. 18 He is now entirely unknown, except that Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (n. 19 below) affirmed that he himself owed the essentials of his doctrine to St Paul and to Hierotheus, and asssigned vast authority to works of Hierotheus which he specified, but which have not survived. See Baudrillart, Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 14, 425–430. 19 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. c. 500), probably a Syrian monk who, known only by his pseudonym, wrote a series of Greek treatises and letters for the purpose of uniting Neoplatonic philosophy with Christian theology and mystical experience. These writings established a definite Neoplatonic trend in a large segment of medieval Christian doctrine and spirituality – especially in the Western Latin Church – that has determined facets of its religious and devotional character to the present time. Historical research has been unable to identify the author, who, having assumed the name of the New Testament convert of St. Paul (Acts 17:34), could have been one of several Christian writers familiar with the Neoplatonic system of the 5th-century Athenian Proclus. See Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius.

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bricoso mentis carcere in perspicuam lucem evolabimus? Nunquam abducto per meditationem animo, divina abstrusaque contemplabimur? Haec singula quum apud me tacitus expenderem, simúlque aliquando monitus essem Hippocratis oraculo, quo in morbis divinum quippiam inesse confirmat: existimavi perbrevem sententiam permagno esse momento ponderandam, et eò magis quòd eximius vir ob divinitatem olim seu numen cultus sit, et brevi sententia magnam rerum supellectilem, quam mente gerebat, concluserit. Primorum philosophorum mos fuit, quaecunque divina attigissent, tanquam mysteria contegere, aut integumentis quibusdam et involucris implicata enuntiare, seu imperitae multitudinis offensionem veriti, seu quia haec tam abstrusa si nullo negocio intelligerentur, probatum iri minimè sperarent. Quocirca anno abhinc vigesimo odoratus quippiam sub divini nomine in medendi arte penitùs obvelatum latêre, quod nondum satis pateret, coepi illius studio et amore incitatus quid esset investigare. Deprehendi autem id esse abditorum morborum tractationem, nec satis tritam, nec veterum monimentis expressam: sine qua tamen manca et duntaxat inchoata, nec numeros omnes habitura sit ars medendi. Hoc temporis curriculo in haec undique multa pervolitavi, longè plura meditatus sum, neque quicquam occurrit, quod à concepta ea de re sententia me revocet. Quo longius aetate, literis, artis exercitatione, et multis tum aliorum, tum meis experimentis eò spectantibus procedo, hoc mihi certior veriórque fit de abditis morbis sententia, in quam et plerosque omnes paucis admodum rationibus adduci video, quasi illorum animus quodam veri instinctu afflatúque sit perfusus. Ea autem quaenam sit, iam literis mandare conor, non tam perficiundi spe, quàm desiderio excitandi

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never wing our way out of this gloomy prison of the mind into clear light? Will we never ponder divine and recondite matters, with mental detachment produced by meditation? I used to weigh up these points silently, sometimes prompted at the time by the oracle of Hippocrates in which he affirms that there is a divine aspect present in diseases;20 I then concluded that a very concise opinion needed a very great effort of assessment, the more so because that distinguished man’s godlike quality made him at one time worshipped as a divinity, and because he enclosed within a concise opinion a great set of his customary thoughts. It was the practice of the first philosophers to veil as mysteries any divine insights they had reached, or state them obscured by some coverings, either because they feared the antagonism of the ignorant multitude, or because they had little hope that such recondite matters would be accepted if they were taken in without effort. This is why I suspected some twenty years ago that something that might be called divine lurked wholly hidden within the art of healing, and was not yet coming properly to light; so I was impelled by zeal and eagerness for it to search out its nature. I realised that it was the management of hidden diseases, a thing not really familiar, nor set out in the counsel of the ancients; yet without it the art of healing would be hampered and be only a beginning, destined not to possess all its components. At this period I flitted into these numerous topics from every side, and dwelt long on most of them, but nothing came up to recall me from the view I had formed of the subject. As I advance in age, in education, in the practice of medicine, and in the manifold relevant experience of others and of myself, I grow more and more sure of the view of hidden diseases which I see adopted also by most other people, on the strength of quite a small number of arguments, as if their soul had been inspired by some inspired impulse towards the truth.21 I am now attempting to commit the nature of this view to writing, more from a wish to stir up many people’s talents to search out the truth, than in the expecta20 Hippocrates, Sacred Disease, ch. 21; Loeb ed. vol. 2, p. 183. Hippocrates actually wrote that all diseases are divine and all human: “This disease (epilepsy) styled sacred comes from the same causes as others, from the things that come and go, from cold, sun, and from the changing restlessness of winds. These things are divine (εα), so that there is no need to put the disease in a special class and to consider it more divine than others; they are all divine, and all human.” 21 It is not clear who Fernel has in mind as those who have adopted views like his own on so-called “hidden diseases.” It seems likely that this is merely a rhetorical strategy because he does not want to be seen as a lone voice on what he takes to be an important topic.

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ingenia multorum ad veri investigationem. Magnus hic noster conatus Rex Christianissime, sed qui maiestatis tuae splendore summam vim summúmque robur obtinebit, si novis laetísque regni tui auspiciis ille nobis affulgeat. Accedent nihilominus et rationes non tantùm probabiles, verùm etiam ad assentiendum necessariae, quibus (ut confido) veritas ipsa manum nobis adiiciet, et sua luce obscuram multorum caliginem excutiet. Quinetiam ne quid in opinione dubia non satis ratum haberetur, singula quaeque ex Galeni monimentis videbor affirmasse, qui tametsi aliquando videatur haec dedita quasi opera extenuare, in ea tamen vel nolens plerunque relabitur. Hinc scient omnes quod terimus argumentum, et in communem medicinae usum primi conferimus, idipsum veteres attigisse, víxque ullum esse qui hanc in animo sententiam insitam, et quasi insculptam non habeat, etiam si verbo plerunque aliud exprimat. Itaque quam non pauci hanc nostram institutionem existimaturi sint novam, re vera pervetus est, neque ea sum insolentia, ut me eius authorem iactem, sed interpretem duntaxat et explanatorem profiteor. Haec autem maximè in posteriorem librum meditor, quae quoniam ex physicis nasci constituíque solent, ipsa ratio connexi coëgit in librum priorem philosophica quaedam praemittere, quae in illorum demonstrationem necessaria videbantur. Atque ita quantum divinitatis, id est abditarum causarum, inest tum naturali philosophiae, tum rei medicae, hoc unum opusculum scrutabitur et discutiet. Quod autem res est plena contentionis, disserendi rationem quandam aggredior, non simplici narrationis specie, sed quibus ferè sermonibus res controversa agi disputaríque solet: à tali quodam inductus exordio.

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tion of completing my task. This venture of mine is a large one, Most Christian King, but it will derive enormous power and strength from the brightness of your majesty, if that brightness shines upon us with the fresh and propitious omens of your reign. Still, arguments will be added as well, arguments not only persuasive but also essential to gain assent, and through them the truth itself will lend us a hand, as I believe, dispelling with its light the murky darkness of many matters. Furthermore, in case anything should be thought ill-founded on uncertain opinion, I will be seen to have stated individual items from the counsels of Galen; though he does sometimes seem deliberately to tone down these topics, he generally returns to them, even reluctantly. Hence everyone will recognise the line we are pursuing (and we are the first to direct it to general medical use), and [will note] that the ancients reached the same point, hardly anyone not having this view installed and as it were imprinted in his mind, even if he generally puts it another way. And so, while a number of people are going to think this teaching of ours is novel, it is in fact very ancient, and I am not so conceited as to boast of originating it; I claim only to be its interpreter and expounder. I plan particularly [to deal with] these points in a later book, and as they usually arise from natural science, the logic of the conclusion compelled me to preface the earlier book with some philosophical points which were looking essential to prove22 these matters. So this single little work will examine and distinguish how much of the divine, that is, of hidden causes, lies in both natural philosophy and medicine. Since the topic is rich in dispute, I attempt a plan of exposition which is not in the form of a straightforward account, but more or less in the discourse in which a controversial topic is usually raised and argued; I proceed from a starting point of this kind.23

22

The Latin word “demonstratio” used here meant in Aristotelian logic a fact arrived at by deduction from first principles. See, E. J. Ashworth, “Traditional Logic,” and Nicholas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” in Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 143–172, and 685–711. 23 Usually associated with the Renaissance humanists, the dialogue, modelled on Cicero rather than Plato, continued to be a popular literary form in Fernel’s day. See, for example, Marsh, Quattrocentro Dialogue.

