Cromartie Alan. Sir Matthew Hale, 1609-1676: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History) (ENG)
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Natural motions 199
The Primitive origination's fault, as the author himself had candidly
confessed, is the disjointed nature it shares with all his works of any length.
Its argument never achieves momentum, and most of its individual points
are amplified in Hale's unpublished papers, but it has one useful feature
that later writings do not duplicate. It gives an account of his attitude to
the great disturbing force in contemporary science, the mechanistic system
of Descartes (1596-1650).
In the Discourse, it will be remembered, there was just one formal
argument to prove the existence of God. He asserted that the world had
been created, on the grounds of an Aristotelian view about infinity. An
'actual infinity', including an actually infinite 'succession', was a natural
impossibility. The later works expand upon this point.
20
Nothing that can
be counted can be truly infinite; it is characteristic of numbers that they can
be increased by adding one. The material world is a 'quantum', divisible
into numerable parts, and therefore essentially finite.
21
A succession of
natural motions (of circuits of the heavens, for example) was also a variety
of quantum: 'in all successions of what kind of nature so ever there is such
a distinction and division that doth of necessity reduce them under
number'.
22
It followed there was no such thing as an infinite succession,
and therefore that the First Cause must exist. All this was brought in
question by Descartes.
Descartes had made impossible the argument from an infinite succession.
He had replaced the infinite, the source of so much intellectual trouble,
with the idea of the 'indefinite', and depicted the physical universe as
indefinitely large.
23
He neglected the physical proofs for the existence of
the deity, resorting instead (Hale disapprovingly noted) to the questionable
subtleties of an argument from the idea of God. The dangers of relying on
such uncertain grounds were shown by his immediate refutation at the
hands of the great atomist Gassendi (1592-1655).
24
The universe itself was
turned into a great machine, while magnets, gravity and animal life (all of
them to be treated in Hale's works) were given mechanistic explanations.
Hale's answer to this challenge was to place the French philosopher in a
long line of thinkers carried away by an a priori theory. The paracelsan
'chemists' held, on very inadequate grounds, that the fundamental
elements were mercury, sulphur and salt:
their evidence that they are so [is], because they
find
by their solutions by
fire,
some
things which they call by these names, to be that whereinto bodies are dissolved;
when, for ought can be evidently made out, many of these are not so much really in
the constitution of the bodies themselves, as the very alterations and changes of
20
Lambeth 3491, entitled *De Deo:
Vox
Metaphysicae', esp.
fos.
62-71.
21
Lambeth 3491,
65.
22
Ibid.,
71.
n
Descartes, Principles, 13-14.
24
Lambeth 3489, fo. 4.
200 Natural philosophy
them by the force and energy of that active element [i.e.
fire],
or at least, though
after their solution they assume the shapes of salt, sulphur and mercury, yet there
are even in these consistences very various contextures, differing extremely in each
body ... though they seem to assume some analogy of shape .. P
5
The belief in no more than three elements was more of a presupposition
than an outcome of disinterested research. Even the greatest of philoso-
phers was open to the charge of dogmatism. The Aristotelian principles of
matter and form were arguably little more than intellectual tools: 'it is very
difficult to conceive that any such thing should be as matter, undetermined
by form'.
26
A number of so-called 'substantial forms' might well be no
more than 'modifications [arrangements] of matter', while others were
perhaps 'some middle nature' that escaped classification within existing
scholastic terminology, 'neither bodies nor accidents, but powers of a
different nature from bodies, accidents, or qualities, or substances, though
not so adequate to our perception'. The Aristotelian 'hypothesis' therefore
'seemed, for the most part, to be a kind of artificial contrivance, not wholly
taken from the nature of things, but fitted to give some kind of conception
of them'.
27
The atomism of Democritus was another example of dubious presuppo-
sitions, a theory 'not only perfectly inevident to our sense, but altogether
improbable'.
28
As another work of Hale's was to point out, the universe
has many soft compressible components, which it is perverse to explain as
the product of hard if microscopic atoms: 'to suppose the first constituent
minute particles of air or water are hard, or of any other nature than the
whole body, is a precarious, inevident, and unreasonable supposition'.
29
In
its atheistic form the theory was simply absurd. A stable cosmic order had
somehow coalesced from the random conjunction of atoms in a void.
