The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought 9780804780834

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The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought

JACQUES

ROGER,

The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought EDITED BY

Keith R. Benson TRANSLATED BY

Robert EHrich

Stanford University Press STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©1997 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture CIP

data appear at the end of the book

The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought was originally published in French in 1963 under the tide Les sciences de Ia vie dans Ia pensee franraise au XV!lie siecle, © Librairie Armand Colin. Frontispieu: Photograph of Jacques Roger courtesy of Marie-Louise Roger

This translation is dedicated to Madame Marie-Louise Roger, in memory of her husband, Professor jacques Roger

EDITOR'S

FOREWORD

~

of 1985, I attended the History of Science Society meetings in Bloomington, Indiana. While there, Mott T. Greene and I were invited to a reception in the home of Frederic B. Churchill, where Mott introduced me to a colleague he had just met for the first time, Professor Jacques Roger. Like Mott, I had known of Professor Roger's work professionally, both as a result of studying eighteenth-century ideas about animal generation for my master's thesis and from Roger's magisterial work Les Sciences de lr1 vie. In subsequent conversations among the three of us, we discussed why this important work had never been translated into English. At first Roger appeared genuinely puzzled by the question, but eventually he said that he was not aware of any demand for it from the English-reading world. Both French editions (1963 and 1971) had long been out of print. We assured him of the book's value- both of us, in fact, averred that it was the only decent work available on biology in the Enlightenment (we did not mention that it also served as a standard work used by graduate students in the history of science to learn French!)- and promised him that we would begin preliminary investigations to determine the feasibility of preparing a translation. He was touched by our interest, as well as extremely pleased, and he emphasized his willingness to assist as long as we did not demand that he translate the book himself or edit the translation. I immediately spoke to several editors attending the meeting and soon discovered one, Bettyann Kevles (then of the University of California Press), who exhibited a profound interest in the project. She suggested I solicit letters of support from eminent historians of science who knew Enlightenment science and who could speak to the value of an English edition of Roger's book. As soon as I returned from the meeting, I contacted eight such historians, all of whom wrote me promptly, each expressing strong support for the proposal. Once I received these supporting documents, I wrote to Roger to inform him of the good news and to let him know that I was proceeding with the translation. He was extremely gratified to hear of the comments of his AmeriI N T H E FALL

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Editor's Foreword

can colleagues. "His work is a classic in the history of science," Paul L. Farber wrote, comparing its contribution to the history of biology to that of Alexandre Koyre's Galileo studies to the history of the physical sciences. Les Sciences de Ia vie was even more significant, he added, because Roger was a major scholar of the French Enlightenment and had a perspective "broad enough to be of vital concern to anyone interested in the Enlightenment." Ernst Mayr, coincidentally the subject of an interview conducted by Professor Roger for French television just before Roger's death, was also very enthusiastic about the project, promising to do whatever he could to persuade Harvard University Press to publish the translation. Phillip Sloan, another historian of biology, who had been befriended by Roger on numerous occasions, also committed his support to the project, noting that for several years he had contemplated an independent translation of the work. "I agree with you entirely about the need of a translation," Frederick Churchill wrote, expressing astonishment that Roger had not yet been translated. Frederic L. Holmes called the book "one of the major works in our field" and said it "ought to be accessible to as many students of the history of biology as possible." Unfortunately, because it has hitherto existed only in French, the accessibility of the book had become an issue. As Mott Greene pointed out, the "lack of linguistic ability in most graduate students ... makes it unlikely that any book like Les Sciences de Ia vie will be written in the next generation, simply because the training and background is no longer there." The late Professor William Coleman expressed his admiration for the book, calling it "a standard work on its subject [that] will not soon be supplanted. The research is thorough, the organization correct and the style both clear and attractive .... This is a truly original work that ... is also valuable as a reference volume; it is a book every student of our subject must study." Finally, and as an appropriate concluding testimonial, Thomas L. Hankins wrote: "Even though I work more in the physical sciences than in the life sciences, I use Roger's book regularly because of its great scope. It is just about the only comprehensive study of the history of science during the eighteenth century, and therefore, it has unique value for scholars of the Enlightenment .... When I have students write papers on eighteenth-century topics I usually send them to Roger's book, but since few undergraduates can read French, it is often unaccessible to them." While I am saddened that Professor Roger did not live long enough to see his book in an English edition (he died in 1990), I am pleased to know that