LIBER PRIMUS

Mundi elementa solam materiam genitìs quibusque rebus impertiri Cap. i philiatros, brutus, eudoxus ph. Opportune adesse video quem quaerebam, nisi me fallunt oculi, alioqui non satis perspicaces. Profectò is ipse est, neque splendor hic exorientis Solis adversus, aciem obtutúmque oculorum perstringit. O felicem et auspicatam occursationem. Etenim liberabor eo scrupulo, qui mihi ex agitata per hosce dies disputatione iniectus est. Ille sic me habuit malè, ut nulla ratione potuerit à me revelli. Sodalis hic iampridem meus, toto decennio visus nemini, scio afferet novi aliquid ex longa peregrinatione, illius ope consequar quod meo ipsius ingenio assequi non potui. Sed quónam ille se proripit? non assequar virum nisi procul inclamem. Heus tu bone vir, heus Brute, subsiste per Aesculapium, aut si mavis, per Hippocratis genium: nec enim arctius habeo vinculum, quo te retineam. br. Quis est qui me vocat? ô salve mi Philiatre. ph. Salve tu quoque. br. Facis tu quidem tuo more, ut festivus agas verbis, nec unquam urbanitatis sales exuas. Sed quid tu? quò hinc te agis? ph. Te ipsum quaerebam quem rediisse nobis audieram. br. En tibi adsum. ph. Video, sed usque eò insolens vix ut oculis meis credam, quibus monstro similis est hic tuus adventus. Quàm cupio te interrogare. br. Tam citò? vixdum bene salutavi. ph. Non queo amplius supprimere, quod me quam diutissimè torsit. br. Quid hoc tandem rei? ph. Non ita pridem ad indictam quandam celebrium medicorum disceptationem, conveni vel audiendi studio, ut planè immodico illius artis amore teneor. Agitabatur inter eos eiusmodi quaestio. An

4

4

BOOK I

Chapter 1 The elements of the world provide the only matter for each thing that is brought into being philiatros, brutus, eudoxus ph. I see that the man I was looking for is fortunately here, unless my eyes – in general not keen enough – deceive me. Certainly it is he, and the brightness of the Sun rising here in front is not blunting my gaze. A lucky and auspicious encounter! For I shall be freed of the worry which has assailed me because of the argument pursued over recent days. It had such a grip of me that no reasoning could clear me of it. This companion of mine of long ago, whom no one has seen for all of ten years, will I know bring something new from his long travel, and with its help I will get what my own talent could not achieve. But where is he rushing off to? I won’t catch the fellow unless I shout from a distance. Hello, my good friend, hello, Brutus, stop for Asclepius’s sake, or if you prefer, for the sake of Hippocrates’s beard; I’ve really no tighter link to hold you with. br. Who is that calling me? Oh, greetings, Philiatros. ph. Greetings to you too. br. You’re running true to form, in using words wittily, and never shedding the smartness of your style. But what are you doing? Where are you off to from here? ph. It was you I was looking for; I had heard you were back with us. br. Look, here I am with you. ph. I can see you, but I am so out of touch that I can hardly believe my eyes, which see your appearance here as like a portent. How I long to question you. br. So soon? I’ve barely greeted you properly. ph. I cannot bottle up any longer what has been tormenting me for a very long time. br. Whatever can that be? ph. Not long ago, I joined in a formal debate between wellknown physicians, even if keen only to listen, for I am possessed by a quite excessive love for the art [of medicine]. A question was under

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ne quod in morbis est divinum, divinam opem desideret. Istud olim ab Hippocrate nostro simpliciter brevitérque dictum, videbam variis interpretationibus aliò atque ipse sperabam, trahi: nec profectò tumultuoso illo congressu decidi res omnis potuit, tum quòd novus interpres liberè fuséque explicandi caruit loco, tum quod praeiudicata opinio et favorem detrahebat et fidem inauditae (ut tum aiebant) sententiae. Ab eo die optabam tui mihi copiam fieri, ut tuum ea de re sensum expedires, quo facto, me beaveris. Enimverò mihi persuadeo, in ea re nostrae medicinae verti cardinem. br. Rem affers arduam, in qua paulum consumere temporis mihi nunc ocioso, et curis laxato iucundum est, videamus qualisnam sit res ipsa, idipsum vereor, ne tuus interpres rem suam non planè conficiat: vix quippe adduci ulla ratione possum, ut tam exiguo integumento, tanta sit inclusa divinitas. Memini aliàs me in philosophum quendam incidisse, cui similium ferè esset paradoxorum cura: is palàm enunciabat, non omnes rerum vires ab elementorum permistione prodiisse, neque haec omnino causas esse eorum quae consistunt: sed plurima à coelo tum orta, tum suas obtinuisse vires. ph. Plurima horum similia audiisses tota disputatione. br. At scis quid illi obtigerit philosopho? ph. Quid obsecro? br. Is demonstrationum necessitate compulsus, tandem in elementa coelo recidit. ph. Maior est vis nostro huic Eudoxo, qui in demonstrationem plurimus incumbit: est in eo nonnihil quod forsan audire velis. Si illum probè novi (novi autem optimè) lubens aperiet nobis, et edisseret hanc rem totam, et gratiam ab illo simus inituri, si nos benignè et attento animo audierimus.

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debate between them of this type: may what is divine in diseases need divine assistance? That simple and concise statement, once made by our Hippocrates1, I used to see pulled about with diverse interpretations, not in the direction I myself used to expect; and indeed in that disorderly gathering, the whole thing could not be settled, both because a new interpreter found no chance of giving a free and detailed exposition, and because a view already fixed was removing support and confidence from an opinion that went unheard (as the discussion was then going). From that day, I wanted to get good access to you, so that you would explain your view on this topic, and that done, you would have made me happy. For I am convinced that it is a pivotal point of our medicine. br. You propose a tough task, on which it is pleasant to spend a little time, since I am now at leisure and free of anxiety Let us consider the nature of the question. I am afraid that your interpreter is not entirely completing his job, since hardly anything could convince me that so much divinity can be enclosed in so slight a wrapper. I recall how another time I came across a philosopher with a concern for practically the same paradoxes; he used to proclaim in public that not all the powers of things emanated from a mixture of elements, and that they were not entirely the causes of the things that exist; but that most things acquired their powers at the time when they originated from heaven. ph. You would have heard a great deal like that throughout the debate. br. But do you know what befell that philosopher? ph. What, please? br. Driven by the need for proofs, he came to resort to elements in heaven. ph. There is more power in our Eudoxus here, who is utterly insistent on proof; there is something in him which perhaps you would like to hear. If I know him properly (and I know him very well), he will happily explain to us, and expound this whole topic, and we are going to be in his debt, if we have listened to him with good will and attention. 1

Although the exact statement cannot be identified in the Hippocratic works, in Prognostic § 1 (Loeb vol. ii p. 8, Littré vol. ii p. 112) there is: γν ναι ο ν χρ τ ν παων τ ν τοιοτων τς φσιας κσον πρ τν δναμν εσι τ ν σωμ των !μα δ κα" ε τι εον #νστηνεν τ%&σι νοσοισι, κα" τουτου τν πρνοιαν #κμαν νειν. “One should

know the natures of such diseases, so far as they exceed the power of the bodies and at the same time if there is something divine in these diseases, and discover the outlook for this.” Not divine aid, but the outlook.