Lucretius had shored up the theory, at least in its application to the
biological world, by admitting the existence of certain 'moleculae semin-
ales ... to keep the world and its integrals from an infinitude and extend-
lessness of excursions every minute into new figures and animals', but these
intermediate entities were themselves 'made up merely by chance, and by
the contexture of those atoms which have neither qualities nor energy, nor
anything else besides their small and imperceptible moles to make them
operative, and that local motion [sic] which they there have; but they teach
us not from where they have it.'
30
The theory of Descartes gave 'some correctives' to these mad ideas, but
the spirit of the systems was the same. Hale often bracketed the French-
man's thought with that of Democritus and Epicurus. Cartesians thought
25
Hale, Primitive origination, 9.
26
Ibid.,
9-10.
27
Ibid.,
10
28
Ibid.
29
Hale, Observations, 94.
30
Hale, Primitive origination, 10.
Natural motions 201
the universe was full (they identified matter with space, so there could be
no question of a void), and composed of fundamental particles of basically
spherical form. These particles once came in a variety of shapes, but had
gradually been worn down into spheres. Their continual collisions had had
the effect of knocking their corners away. The resultant, still more micro-
scopic debris made up the Cartesian 'materia subtilis', which occupied all
spaces between the little spheres. This sea of subtle matter, pervading all
the chinks of matter proper, was continually invoked (as we shall see) to
explain away the problems raised by commitment to a mechanistic theory.
Hale saw the new philosophy as a plenist atomism, barely to be distin-
guished from the vacuist atomism of the Greeks, and he scorned the role
attributed to 'materia subtilis':
what colour of evidence have we of the various configurations of his atoms, the
grinding of them round by their mutual attritions, the coalition of the globular
atoms into the heavenly bodies, the filling of the chinks and interstices by the
ramenta of the greater, whereby a materia subtilis is diffused through the universe,
which is invisible [and] performs most of the motions that we see in things .. .?
31
The Christian scientist had an advantage in giving an account of the
physical world, because the 'Mosaic hypothesis' was set out in the pages of
the Bible. The opening verses of Genesis i are seldom read as theoretical
physics, even (a little oddly) by the most literal-minded of believers. It
therefore seems worth printing the 'hypothesis' in full:
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the
darkness.
5 And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And the evening
and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the
firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were
the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one
place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land earth; and the gathering together of the waters
called he seas: and God saw that it was good.
The story of creation confirmed Hale's instinctive beliefs about the roles of
matter, God and motion in shaping the visible world. He inherited from
31
Ibid.,
10.
202 Natural philosophy
the Aristotelian system
the
sense that matter
in
itself
was
utterly formless
and passive.
The
world
had
these deficiencies
in it, in and for
some time after
its
production:
1.
It was
without form
and
order.
2.
It was
without light.
3.
It was
without activity, life
or
motion:
and
4.
All the
superficies which
it had
bore
the
greatest analogy
to
water, though
in
that confused abyss there
was a
confused mixture
of
other matter.
32
The spirit that moved
on the
face
of the
waters
set in
train
the
trans-
formation
of
this mass:
1.
It
derived into
it
motive powers
or
energies, whereby
the
parts
of it
were
agitated
or
moved,
or at
least rendered more obsequious
to the
agitation
or
motion
of
that active nature which
was
afterwards created, namely light
or
fire.
2.
It did
gradually digest
and
separate
its
parts, whereby they became more
capable
of
disposition
and
order, according
to
their several designed
and
destined places, positions,
and
uses.
3.
It did
transfuse into this stupid, dead
and
unactive moles certain activity
and
vital influence, whereby
it did in
general affect that which Aristotle calls
the
common life
of
bodies, namely motion;
and the
several parts thereof were
impregnated with several kinds
of
vital influence.
33
These were
not in
fact original ideas.
An
almost identical theory,
treating 'spirit'
as a
moulding influence
and
'light'
as a
means
of
softening
intractable matter,
can be
found
in a
work
by Jan
Comenius (1592-1670),
a
treatise called Natural philosophic reformed
by
divine light (1651),
to
which Hale made occasional allusions.
34
The
source
of
their appeal
is
fairly clear. They offered
a way of
understanding 'spirit'
as
equivalent
to
Aristotelian 'form',
and
treating
the
organising force
as
having
a
quasi-
material existence. Thus
an
undated essay 'Concerning
the
works
of God'
distinguished creatio prima,
'the
production
of a
being from
not
being',
from creatio secunda,
'the
production
of a
being
out of
such
a
being,
and in
such
a
method
or way as
exceeds
all
created power'.