Editor's Foreword

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at the very least he read these reviews from colleagues who knew his work. It is my hope that this translation will address the accessibility issue, and that Roger's work will consequently become even better known by scholars and students interested in the Enlightenment era in general and, more specifically, in the history of thinking on the subject of animal reproduction. It is, indeed, one of the most important scholarly treatises on both subjects. The translation needs few introductory comments. The translator, Robert Ellrich, is a highly respected scholar in Romance languages and the Enlightenment, who approached the project with the goal of creating as faithful a translation of the original as possible. We had innumerable discussions and written exchanges concerning appropriate word usage; in fact, Bob also was in frequent contact with Madame Marie-Louise Roger to clarify points in the translation. Because of the size of the book, we also decided, on the advice of several colleagues and Madame Roger, to delete the Diderot chapter in Part III of the original, which Roger added to his original study to satisfy the literary requirements of his graduate work. This chapter will be published separately; its absence neither changes the general thesis of Roger's study nor detracts from the integrity of the work. Finally, the translation is based on the text and bibliography of the 1963 edition. Those of the subsequent 1971 and 1993 editions are identical. The only substantial difference among the three versions is in the 1993 text, where the editors added a historiographical preface, "L'Histoire des sciences: Problemes et pratiques. Histoire des sciences, hisroire des mentalites, microhisroire," which was a paper Roger had presented in September 1987 at a conference in Venice. Because this essay contains his mature reflections upon the historiography he adopted during his professional career, we thought it important to include a translation of it in this volume, and it appears here as "Preface to the 1993 Edition." I have also added a brief supplementary bibliography of relevant books written since Roger's work originally appeared. colleagues and individuals to acknowledge for their contributions to this project. Paul Farber, Tom Hankins, Chuck Dinsmore, Phil Sloan, and Mary Terral! have all served as sources of encouragement and inspiration, especially during those times when events seemed stacked against the project. Bob Ellrich has been a superb colleague with whom to collaborate; indeed, it has been a pleasure to feel the pressure to publish from the translator, instead of having to exert pressure in the reverse direction. AddiT H E R E A R E M A N Y

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tionally, I have learned much from Bob, not only about the French language, but also concerning the life sciences in the Enlightenment. Jacquie Ettinger, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Washington, contributed markedly to this project. In fact, I actually regard her as a co-editor. Jacquie prepared the notes and the bibliography, often spending hours in the library searching for an obscure reference. And her work was superb. Professor Jean Gayon, a colleague I met as a result of this project, was a valued intermediary between the American and French bureaucracies. As a trusted confidant of the Roger family, he also helped to negotiate between the various institutions and agencies that inevitably become involved in such undertakings. Finally, I must emphasize that Madam Marie-Louise Roger was the true inspiration behind this project. After Professor Roger's death, she committed herself to seeing the translation through to completion. Despite numerous delays, problems with funding, and contractual disputes, she remained a steadfast and stalwart champion of the translation. In addition, I have had the pleasure of spending several wonderful afternoons and evenings in Paris with her, usually discussing the translation but always enjoying fine food and drink. Her warm hospitality and graciousness will remain a source of inspiration to me. The translation would have been impossible without financial contributions from a number of sources. These include the French Ministry of Culture, the Roger family, Stanford University Press, and the Jonsen Fund of the Department of Medical History and Ethics, University of Washington. Keith R. Benson

TRANSLATOR'S

NOTE

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o L D saws about the translator's impossible task are true. As a result, no one, including myself, will be entirely happy with every detail of the present rendering of Jacques Roger's masterly study. I console myself, however, with the memory of seemingly endless and dogged research carried out to ensure a maximum of correctness, and with my sense of having succeeded to some extent in reproducing the author's special, and especially winsome, style. That English idiom is not always entirely adequate to French idiom (and vice versa) is a fact universally acknowledged by users of the two languages, and explains my having translated the French experience, for example, in five or six different ways according to the context. A L L

T H E

Robert EUrich

CONTENTS

Preface to the 1993 Edition Preface to the Second Edition (1971) Preface to the Original Edition (1963) PART I

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The End of the Renaissance, I6oo-1670 o N E I The Medical and Scientific Spirit of the First Half of the Seventeenth Century Two I The Battle with Shadows T H R E E I In Search of Clear Ideas Conclusion to Part I

PART II

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3 37 74 124

The Scientists' Philosophy, 1670-1745 F o u R I The New Scientific Mentality FIvE I New Discoveries in Animal Reproduction s I x I The Preexistence of Germs sEvEN I Problems with Preexistence Conclusion to Part II

133 205 259 308 354

PART III The Philosophers' Science, 1745-I770

E I G H T I Precursors and Mavericks N I N E I Buffon TEN I Resistance to the New Science Conclusion to Part III Epilogue Notes Bibliography Supplementary Bibliography Index

369 426 475 530 543 561 691 733 735

PREFACE

TO

THE

1993

EDITION

owN H I s To R Y as a historian of science clearly bears the stamp of an individual itinerary that has led me from the study of classical languages and literatures, in the French sense of the term (i.e., French, Latin, and Greek), initially to intellectual history and then to the history of science. Selftaught in the latter discipline, I was strongly influenced by certain works in which I found models on my own: those of Helene Metzger and George Canguilhem, and secondarily (because of the difference in field) those of Alexandre Koyre. To them were added all the reading you may imagine throughout these past twenty years in which history in general and the history of science in particular have been the object of so many theoretical reflections and reexaminations. Not being particularly attracted by abstract theories, however, I have always been drawn back to my experience as a practitioner in order to judge new theories, as well as the still newer ones that have replaced them. It is still this experience that guides me today. It is fitting at the outset to glance at the institutional situation of the history of science, a situation generally marginal and almost always ambiguous. The history of science is practiced by scientists, philosophers, and historians in their respective departments. It has no clearly defined place in the traditional division of university disciplines. Depending on the country and the university, it may be everywhere and nowhere. It is not the only discipline enjoying this ambiguous status: the history of economics, of law, or of theology may be studied at the same time by historians and by economists, jurists, and theologians. Such a situation can, however, give rise to conflicts. Certain social sciences-cultural anthropology, ethnology, psychology-are quick to claim exclusive title to the study of their own history, for in these sciences the MY