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br. Ain? Speras id nobis probatum iri? ph. Exitum nolim polliceri, unum scio illum quidem certè enunciaturum nobis ea mysteria, quae abstrusa, neque in communibus hominum sensibus posita, hactenus putavit. br. Utut res habeat, placet hominis ingenium ac vires experiri: hac tamen lege ut mihi liceat, quaecunque obscura aut nova audiam, sedulò percontari, et liberius dissentire, si absurdum quiddam attingere videbitur: sic enim fiet, ut audias meam, quam | tantopere 5 desideras, hac de re sententiam. ph. Efficiam ut tibi liceat: viri mores et ingenium probè teneo. br. Conveniamus hominem, et quando ita videtur, interpellemus. ph. Erit nunc tempestivum: agit enim in villa proxima, quo profectus est heri cum amicis philosophis, ibi plenius et audacius sermonem cum illo conferemus, tantisper dum se franget aestivus iste calor. Illud imprimis vereor, ne non descendant in animum nostrum, quae afferet: petet enim nescio quid ex abditis fontibus rei medicae, quò non cuivis penetrare promptum est. Tu ipse et nostrate et externa philosophia instructus, impetum sustinebis, si quando superior erit meis viribus. Malim enim tutò fugere, quàm temerè et cum nota iis me obiicere, quae perferre nequeam. At vehementer me pudeat, si ea philosophiae praecepta nescire deprehendat, quibus velim videri recens institutus. Quocirca dum hanc viam compendiariam per saltus et humiliores colles conficimus, quaeso in commune consideremus conferamúsque philosophiae principia, quaecunque in futuram disputationem utilia iudicas: ne quum ad seria veniemus, grave sit viro in haec, quae sui ingenii non sunt, detrudi. Sic enim nihil moliemur perturbatè, et à minimis struemus maxima. br. Ordinem dicis quem omnes secuti sunt, in quorum nos vestigia incurrere debemus. ph. Itaque matutinus hic avium concentus dum recreat animos, inito colloquio haec explicanda suscipe. br. Rem ut vis aggredior, et in primis rogo te, certò ne scias naturam aliquid esse? ph. Qui naturalis philosophiae praecepta tradunt, naturam quandam esse non dubitant, à qua et se φυσικο(ς appellant: id-

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br. What? Do you expect us to assent? ph. I would not like to guarantee the outcome, but I know that he is the only man sure to declare to us mysteries which he has so far viewed as recondite and lying beyond the general senses of men. br. However it turns out, we want to test the talent and powers of the man, but on the condition that I can put careful questions about anything obscure or novel that I may hear, and I can freely disagree, if he appears to get to something absurd. Thus surely it will come 5 about that you will hear my view on this topic, | as you so much wish to do. ph. I will arrange for your condition to hold; I understand the man’s habits and talent well. br. Let us approach the man, and accost him when the time seems right. ph. Now will be the right time, because he is staying in a house close by, where he arrived yesterday with philosophical friends. There we will engage in conversation with him more fully and confidently, for as long as this summery heat takes to disperse. My main unease is that what he contributes may not penetrate into our mind; I do not positively know what he will be after from the hidden springs of medicine, and it is not open to everyone to reach there. You yourself, armed with our own philosophy as well as that from elsewhere, will face the attack if it ever gets too much for my powers; I would really rather escape to safety than expose myself rashly and identifiably to what I could not endure. But I would be deeply ashamed if he found me ignorant of the philosophical principles in which I would like to appear recently instructed. So, while we are completing this short cut through passes and fairly low hills, please may we discuss jointly whatever philosophical principles you judge helpful for the debate ahead, in case it may be difficult for the man to be forced into subjects outside his competence, when we get to important matters. In this way we will not really attempt anything in confusion, and from small foundations build largely. br. You are stating the sequence that everyone has followed in whose footsteps we should tread. ph. So, while this morning birdsong restores our spirits, start the discussion and take on these points for explanation. br. I am starting as you wish, and first of all I ask you, whether you are certain that there is something called nature? ph. Those who hand on the teachings of natural philosophy do not doubt that there is something called nature, hence they call them-

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que tanquam notissimum et apud omnes pervulgatum, philosophiae principium statuunt, quod neque demonstrari debeat, neque possit. br. Illámne tu aliquando aut vidisti, aut manu tractasti? ph. Videre non contendo, si modò cogitatione satis hanc possum consequi. Tu igitur aliò perge. br. Eorum quae mundus habet omnium, alia per naturam esse dicuntur, alia per alias causas, ut per artem vel fortunam. ph. Quo modo? br. Quae sponte sua interioréque impetu prodierunt, naturâ esse dicuntur, ut quatuor mundi elementa, metalla, stirpes omnes, cuncta animalia, horúmque partes: at lectica aut domus, non naturâ, sed arte suam rationem est adepta. Neque verò animal, neque stirps, neque quicquam caeterorum naturalium appellatur natura, sed duntaxat à natura, à qua oriri dicitur, consistere atque conservari: hoc igitur ortus omnísque actionis occultum intimúmque principium, natura cuiusque rei dicitur et est. Huic materies quaedam subiicitur, quemadmodum simulachro aes aut lignum: quam sanè oportet et naturae nomine dignari. Sic unumquodque ex naturis duabus conflatum est, quae nullo pacto seiungi, aut disclusae locis consistere queunt: sed est utraque alterius sic appetens, ut ei annexa alioqui moritura foveatur. Materies ea quae formae tanquam primum fundamentum substernitur, dum res ipsa composita perit, atque in aliam facessit, una eadémque permanet. Omnis enim quae gignitur substantia ex quodam gignitur fitque subiecto: quemadmodum ex aqua fit aër, stirpes et animalia ex semine, neque quicquam fit ex nihilo. Atqui subiectum ex quo aliquid factum est, ex materia et specie conditum erat: species periit abiítque succedente altera, privationémque tollente: materia autem eadem permansit: quae hanc subiecta substratáque exciperet. Necesse igitur est hunc in modum subiici quiddam, in quo servato ac superstite fiat rerum conversio. Ex quo intelligitur materiam nec ullo ortu generatam et indissolubilem esse, immortalem seculis omnibus, ac ut ortus ita et interitus expertem: atque dum gignitur quiddam, eius solùm formam nasci et

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selves naturalists.2 And since this is well recognised and is common knowledge, they make it a principle of philosophy, which neither needs proof nor can be proved. br. Have you seen or handled “nature” at any time? ph. I do not strive to see it, provided only that I can grasp it sufficiently by thought. So try another tack. br. Of all the world contains, some things are said to be “through nature”, others “through other causes”, such as skill or luck. ph. In what way? br. What has emerged of itself and from an internal impulse is said to be “by nature”, like the four elements of the world, the metals, all plants, all animals, and their components; but a stretcher or a home has acquired its basis not “by nature” but “by skill”. And certainly no animal nor plant nor any of the other natural things is called “nature”, but simply “from nature”, from which it is said to arise, exist and be preserved. Hence this hidden and inmost principle of coming to be and of every action is called, and is, the nature of each thing. A matter underlies it, as bronze or wood underlies a statue; it is surely appropriate for this too to be granted the name “nature”. Thus each thing is a combination of two natures, which cannot be separated in any way or exist when parted from each other. Each is so eager for the other that it thrives when attached to it and would die otherwise. When a composite thing itself perishes, and makes another thing, the underlying matter, which is, so to speak, the original foundation of the form, stays one and the same. For every substance that comes into being does in fact do so out of some substrate: for instance, air comes about from water, plants and animals from seed, and there is nothing that is made from nothing. But the substrate from which something is made is composed of matter and form; the form has perished and departed when another form is replacing it and preventing the absence [of any], but the matter remained the same, to accept the form as the form’s underlying substrate. So it is essential that there should be a substrate like this, preserved and surviving for the alteration of things to occur in it. Hence it is seen that matter is not created by any origin and is indestructible, deathless in all ages, and as immune to death as it is to creation. Also that while something is coming into existence, only

2

The Greek word is “physicists.”