35
There were
two
essential elements
in the
process
of
creation:
1.
The
common mass
of
matter;
and
2.
The
common spirit
of
material beings.
As
the
former
is the
materia prima
of
bodies,
so the
latter
may
possibly
be the
materia prima,
as I may
call
it, of
substantial forms;
and
these
lay
confusedly
mixed together,
so
that neither
was the
matter purely informis,
for
that were
to
suppose such
... a
subsistence
of
matter,
or
corporeal moles,
as is
without
any
kind
of
form;
nor is it on the
other side imaginable that
the
spiritus universi,
as I
32
Ibid., 292.
33
Ibid., 293.
34
Lambeth 3492, 205v.; Lambeth 3499, 112; Lambeth 3504, 240.
35
Hale, Works, I, 373.
Natural motions 203
may call it, was distinct complete or subsisting without matter; but they were both
mingled indistinctly together.
36
This 'spirit of material beings' was the spirit that moved on the waters in
Genesis i.
Hale differed from his atomist opponents in insisting on an active
principle (apart, that is, from the motion the Almighty originally gave) in a
naturally passive material world. He never made it wholly clear, however,
whether this 'spirit' was a quasi-material 'substance', or a label for the
various manifestations of the unmediated will of God. His position was
defined with reference to Cartesians on the one hand, and on the other to
an Englishman who set himself to refuting Cartesian physics, the famous
'Cambridge Platonist' Henry More (1614—87).
37
More was concerned, like
Hale, to use the failures of the mechanists to point to the existence of a
non-material force. He was a great admirer of Descartes, whose system he
regarded as a supreme achievement of the human intellect. Its manifest
absurdities, in spite of the ingenuity its author lavished on his theories,
were a sign of the wrongheadedness of a strict mechanistic approach.
38
At the end of the 1640s More had a correspondence with his hero, in
which he praised the new philosophy, but objected, amongst other things,
to two Cartesian claims: that spirit is not spatially located, and that
animals are nothing but machines.
39
His later objections were succinctly
put in the preface of Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671), which summarises
what he saw as a hopelessly contradictory position:
That God is a being absolutely perfect; but that matter (in virtue of its own form
and considered in itself) necessarily comes to exist. That God indeed
is;
but that he
is nowhere, whether in the world, or outside it. That matter is not moved by
itself,
but by God; that God however does not impinge on any part of matter, nor on the
whole, nor has he ever impinged in such a way that he could transmit motion to
matter. That matter, however modified, cannot think; but this principle is taken so
far that all brute animals are simply machines, and there is no more sense in an
apparelled horse than in his saddle-brasses. That there is a mind or immortal soul
in,
or at least at, the human body, but only through its operations, not its essence.
That there is a divine providence, but the ends of things [final causes] are not to be
searched after.
40
36
Ibid.
37
For an
introduction
to
More,
see
Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614—1687):
tercentenary studies, Dordrecht 1991; A. Rupert Hall, Henry More: magic, religion and
experiment, Oxford 1990.
38
More,
The
immortality of the
soul,
so far
forth
as it is
demonstrable
by the
light of nature
and of reason, 1659, sig.
B4 + 3v.
The point
is
emphasised
by
Alan Gabbey, 'Henry More
and
the
limits
of
mechanism',
in
Hutton, Tercentenary studies, 19-32.
39
Descartes, Correspondance avec Arnaud
et
Morus, Latin
and
French
edn,
Paris
1953,
97-9,
105-7.
40
'Deum
Ens
absolute perfectum esse;
et
tamen Materiam
ex
propria
sua
idea
et in se
consideratam necessario exsistere. Esse quidem Deum;
sed
Deum nusquam esse,
aut in
204 Natural philosophy
The real heart of all of More's objections was his belief that intellect is
'extended', on the grounds that to exist at all is to exist in space. Cartesians
believed that everything was intellect or 'extension' (the categories were
mutually exclusive), that extension was synonymous with matter, and
therefore that the human mind and God were incapable of physical
location. More favoured an alternative classification, distinguishing matter
and spirit. Both the spiritual and material were extended, but matter was
'discerpible' (a stronger term than 'divisible': it has physically separable
parts) and impenetrable (only one piece of matter at a time could occupy a
given spatial point), while spirit was penetrable (a number of spiritual
substances could share a given point) and indiscerpible. A spirit also had
the power of originating motion, unlike merely material things which
could only transmit an impulse they had themselves received. As spirit was
extended, there were none of the difficulties that vexed Descartes in
explaining how the soul could move the body.