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emergere, dum occidit et extinguitur, eandem occumbere: materiam autem rerum omnium communem, unam eandémque perpetuò manere. Si enim quando res oblitescit, illius materia simul interiret et dissiparetur, communis rerum omnium moles, iamdudum, vel saepius esset absorpta, nec hominum universum genus, nec rerum natura omnis, nec ipse mundus stare posset. ph. Haec satis probè teneo. Age verò aliud edisseramus. Si ex alia quapiam res omnis genita profluxit, à qua materiam suam, quasi à fonte hauriret: cur tandem elementa desideramus, quae in concreti huius corporis procreationem confluant? br. Ut haec quoque genitis constitutísque rebus materiam subministrent: etenim materia priùs ab elementis profecta, in subiectum quondam mi|gravit, ex quo quidque oriri nascíque contuemur. 6 ph. Mentem tuam non assequor: dic igitur, si lubet, clariùs. br. Subiectum id corpus ex quo procreatione quiddam nascitur et emergit, aut est omnino simplex aut compositum. Ex simplici nihil nisi simplex duci derivaríque potest, quòd motus illius simplex sit et uniusmodi. Qua ex causa elementa in sese duntaxat solvuntur, et retro vicissim commeant, et unumquodque ex alio fit simplici. Ex composito autem corpore non simplex, sed aliud compositum efficitur, quod nunquam possit ex simplici prodire. ph. Sic res habet. br. Conclude igitur aliam elementis, aliam concretis corporibus esse materiam. ph. Id consequens esse video, quanquam nondum mihi dilucidè patet. br. Dicam igitur luculentiùs. Elementorum simplex, concretorum verò ex elementis composita est materies. In illis sola principia: in his utraque omnino tum principia, tum elementa insunt. Simplicissima est elementorum inter se commutatio, in qua quod prius est, posteriori simplicem materiam exhibet. Concretis mistísque corporibus gignendis, unius elementi materia satis esse non potest, sed necesse est quatuor illa permistione confusa, gignendis rebus idoneum se subiectum exhibeant substernántque. Ut enim dubitare non possis aurum, argentum, ferrum, metalláque omnia: item unionem, hyacinthum, smaragdum, universúmque lapidum concharúm-

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its form is born and appears; when it passes away, the form perishes; but the matter that is common to everything stays one and the same forever. For when a thing disappears, if its matter perished and were dispersed at the time, the general mass of all things would have been consumed long ago, even more than once; and the whole human race, the whole nature of things, and the world itself would not be able to continue. ph. I certainly consider this correct. Come, let us set out another topic. If everything that comes into being has originated from something else, from which it drew its matter, as if from a wellspring, what need have we of elements to assemble for the creating of this concrete body? br. So that they too may contribute matter to the things that come into being and are established; for the matter that emerged 6 earlier from the elements, has | passed at some time into a substrate, from which we see each thing originate. ph. I do not follow your thought: so express it more clearly, please. br. The substrate, the body from which something is born and comes into being by procreation, is either entirely simple or composite. From a simple thing nothing can be derived except a simple thing, because its motion is simple and uniform. Hence elements are resolved only into themselves, and travel backward in turn, and each is made from another simple thing. But from a composite body there is made not a simple one, but another composite one, which can never proceed from a simple one. ph. That is the way it is. br. So the conclusion is that elements have one kind of matter and compound bodies another. ph. I see that that follows, though it is not yet transparently clear to me. br. Then I will put it more lucidly. The matter of elements is simple, but the matter of compound bodies is assembled from elements. In the former there are only principles: in the latter both principles and elements are entirely present. The conversion of elements into each other is extremely simple: what is there first presents a simple matter to what succeeds it. In the generation of composite and mixed bodies, matter consisting of one element cannot suffice; the four have to be mingled in a mixture, and provide and spread themselves out as a substrate suited to the generation of things. You cannot really doubt that gold, silver, iron, and all metals, also pearl, sapphire, emerald, and the whole kind of stones and shells, take their

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que genus, non ex unico sed ex permistis quatuor illis rerum initiis originem duxisse: aut si mavis, ex terra tanquam ex matre, sed quae ex aliorum temperatione idoneam constitutionem sit adepta. Ita etiam stirpes et animantia quae non statim è terra, sed ex semine edita sunt in lucem, quanquam longiore tractu et complurium mutationum interventu, ex iisdem tamen rerum primordiis, quae in semine et alimento tenebantur, materiam acceperunt. Haec igitur illorum materia non ut elementorum, simplex est, et omnis formae expers, sed multa compositione et conformatione instructa, corpus iam physicum, et propriè subiectum appellatur: in quo quatuor elementorum substantiae incorruptae persistunt. Quinetiam si ex hoc intereunte corpore aliud proferatur, illae, quanquam alia proportione aliáque permistionis lege, integrae manebunt, dum extrema tandem dissolutione in suas naturas quaeque redeant, et restituantur universitati. ph. His omnibus memini me non ita pridem ex naturali medicinae parte informatum institúmque fuisse. Iam tempus est, finem inter nos disserendi fieri. En hortus eius quem tantopere expetimus. br. Huc sanè (tanta vis est sermonis) nullo viae taedio pervenimus. ph. Vestibulum ingressi, apud hunc amoenissimum fontem anhelantes conquiescamus, ac tantisper respiremus, dum aliquis domesticorum qui nos introducat, occurret. br. Nullus est quieti locus, ostium iam concrepuit. ph. Quem quaerimus adest, suo more, meditatione plenus: bene res habet, nondum in literarum colloquia se contulit cum amicis: sensit adventum nostrum, contendit ad nos exadvorsum. br. Age ocyùs, et congredere. ph. Salvus sis Eudoxe perdocte. eu. Vos quoque salvete: advenisse quidem vos gaudeo, ut huiusce philosophicae sodalitatis numerum augeatis, sitque nobis plenior ad studiosam rusticationem occasio. ph. Nihil quicquam nobis est optatius, nisi vobis molesti sumus. eu. Opportunè quidem venistis, si quid affertis, etiam si nihil affertis. ph. Afferimus sanè quod vos totum hunc diem magna occupatione distineat.

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origin not from one thing but from a mixture of these four origins of things – or, if you prefer, from earth as, so to speak, their mother, but earth with a constitution adapted through the tempering of the others [i.e. the other three elements]. In this way too, plants and animals that are not produced into the light straight from the earth, but from seed, have taken over their matter from the same origins of things which were contained in the seed and in food, but with a longer trail and a number of intervening conversions. Hence their matter is not simple like that of the elements and devoid of all form, but being provided with considerable assembling and shaping, it is now described as a physical body, and a substrate in the proper sense. In it the substances of the four elements persist. Besides, if another body is produced from this perishing body, they will stay intact, although in a different proportion and on another basis of mixture, till ultimately at the final dissolution each returns into its own nature and is restored to the universe. ph. I recall that not long ago I was trained in all these points drawn from the natural part of medicine. It is time now to put an end to our discussion. Here is the garden of the man we are so keen to find. br. Conversation is so potent that we have certainly got here without being at all bored by the journey. ph. Let us go in to the entrance, and rest and recover our breath at this very pretty spring, and have a respite until one of the servants comes along to let us in. br. There is no chance of a rest – the door has creaked already. ph. The man we are looking for is here, deep in thought, as is his way. All is well; he has not fallen into literary discussions with his friends; he has noticed our arrival, he is hurrying to meet us. br. Come quickly and meet him. ph. Good day to you, learned Eudoxus. eu. And to you [both] too; I am certainly glad you have come, to build up the number of this philosophical group, and provide us with a fuller opportunity for a scholarly stay in the country. ph. We like nothing more, provided we are not a nuisance to you. eu. You have come at a good moment if you are presenting anything – and even if you are not presenting anything. ph. We are certainly presenting something that may keep you very busy all of to-day.

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eu. Quid istuc mi Philiatre? Quid quaeso rei huc vos tam matutinos egit? An quid est quòd mea opera opus sit vobis? ph. Maximè. Etenim angimur vehementer ea disputatione, quae nuper agitata est de divinis morborum remediis: hícque noster Brutus, quanquam supra vulgarem modum sit multos annos philosophatus, optavit tamen in tuam familiaritatem et colloquium venire, ut quantum ea de re gestas animo, tantum per tuam humanitatem intelligeret. Itaque rogamus, ut quod inter disserendum assequi haud potuimus, id tu docendo nobis planum facias: si modò nunc tibi licet per ocium, et si familiarem hunc amicorum coetum soluturi non sumus. eu. Arduum est quod petitis, et à veterum paucissimis comprobatum: quúmque non facilè sit novam rem ad communem hominum mentem et assensum accommodare, vereor ne si id percrebrescat, atque in sermone multorum incipiat esse, primo aditu indi|gnum 7 commentatione videatur: quò fit ut non facilè vestrae acquiescam petitioni. ph. Confidimus rem universam ex naturalis philosophiae principiis sic te demonstraturum, ut ei qui syncero candidóque animo totam praeceptionem diligenter audiet, nulla irrepat calumniandi occasio. Tu Mathematicorum more, ex principiis, quae sunt omnibus vel plebeis recepta, soles rem omnem tam apertè conficere, ut qui ab illis ad extrema occultiora, tanquam manu deductus sit, his tandem non minus quàm illis fidem tribuat et assentiat. br. Illa docendi ratio eruditis quibusque viris, maximéque Graecis veteribus probata excultáque est, proptereà quod tutò ac facilè quicquid suscipit, demonstret. Quocirca hac inniti praestantissimum semper esse duxi, tametsi imperitis non perinde placet, ut quam assequi non possunt, neque iudicio decernere noverunt, quo quidque loco statuendum sit. Gaudent enim ieiunis nudísque quibusdam propositionibus et sententiis destitutis munitione demonstrationum, pu-

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eu. What is that, my friend Philiatros? Please, what has brought you here so early in the morning? And what is it that you can need me to do? ph. A great deal; we are much disturbed by the dispute which has recently been pursued about the divine remedies for diseases; and although our friend Brutus here has philosophised for many years beyond the everyday level, he has still been eager to associate himself closely with you in discussion, so that your classical learning may let him grasp all that you harbour in your mind on this topic. And so we ask you to make clear to us by instruction what we were unable to follow during our discussion, provided simply that your leisure now lets you, and that we are not going to break up this family gathering of friends. eu. You are asking a difficult question, and one solved by very few of the ancients. And since it is hard to adapt a new thing to people’s general understanding and agreement, I am uneasy in case its being widely reported, and being in many people’s mouths, may make it 7 look | not worth study, on a first approach. Consequently I am not readily falling in with your request. ph. We believe that you are going to prove the whole thing from the principles of natural philosophy, in such a way that anyone who listens carefully to the whole presentation with a straightforward and honest mind will find no occasion to criticise sneaking in. As mathematicians do, starting from principles which are agreed by everyone, even by common people, you usually complete the whole task so lucidly that one is led by the hand, so to speak, from these principles to the limits of more abstruse things, and one ends trusting and concurring in both alike.3 br. This system of teaching has been endorsed and followed by all learned men, and especially by the ancient Greeks, just because it provided secure and easy proof of whatever it undertakes. So I have always thought there was great distinction in depending on it, even if the inexperienced do not much like it, not being able to follow it, nor knowing how to make a judgment on where each component should be set. They actually enjoy meagre and bare propositions, without the defence of demonstrations, and suppose that they learn 3

In other words, in the technical phrase of Aristotelian logic, Eudoxus argues “more geometrico.” It is perhaps not irrelevant that the real Eudoxus of Cnidus, (c. 390– c.340 bc) was an outstanding mathematician and did important work in astronomy and geography. For a full discussion of the use of argument more geometrico in the Renaissance see Schüling, Geschichte der axiomatischen Methode.

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tántque iis se scire, demonstrationibus se obrui, potiùs quàm doceri. Unde fit ut scriptorum cuiusvis fidei et authoritati omnia tribuant satis esse rati si quid audierint à probato insignísque famae viro dictum. Proinde quas ex optimis authoribus mira diligentia observarunt praeclaras sententias incompositissimè congerunt, quae minus cohaerent quàm scopae dissolutae. Putant id artis esse primum et maximum, si nihil arte, modò pulchrè sententioséque dicatur. ph. Valeant isti, mendicent perpetuò, et alienis rebus inhaereant, curéntque ediscere singula, quàm scire potiùs. br. Tu vir optime, tuo more facito, et si quid in morbis aut in eorum medicina divinum inesse putas, id per philosophiam obtestor, ne pigeat nobis quicquid est exponere. Nihil est cur rei aut difficultatem aut novitatem causeris: novimus et quantum possis, et quàm nihil tibi novum sit. eu. Possum fortè aliquid, quia posse videor. Paucis certè quidem omnem controversiam vobis dirimere possum, si in caput unum ac summam, totum coniici velitis. br. Tam est ardua, támque abstrusa nova haec et παρ δοξος sententia, ut si pro dignitate eam exponi ac discuti placeat, necesse sit, antequam ad medicinam venias, difficilima quaeque ac longè pulcherrima naturae principia excutere, et rerum omnium ortus, primámque formarum originem interpretari. ph. Mihi quidem iucundum erit ac dulce, à vobis haec prius edoceri, quàm rei medicae totum me dedam. eu. At mihi grave est, ad haec quasi incunabula revocari, quae nec satis memoriter teneo, neque hanc decent aetatem. br. Age precor, ne poeniteat in hanc rem aliquot horulas nostra causa collocare, quo et nobis satisfacias, et res tota planior éque suis principiis orta esse videatur: fac ut alteram diei partem in hanc operam perdas, velut animi causa confabulando. eu. Conabor equidem, quando me tantopere urgetis, et praestabo quantum mea feret tenuitas: sed meos tamen familiares adesse volo, quos scio philosophiae studio flagrare. br. Aequum est. eu. Heus puer, accerse philosophos, qui mihi huc venêre comites, ut se nobis socios, si videbitur, adiungant: reperies in hortis