41
The apparently purpose-
ful motions for which the Cartesian theory so obviously failed to account
could also be traced to an impulse that a spiritual substance supplied. This
was not God himself, but another ubiquitous force, which More described
as the 'Hylarchic Spirit'. This was the efficient cause of every motion that
Aristotelians explained in teleological ways. It was the grand omission that
made a nonsense of Cartesian physics, and of any other mechanistic
system;
42
it did not occur to More that he had given the machine an
additional, flexible part.
More was at one with Hale in pointing to the inadequacy of atomist and
Cartesian explanations. Both wanted to use phenomena for which the
mechanists could not account as visible arguments for God's existence.
The problem with More's theories, from Hale's theological standpoint,
was that they naturalised God's operations. Hale believed in a God that
stood outside a finite universe, that caused particular motions (chiefly those
once explained through final causes) by issuing commands. The Cam-
bridge Platonist's Hylarchic Spirit, which performed a similar function in
Mundo, aut extra Mundum. Materiam a seipsa non moueri, sed a Deo; Deum tamen nee
ulli quidem parti Materiae nee toti adesse, vel unquam adfuisse, quo Motum Materiae
impertiret. Materiam cogitare non posse qualitercunque modificatam; id vero eousque
verum esse, ut omnia Bruta Animalia purae putae sint Machinae, nee equo phalerato plus
sensus insit quam suis ephippis. Mentem animamve immortalem humano corpori inesse,
vel adesse; sed per operationes solummodo, non per essentiam. Esse quidem divinam
providentiam; et tamen rerum fines non esse inquirendos.' More, Enchiridion meta-
physicum sive de rebus incorporeis succincta et luculenta dissertation 1671, sig. A3 + 1.
41
Or so at least More seems to have believed; in fact there is no reason why a penetrable
spirit should move anything at all. The ability of matter to move matter is intrinsically
connected with the property of resisting penetration. Hobbes understood this point, and
insisted that anything moving 'body' is body. Most of his Restoration critics missed it.
42
More's Enchiridion metaphysiewn is largely taken up with illustrations of this point.
Natural motions 205
More's physics, was extended in infinite space. More came to believe, in
other words, that the universe had an inhabitant who was ubiquitous and
purposeful, the cause of every motion that mechanistic physics was unable
to explain. As Hale reasonably complained, More gave an account of
everything and nothing: 'it would be a pitiful refuge for a man pretending
to philosophy, to give this general solution to all phenomena of nature,
that this is so, because the Spirit of nature thus orders it.'
43
He was
criticising More's Hylarchic Spirit on precisely the grounds that Boyle
attacked the use of natural 'laws'.
Hale thought that the purpose of science was to 'carry the mind up to
God', and not to a 'spiritual' creature, however exalted. He made notes on
Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671), which show that he strongly disagreed
with More's belief that space is infinite.
44
If any quantity were infinite, then
of course his argument for the creation, the absurdity of an infinite
succession, was robbed of all its force. But he also disagreed with More's
idea that space itself was a kind of spiritual substance. The Discourse held
that space and time were purely 'relational' things, and his later works
were loyal to this view. As the Primitive origination put it, 'duration
without a thing that dureth and space without a thing that is extended in it
is the veriest the absolutest nothing that can be'.
45
His comments on the
Enchiridion explain how we arrive at such ideas. Our notion of an empty
space, 'antecedent to any body or spatiatum really existing with it or in it'
comes from our picturing a phantom body, an 'imaginary spatiatum', 'and
then by cause the nimbleness of our intellective faculty substitutes this
imaginary spatiatum and knits it to space we presently think that space
devoid of any spatiatum is really and actually extended.'
46
More held
(against Descartes) that space can be imagined without matter, though it is
quite impossible to imagine a form of matter without space. Our concep-
tion of matter involves a conception of a substance that is penetrable,
eternal, self-subsistent and infinitely extended: in fact of a spirit like God.