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from them that proofs overwhelm them rather than instruct them. This is why they pay total homage to the reliability and authority of any author, considering that they have done well enough if they have heard something said by a reputable man of notable standing. Likewise, they have taken great care to note celebrated views of the best authors, and heap them up in no order, so that they stick together less than untied brooms. They suppose that the highest achievement of the art is for nothing to be expressed with art – only prettily and imaginatively. ph. Goodbye to them; let them be forever begging, and interested in other people’s affairs, and seeking to memorize details, rather than to attain knowledge. br. Excellent man, follow your practice, and if you think there is anything divine in diseases or in their treatment, I implore you in the name of philosophy, do not be put off from explaining to us what it is. You have no reason to plead the difficulty or the novelty of the topic: we know your ability, and how nothing is novel to you. eu. As it happens, I can do something, because I am thought able to. I can certainly break up the whole argument briefly for you, if you want everything put under a single heading and as a summary. br. This new and unexpected view is so difficult and recondite that if you are willing to explain it and take it apart as it deserves, then before you get to medicine, you must examine all the hardest and outstandingly beautiful principles of nature, and explain the principles of all things, and the initial origins of the forms. ph. I certainly will find it pleasant and attractive to learn this from you [both], before dedicating myself wholly to medicine. eu. But it is hard for me to be summoned back to what were virtually my earliest studies, which are not well enough lodged in my memory, nor suited to my age. br. I beseech you, don’t regret devoting a few short hours to this topic for our sake, since thus you will satisfy us, and the whole topic appears more straightforward when begun on the level with its own principles. Arrange to while away a further part of the day in this activity, in discussion, as it were, for your mind’s sake. eu. I will try, when you press me so hard, and I will offer my short supply. But I want my household to be present, whom I know are eager students of philosophy. br. That is fair. eu. Hello, boy, summon the philosophers who came to meet me here, so that they can join us, if they agree. You will find them strolling

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deambulantes. Vos cessatores scamna parate in aula, quae hortis adiacet: ex ea enim regione salubriùs inspirat caelum, his maximè diebus, quum terra in omnis generis stirpes et flores se resolvit. En adsunt quos opperiebamur:* ingrediamur omnes, et sedibus in umbra positis disputemus. ph. Placet. eu. Nullum híc statuite dignitatis ordinem: locum quem cuique fors tulit, capessite. Liberum erit omnibus, hac de re quae sentient dicere, nulli indicetur silentium: nec enim aequum est in hac sodalitate. Hîc philosophi, qui pridie venerant, Quae sit, inquiunt, vestra quaestio, ignoramus. Agemus Pythagorae discipulos: discemus aliquid sine ullo periculo.† Tacerem vobiscum si per hos liceret. Quoniam verò amicorum et philosophiae gratia nihil reiiciendum, sed audendum potiùs est aliquid, provinciam maiorem, scio, viribus meis suscipiam: quo et si nihil adferam dignum tantis viris, recreabo tamen animos novitate rei. Itaque de occulta medicina locuturus, rem paulò altiùs repetam, ut à fundamentis opus extruere, et suo loco partes omnes collocare possim. br. Sic optamus, velimúsque te rem ipsam iam nunc auspicari. Rei naturalis formam, substantiam esse, non accidens Cap. ii eudoxus Materia est constans permanénsque subiectum, ex quo omnia procreantur: et quanquam per se ipsa, et à forma remota non invenitur, prima tamen in corpore supponitur, tanquam fundamentum, cui forma innitatur ac insit, veluti receptaculo omnium vicissitudinum et commutationum.

* The original is “operiebamur”; “operio” means to shut, while “opperior” means to await; there is no confusion nor any acceptance of deviant spellings in the contemporary Latin-French dictionary of Robert Stephanus (1544). † A superfluous “eu.” appears here in the text and I have removed it.

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in the gardens. You idlers, get benches ready in the hall adjoining the gardens, as that is the direction from which the weather breathes more healthily, especially at present, when the earth breaks out in plants and flowers of every sort. Look, the people we were awaiting have come; let us all make a start, and debate on seats placed in the shade. ph. Agreed. eu. Don’t set up any order of precedence here; occupy the place chance has given each of you. Everyone will be free to say what they feel on this topic, and no one will be enjoined to be silent; that is not fair in this group. Here philosophers who had come the day before say, “We do not know what your question is.” Let us play the part of pupils of Pythagoras: let us learn something without anything to fear.4 I would be silent along with you if it were acceptable to those people. But for the sake of our friends and of philosophy, nothing is to be refused, but rather something should be ventured; so I will undertake a task I know is beyond my powers. And if I bring to it nothing worthy of such distinguished company, still I shall refresh your spirits with the novelty of the topic. And so, as I start to discourse about hidden medicine, I shall go over the ground a little more deeply, so as to be able to build up the task from the foundations, and set all the parts in their places. br. This is what we long for, and we would like you now to make a beginning. 8

Chapter 2 The form of a natural thing is substance, not accident eu. Matter is the unchanging and permanent substrate, out of which everything is created; and although it is not found on its own and apart from a form, it is the first thing underlying in a body, the foundation, so to speak, on which the form rests and is supported, as if it were the container of all alterations and changes.

4 It is puzzling that Eudoxus follows his injunction that everyone should be allowed to speak freely with a reference to pupils of Pythagoras. According to the Ancient Greek historian, Timaeus (c. 345-c. 250 bc), disciples of Pythagoras had to listen in silence for a probationary period of five years. On this, see Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, pp. 192–193. Perhaps Fernel had some other story about Pythagoras’s pupils in mind?

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ph. Nos isthaec ad te venientes longa commentatione discussimus, ut renovata eorum memoria, instructiores essemus ad tuam disputationem. eu. Si haec, ut debetis, recipitis, dubitari non potest materiam substantiae rationem et genus subire, utpote quae in composito prima subiicitur, et permanens continentes rerum varietates novationésque sustinet. br. Ne istuc quidem nos in disputationem revocamus, satis omnibus perspicuum. eu. Sed neque illud quod est principii loco receptum, cuiusque substantiae naturalis formam actúmque primum, substantiam et ipsam esse. br. Quid ita? eu. Nam si in genere substantiae est materia, multo (arbitror) magis ipsa forma, quam vos hac longè perfectiorem esse non inficiamini. br. De forma non adeò compertum est, quòd ea per se subsistat nusquam, sed in materia semper ac subiecto sit, ad accidentis ferè similitudinem. eu. Vastum est hoc disputationis mare, in quod si semel vela pandimus, longa nobis erit, et gravis ex concertatione perferenda iactatio: nec nisi post longos errores veniemus ad illum vobis, ut dicitis, optatissimum portum. br. Rem totam percurrere satiùs est, si tibi per ocium vacat. Ego enim, ut ingenuè fatear, à gravissimis quibusdam authoribus sum institutus, qui aliis quàm tu principiis nixi, omnia quaecunque mundus continet, ipsásque rerum formas ex elementorum permistione nasci ac prodire contendunt. Illi materiam totam rei naturalis substantiam esse confirmant, huícque rhythmum quendam seu concentum affectionum qualitatúmque accidere, quae forma sit, per quam et nomen habeat, et à caeteris diversa sit. His enim suis qualitatibus res quaeque cognoscitur, et sensibus nostris sese offert. Multis rationibus contendunt, id Aristoteli rei formam dici, eámque esse perfectionem, et

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ph. On the way to you we debated these matters in a long preparation, so that the refreshment of our memory would better brief us for discussion with you. eu. If you accept them as you should, there can be no doubt that matter assumes the basis and kind of a substance, being the first item supplied in a composite thing, and the one that permanently undergoes the continuous alterations and revisions of things. br. We do not bring that back into discussion either, since it is sufficiently evident to everyone. eu. Nor [need we review the proposition] that what is accepted in the role of a principle, the form and first activity of each natural substance, is itself a substance too. br. How so? eu. For if matter is in the kind of a substance, then I think that the form itself is much more so, the form which the two of you do not deny is much more perfect than the matter. br. It is not completely proven that a form exists nowhere on its own, but is always in a matter and substrate, almost like an accident.5 eu. This is a vast ocean of argument, and if we once set sail in it, it will take long, and from the controversy there will be severe tossing about; we will only reach what you call your most long-desired harbour after enduring long wanderings. br. It is preferable to go through the whole topic, if you have the time to spare. Myself indeed, as I openly admit, I have been started off by some authorities of great weight, who rely on principles different from yours, maintaining that everything the world contains, and the forms of things themselves, originate and come forth from the mixture of elements. They assert that the whole matter of a natural thing is a substance, and that a rhythm or harmony of affections and qualities befalls it, which is the form; through the form it can get its name, and be different from the rest. For it is by the qualities it has that each thing is recognised, and presents itself to our senses. People maintain with many arguments that this is what Aristotle called the form of a thing, and that it is the completion and the destination 5 According to the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, matter and form are inseparable, and so form should not be able to exist on its own. However, Fernel has to acknowledge an opposing view because, according to the Thomist account, the intellectual (or rational) soul is the form of the human body (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 76, Article 1). Since it is a requirement of the faith that the soul survives the body, it must be deemed possible for forms to exist independently of any material substrate. See Eckhard Kessler, “The Intellective Soul,” in Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 485–534.

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finem ad quam rei ferebatur procreatio: per eam habere et figuram et finitionem, et perfectionis complementum. ph. Si hoc ita tibi statuendum esse videtur, aut rationes producito, quarum te moveat probabilitas, aut si id non potes, celebris authoris testimonium. br. Utrunque adferam: nam Alexander Aphrodisaeius Peripateticae familiae sectator praecipuus, haec videtur iisdem propemodum verbis dixisse, quo loco sic ait, Verùm enimverò in igne quod naturale ac simplex corpus est, calorem et siccitatem speciem facimus, et ab iis atque in iis genitam levitatem. Haec enim principium est motionis ad superiora tendentis. ph. Haec fortasse ex aliorum sententia pronuntiavit. br. Minimè vero, sed ea fuit opinio tum maximè celebris, quam etiam Galenus, quem Alexandri tempore vixisse scimus, probasse videtur: nam neque id in quaestionem vocavit, et libro de elementis primo qualitatem passim elementi speciem appellat, aítque ignem ex materia constare et qualitate. Hos non parvo pòst intervallo tutatus est Philoponus philosophus in primis magnus, et post hunc alii plurimi celeberrimi nominis et gravissimae authoritatis viri. ph. Quae ratio potuit illos in istam opinionem inducere? br. Quod cùm prima elementa, per temperaturam subiici fieríque mistorum corporum materiam oporteret, esset quoque necesse illa retundi, et ad medium quoddam temperari, si exquisita erat permistio futura. Contendebant autem illud fieri non posse, nisi elementorum formas in qualitatum genus et ordinem referrent, quibus solis proprium est intendi et remitti.

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toward which the creation of the thing was directed; through the form it possesses its shape and outline, and the implementing of its completion. ph. If this appears to be what you are to maintain, either produce arguments whose credibility carries weight with you, or if you cannot, the evidence of a celebrated authority. br. I will contribute both. Alexander of Aphrodisias, an outstanding adherent of the Peripatetic family, appears to have put this in nearly the same words, where he says: “But as a matter of course, in fire, a natural and simple body, we assume heat and dryness as the form, and from them and arising in them, lightness.” 6 For it is the principle of movement directed upwards. ph. Perhaps he declared this on the advice of other people. br. Not at all; this was the opinion then widely held, and even Galen (whom we know lived at the time of Alexander) seems to have endorsed it; he did not question it, and throughout his first book On the Elements he calls the form of an element a quality, and states that fire has its existence from matter and quality. 7 After a considerable interval, these authorities were supported by Philoponus,8 a philosopher notable among the first of them, and after him, by other very numerous people of the greatest fame and weightiest authority. ph. What line of argument could bring them round to that opinion? br. This, that when the original elements required to be subjected to tempering and to become the matter of composite bodies, it would be necessary also for them to be moderated and brought to some middle state, if an ideal mixture were to come about. They used to hold that this was impossible unless they returned the forms of the elements to the kind and rank of qualities, to which alone they can suitably be returned and released.

6 Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200), influential follower of, and commentator upon, Aristotle; often known as “the Exegete.” In his De Anima (Bruns edition): p. 5, ll. 4–6, the Greek runs: το* γρ πυρ+ς -ντος φυσικο* τε κα" /πλο* σ1ματος ε2δος μν 3 ερμτης κα" 3 #κ τοτων τε κα" #π" τοτοις γεννωμνη κουφτης, … 7 This does not appear to be a verbatim quotation, but its substance is to be found in Galen’s De Elementis ex Hippocrate, 8 (i. 480 [Kühn]; de Lacy 126 ll. 8–9), where he remarks that air, earth, fire and water “ο4κ #ξ 5τρων σωμ των, 6λλ’ #ξ 7λης τε κα" ποιοτ8των #στ".” 8 John Philoponus (c. 490–570), Christian Neoplatonist philosopher who developed his own original approach to natural philosophy. See Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science.

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Multo pòst tempore Averrhois acerrimo vir ingenio, lectis diligenter singulorum* decretis, hac ipsa ratione eò necessitatis redactus est, ut elementorum formas ancipitis inter synceras qualitates et compositorum corporum formas naturae statuerit, illásque qualitatibus et substantiis interiectas utriusque participes esse. Quatenus enim elementis perfectionem consistendíque vim tribuunt, substantiarum viribus pollêre: quatenus verò in permistione confusae intendi aut remitti videntur, qualitatum vim et potestatem exercêre. Haud secus enim formarum, quae in elementis inhaerescunt, coïtionem fieri autumat, quàm contrariarum | qualitatum confusionem, quasi pro- 9 priae elementorum qualitates remitti nequeant, nisi et ipsae pariter commutentur formae. Si enim aliqua ex parte eas quispiam retundi dicat, cùm sit reliquarum, inquit, eadem ratio, possent quoque omnes illorum qualitates in nihilum tandem redigi, forma superstite et haudquaquam offensa. Id autem perquàm absurdum in natura videtur: neque enim subsistat ignis, omnis caloris expers: neque aqua, ab omni humore destituta. ph. Adversus nunc autem aciem struunt optimi quique Aristotelis interpretes, qui omnes affirmant elementorum qualitates nonnihil ac leviter retundi posse, formis eorum, quae verae substantiae sunt, servatis, neque illas obstare quominus elementa possint bene perfectéque misceri. br. Ego cùm praeclaris philosophis censeo, elementorum species, quemadmodum et qualitates eas quas primas vocitant, inter se dissidentes, coïre tamen ac congredi remissionéque convenienti temperatas, κα’ 9λον misceri, hinc totius compositi unam simplicémque formam prodire. Tu verò si vis elementorum species nequaquam retundi, quo pacto illarum temperamentum fieri intelligas, haud equidem video. ph. Fiet, inquit Aristoteles, primordiorum substantiis ad minima diductis confuséque permixtis.

*

I have rendered this word as “authority by authority” in the translation.

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Long afterwards, Averroes,9 a man of very keen mind, carefully read the statements, authority by authority, and this line of thought constrained him to rank the forms of the elements as of equivocal nature, between pure qualities and the forms of composite bodies, regarding them as between qualities and substances, with a share in each. For insofar as completeness and the power of existing are granted to elements, they exert the powers of substances; but insofar as they seem to be returned and released when mingled in a mixture, they possess the power and potentiality of qualities. Indeed, he says that a coming together of the forms indwelling in elements occurs in the 9 same way as a | combination of contrary qualities, as if the qualities belonging to elements cannot be released unless the forms themselves are altered to the same extent. For if someone affirms that they are abated in part, with the rest keeping (he says) the same basis, all their qualities could also be reduced to nothing in the end, with the form surviving and in no way the worse. But in nature that appears highly preposterous; for fire cannot exist without any heat, nor can water without any wetness. ph. All the best interpreters of Aristotle now array their line of battle in opposition. They all hold that the qualities of elements can be abated to some minor extent, with their forms (which are real substances) being preserved; and the forms do not stand in the way of elements being well and perfectly mingled. br. Along with distinguished philosophers, I hold that the forms of elements differ between themselves, as do what are called their primary qualities, yet they assemble and gather together, and when tempered by a suitable remission, totally mix, consequently giving rise to a single simple form of the whole composite thing. But if you will have it that the forms of elements are in no way abated, I cannot see myself how you take their temperament to come about. ph. Aristotle says that it will happen when the substances of the elements are finely divided and thoroughly mixed.