Part of the Primitive origination discusses this ingenious argument:
47
A late excellent author hath used a very incongruous medium to prove ... the
existence of God, because there was really a space before the world was created;
whereas
first
of all, there could be no space without a body, and secondly, if there
could be such a space, it were of a divisible existence, which could hold no
proportion with the indivisible nature of the glorious God, space being quid
43
Hale, Observations, 35.
«
Lambeth 3498, 1-33.
45
Hale, Primitive origination, 118.
46
Lambeth 3498,
3.
47
The view that space
is
God, or at least has all the properties
of
God,
is a
doctrine
of
the
Enchiridion metaphysicum (1671), though More has earlier passages which hint
at
some
such view (Hall, More, 188-9; 207-8).
206 Natural philosophy
extensum, and divisible, but the essence of God purely spiritual and indivisible,
and equally immense, whether there were
a
world or no world, space or no space.
48
Space and time were 'modes of being'; there might be entities which were
non-spatial and non-temporal. Even in the material world, he interestingly
but puzzlingly suggested, a 'permanent being' like gold might have
'another kind of duration'.
49
God's manner of existing is different again.
He 'co-exists' (Hale's word) with the created world, but the world does not
affect his mode of being. It is made of 'divisible body', but he of course is
indivisible; it experiences 'time or successive duration', but he has 'indivisi-
ble duration'.
50
A 'spirit', as defined by More, cannot possibly be God; if
divisible space is infinite, 'why may we not rather suppose matter eternal
and the material world eternal and also immense and infinite?'.
51
The problem with the mechanists was their attempt to do without a
God, except as an ingenious designer. More's deep dislike of mechanistic
science induced him to make an equally damaging error. Because he
assumed an identity between atheist and materialist ideas (a belief that was
clearly encouraged by reading Thomas Hobbes) he thought an argument
for 'spiritual substance' amounted to a proof that God exists. In showing
that nature is not a machine, he presented it as a vegetable instead. He then
increasingly implied that the vegetable was God.
52
Hale clearly wanted to
avoid More's ultra-vitalist aproach to nature, but the notion of 'spiritual
substance' acquired a place in his philosophy. The compromise he sought,
preserving an ambiguity between mechanist and vitalist approaches, led
him towards 'Helmontian' ideas.
The works of John Baptist van Helmont consist in a succession of short
tracts.
53
They first became available to the general learned world in the
Latin edition of 1648; an English version followed in 1662. Helmontian
science dispensed with the Aristotelian forms and final causes. Helmont
was categorical that 'the form of the thing composed cannot be the cause of
the thing produced, but rather the last perfect act of generation'.
54
He saw
a need, however, for some internal organising force in a range of the
48
Hale, Primitive origination, 121.
49
Ibid.,
119.
50
Lambeth 3482,
94.
51
Lambeth 3498,
4.
52
More's vitalism became more pronounced
in
the course
of
the 1660s.
On
the Enchiridion
tnetaphysicum's innovations,
see
Gabbey, 'Limits
of
mechanism',
25,
and
Hall, More,
208.
53
Hale's explicit references
are
always
to two
essays, referred
to as *De
fermentis'
{Oriatrike,
27) and De
origine formarum {Oriatrike, 128), which
are
summarised
in
the
following paragraphs.
54
Helmont, Oriatrike,
or
physick refined, 1662,
p.
28. On
Helmont see Walter Pagel, Joan
Baptista
Wan
Helmont, Cambridge
1982,
Allan
G.
Debus,
The
chemical philosophy:
paracelsian medicine
and
science
in the
sixteenth
and
seventeenth centuries,
2
vols.,
New
York 1977.
Natural motions 207
phenomena of nature, including fires and magnets and every living thing.
55
This 'inward and essential'
56
cause was what he called a ferment: 'the
ferment is a formal created being, which is neither a substance nor an
accident, but a neutral thing framed from the beginning of the world in the
places of its own monarchy, in the manner of light, fire, the magnall or
sheath of the air, forms etc .. .'
57
A substance is entirely self-subsistent; an
accident is something that can only exist by inhering in a substance. A
ferment inhabits some matter, but is more than just a property of its
material base. In Helmont's terminology, which is frequently borrowed by
Hale, it is a 'vis' or 'virtus', while the 'place of its own monarchy' is a
'hypostasis'. A fire, which subsists in its fuel, and dies when the fuel gives
out, is something entirely different from heat in something hot.
The distinguishing mark of a ferment was its ability to replicate, trans-
mitting the vis or virtus to separate stocks of the hypostasis. Helmont was
not, however, a believer in sharp distinctions, in any branch of his phil-
osophy. He placed these 'neutral creatures' along a continuous spectrum,
with self-subsistent angels at one end, and at the other accidents like heat.
Somewhere between these two extremes were light, fire, magnetism, and
the 'souls' that lived in animals and plants, as well as the so-called
'Archeus', an organising spirit for the whole of the visible world. The
appeal of Helmontian thought lay in its imprecision. The ferments might
be understood as non-material substance, just like the examples of 'spirit'
in the writings of a vitalist like More. But they could equally be seen as
essentially nothing but 'motions', as a curious class of activity in merely
material things.
This was how Thomas Willis (1621—75) appears to have used the idea.
58
Willis, the greatest doctor of Restoration times, was probably an atomist at
heart, but he used the Helmontian ferment to label operations that no one
understood. He thought that the soul of an animal was a ferment of some
kind, a complex mechanical motion which might even be responsible for
thought. Willis was Hale's own doctor, and an influence on his attitudes
towards the whole complex of issues surrounding the 'animal soul'.
59
One
side of Helmont's theory was thus compatible with mechanism. But
Helmont was also an alchemist with a credulous or even fraudulent streak.
He exasperated Robert Boyle, who greatly admired his experimental work,
by claiming to have found the Alkahest, the paracelsan universal solvent.
60
55
Helmont, Oriatrike, 29.
56
Ibid.,
29.
*
Ibid.,
31.
58
On
Willis
see
Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis
MD,
1621-75, 1968;
R. G.
Frank,
The
Oxford physiologists, Berkeley 1980, p. 166.
59
Hale, Works, I, 99; Isler, Willis, 172-9.
60
Boyle,
The
works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch,
5
vols., 1744, vol.
I, pp. 307, 313-15.
208 Natural philosophy
He also believed in 'weapon-salve', a means of curing wounds applied to
the instrument responsible. The world-soul, or Archeus, was another
concept drawn from alchemy, totally incompatible with mechanistic
thought.
Though Hale was not much interested in alchemical ideas, he was drawn
to Helmont's notion that matter was 'inhabited' by a non-material force.
The latter's alien paracelsan side could anyway be overlooked for the sake
of his helpful suggestion that ferments were God's laws. As Robert Boyle
had put it, in the course of the Free enquiry's attack on such ideas, 'the
famous Helmont ... will have every body ... to act that, which it is
commanded to act'.
61
Hale strongly approved of this general approach.
His nearest thing to a pure theoretical statement was the opening chapters
of his final book. The Observations touching the principles of natural
motions (1677) was one of a series of pamphlets to be discussed at length in
the next chapter. Its most important feature, for present purposes, was its
general account of his views on 'natural motions'. Though God of course
supported every motion 'by way of concurrence and concomitance' (what
Boyle referred to as his 'general concourse') he also acted 'by causality'.
Hale therefore assumed that 'those created beings that seem to have the
immediate principle of motions in themselves, have that principle from his
fiat and institution'.
62
Such principles were numerous, including: 'the
motions of augmentation and conformation of vegetables, the motions of
ascent and calefaction in fire, the motions of attraction and aversation in
magnetical bodies, and the very motion of descent in physical bodies.'
63
Hale gave a summary of Helmont's theory, which offered a middle way
between
two extremes in the modern philosophy: some are so wholly intent upon vital and
plastic principles that they contend even almost against all mechanical motions of
bodies ... others are so greatly taken up with the thoughts of matter and mechani-
cal motions, that they wholly exterminate any intrinsic principles of motion and
resolve them wholly into matter and its modifications, and mechanism and
mechanical motions.
64
The ferment's intellectual charm was that it made a choice unnecessary.
Hale was sure that a ferment would count, unlike an act of More's
Hylarchic Spirit, as a genuine scientific explanation. He could ignore the
question of whether the explanation that he gave was mechanist or vitalist
in form. He had fulfilled the philosopher's principal duty, using the fabric
of the world to 'carry up' the human mind to God.
61
Boyle, Works, IV, 367.
62
Hale, Observations, 3.
63
Ibid.,
6.
64
Ibid.,
21.