9

Averroes was the latinized name given to Ibn-Rushd (1126–1198), one of the greatest Arab philosophers (he lived in al-Andalus), whose commentaries on the works of Aristotle meant that he was known to the Latin West simply as “the Commentator.” A classic study is Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme, or see Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy.

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br. Id appositionem esse dico, non commixtam temperaturam. ph. At vera mistio tum perficitur dum totae praetereá qualitates totis confunduntur, etiam si non sint illorum formae totae totis confusae. eu. Quid vos tantoperè moratur haec philosophica concertatio, quae aut nihil aut minimum frugis ad hanc rem sit allatura. Debueras tu certè quidem, his posthabitis, ad graviora et longè utiliora properare. Quid de elementorum formis statuas, parùm laboro, si modò cum praeclaris philosophis tibi conveniat, concretorum corporum formas in substantiarum genere constitui. br. Conveniat sanè: nec illis prorsus adhaereo, à quibus dixi me aliquando fuisse institutum, sed tutiorem viam ingressus, iam pridem concessi in familiam longè celeberrimam, eorum qui compositorum formas inter perfectissimas substantias collocant, elementorum formas inter qualitates referunt: quam quaestionem etsi tu ad hanc rem parùm facere ducis, vellem tamen de illa tuam audire sententiam. eu. De his nihil certum, nihil constans, nihil omnium consensu probatum definiri posse sentio, quandiu mens humana corporis hoc veluti ergastulo inclusa, neque materiam, neque formam sensibus cognoscit. br. Sic arbitror: neque enim tam discordes illi fuissent, qui in hanc investigationem diligenter incubuerunt.

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br. I call that apposition, not a mixed temperament.10 ph. But a true mixture is brought about when in addition every one of the qualities is mixed with every other one, even if their forms are not thus mixed all together. eu. Why do you [both] spend so long on this philosophical controversy, when it can contribute little or nothing to the present topic? You should certainly relegate it and hurry to more weighty and much more useful issues. I care little what you decide about the forms of elements, provided only that you follow the notable philosophers in holding that the forms of composite bodies fall within the kind of substances. br. Agreed, certainly; and I do not completely go along with those by whom I said I was at one time instructed, but I have started on a more secure path, and withdrew long ago into an extremely famous family,11 the family of those who set the forms of composite things among the most perfect substances, and regard the forms of the elements as among the qualities; even if you hold that this question has little to contribute to the present topic, I would still like to hear your view about it. eu. I feel that on these issues nothing sure, permanent, or endorsed by universal agreement can be specified, so long as the human mind, imprisoned in its body, cannot be acquainted with matter or form through its senses.12 br. I think so too; for those who devoted themselves diligently to this study would not [otherwise] have been in such disagreement with each other.

10 Maier in a classic discussion (“Strukture der materiellen Substanz,” p. 19 n. 20) refers to the distinction here, using the nomenclature of earlier Scholastic discussion of the basis of a “mixtum”: “Das mixtum ad sensum entspricht also im Prinzip der physikalischer ‘Mischung’ im modernen Sinn, das mixtum secundum veritatem der chemischen ‘Verbindung.’” “Appositio” corresponds to a “mixtum ad sensum” or modern “mixture”; “mixed temperament” corresponds to a “mixtum ad veritatem” or modern “compound.” 11 Fernel has already (p. [8] 141 above) made Brutus refer to Alexander of Aphrodisias as a member “of the Peripatetic family” [Peripateticae familiae]; it is possible therefore that here also Fernel uses “family” to refer to a major group of philosophers. It seems likely that he has the Averroists in mind, since Averroes seems to have regarded the forms of the elements as not fully substantial, but closer to qualities. See Emerton, Scientific Reinterpretation of Form, pp. 58, 79–82. 12 On the lack of consensus, see Maier (n. 10 above), and also Van Melsen, From Atomos to Atom, pp. 38–44 and 58–80; Emerton, Scientific Reinterpretation of Form, pp. 76–105.

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eu. Si tamen placet, haec rationis probabilitate diiudicari oportere, illorum potiùs accedam sententiae, qui ut concretorum corporum, sic nullo discrimine et elementorum species, puras substantias esse pronuntiant. br. Age verò si quid ad eius rei fidem in animo premis, hoc exprome: neque enim te vel temerè vel citra rationem, ita sentire puto. eu. Caeterorum rationes omitto: unius Alexandri, quem tu tibi praecipuum ducem legisti, sententiam in te profero. Age igitur ob oculos apertè ponatur Alexandri locus, ubi elementorum formas scriptura prosequitur, ut inde nobis sit integra sententiae nostrae confirmandae potestas. br. Quamobrem (inquit) ea species quae ab arte proficiscitur, substantia nullo pacto est, quemadmodum et ars ipsa: forma verò quae est à natura, proculdubio substantia est, quemadmodum et ipsa natura. Verùm enimverò in igne quod et naturale et simplex corpus est, calorem et siccitatem speciem facimus, et ab iis atque in iis genitam levitatem. His planè affirmat compositi naturalis formam esse substantiam, elementi, qualitatem sicut et artificio aliquo fabricatae rei: neque est de illius opinione quicquam altiùs investigandum. eu. Sed haec videri possunt, neque satis circunspectè dicta, nec ulla demonstratione suffulta: noli librum ponere. Sed eo ulterius evoluto, lege quae paulò pòst adiecit. br. Perplacet. Illis commemoratis haec subiicit, Quandoquidem non potest ipsa species, per se seorsum à materia separata et abiuncta subsistere: utranque tamen substantiam esse non ambigimus. Nam sicut materia, ita et naturalis species substantia est: partes enim substantiae, substantiae sunt. Quinimò quia pars utraque substantia est, id quod ex ambabus constat, et substantia et una quaepiam natura

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eu. But if you accept that these issues ought to be settled on the basis of reasonable probability, I would rather adopt the view of those who proclaim that the forms of composite bodies, exactly like the forms of elements too, are pure substances. br. Come now, if you have something concealed in your mind bearing on this, out with it; I do not really think you hold this view either hastily or without good reason. eu. Passing over the reasoning of others, I offer you the view of Alexander alone, whom you chose as your special guide. So come, let the place in Alexander be set openly before your eyes, where his text is concerned with the forms of the elements, so that we can get from it a complete ability to support our view. br. “Therefore,” he says, “a form which proceeds from an art is in no way a substance, any more than the art itself is; but a form which exists from nature is undoubtedly a substance, just as nature itself is. Of course, however, we suppose that in fire (a natural and simple body) the heat and dryness are a form, and the lightness that arises from them and in them.” 13 Here he clearly states that the form of a composite natural thing is a substance, but the form of an element is a quality, like that too of a thing constructed by some craftsmanship. And there is nothing about his view that needs more searching enquiry. eu. But this can be regarded as said without sufficient care and unsupported by any proof. Do not put the book down; open it further, and read what he has added a little further on. br. With pleasure. To what has been mentioned, he added the following: “Since a form cannot exist itself on its own in separation from matter, nevertheless we have no doubt that both are substances. For a natural form is a substance too, like matter; the parts of a substance are indeed substances. Indeed, as each part is a substance, what is composed of both is both a substance and a single nature,

13 Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Anima (Bruns edition): p.5 ll. 1–6: τ+ μν ο ν κατ τχνην γινμενον ε2δος ο4κ ο4σα, 9τι μηδ : τχνη (τχνη γρ κα" τ+ τοιο*τον ε2δος,