The preface to the 1993 edition originated as a paper by Jacques Roger entitled ''l:Histoire des sciences: Problemes et pratiques. Histoire des sciences, histoire des memalites, micro-histoire" (The history of science: Problems and praxis. History of science, history of mentalities, and microhistory) read at the 29th Corso internazionale di alta cultura, "Examinations of History in Its Development," organized by the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, September 1987.

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past is always present. Today's military men and strategists can easily leave the study of Hannibal's or Napoleon's campaigns to the historians. The history of behaviorism and psychoanalysis has very current stakes, and there is no question of handing it over to the profane- which is to say, to the historians. The question is, however, are they the profane or the profaners? The historian digs into tombs and archives, exhumes the dead from pyramids or draws them out of closets, and is not loath to reveal family secrets. Whence the immediate reflex of the interested parties: to hide their archives and protect their past in order to protect themselves. Ethnologists and psychoanalysts are quick to react like the Soviet government or the Holy Office, which everyone knows exist but whose archives are not open to just anyone. What emerges from this is that relations between the historians of a scientific discipline and its practitioners are not always easy. There is, of course, no difficulty where the distant past is concerned: modern physicists are hardly interested in Nicole d'Oresme or Thomas Bradwardine: the fourteenth century is sufficiently distant to be left to the historians. But the history of the universal theory of evolution that was developed between 1940 and 1960, and even the history of its spiritual father, Darwin, are still delicate subjects. Likewise, although for other reasons, it is not easy to write the history of France or Italy between 1930 and 1945. The fact is that historians and scientists are not looking for the same things, and their methods and modes of explanation are not the same. This leads us to another question: What is "science"? Or, more precisely, of what is the history of science the history? The question is a hard one, is often debated, and brings along with it many subsidiary questions that different specialists answer in different fashions. To each of these answers, moreover, there corresponds- theoretically, at least- a particular type of history of science. Most often, scientists themselves do not ask the question in theoretical and clear terms, because the answer seems so obvious to them: science is what they do. When they ponder the past, they most often adopt attitudes that depend upon their discipline. For mathematicians, mathematics has been a science since Thales. Elsewhere things are more complicated. A biologist will accept Aristotle as a biologist, while a physicist will not accept him as a physicist. One may recall in this regard the question Thomas Kuhn asked himself one day, as a young instructor of physics in charge of an introductory course: What did Aristotle know of Newtonian physics? Kuhn set himself to reading

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Aristotle and soon discovered, not only that he knew nothing of it, but that he had moreover had a totally different physics, of which nothing remained. This was the discovery that launched Kuhn on the brilliant path so widely recognized today. If they rarely feel the need to define science, scientists at least make a clear distinction between true and false sciences. For the immense majority of them-with a few well-known exceptions-dowsing, telepathy, and psychokinesis are false sciences. But what is this distinction worth when projected onto the past? If we set up an opposition between astronomy and astrology, what shall we do with Kepler or Tycho Brahe? And if we cast alchemy into the outer darkness, what shall we do with the mass of practical experiments and knowledge inherited by eighteenth-century chemistry? However legitimate it may be today, the true science/false science distinction may well get in the historian's way. Sorely shaken by recent polemics, and even by the endeavors of historians, today's scientists are less inclined to hold on to the mythic image of the scientist as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. But in at least a sector of public opinion, the scientist remains that pure intelligence confronting the mysteries of nature, driven by the sole desire to understand, as invulnerable to bias as to the temptations of vanity, ambition, or money. The historian at times takes mischievous pleasure in tearing down this myth, in showing that scientists possess the same human weaknesses and entertain the same prejudices as other mortals. Some may even go too far in this direction. Most often there are ideological reasons for this enterprise of systematic demolition, but it would be just as interesting to submit the attitude of the historians of science concerning the scientists they study to deep psychological analysis. Such an analysis might reveal some highly ambiguous feelings. More seriously, the historian's work shows clearly that the scientist is a man who lives within his time and who shares its ideas and preconceptions, among which its "mental tool-kit," to use Lucien Lefebvre's expression, is first and foremost. Here, however, matters are not simple, and the logic of a scientific theory may seem to flee, as if startled, before the pressure of the intellectual milieu. The Darwinian theory of evolution would be a good example. Born at a time when everyone believed in the universal law of inevitable progress, it explains evolution by way of a mechanism that renders this progress aleatory and is even unable to take account of it. Despite this, evolution was first understood as a theory of progress, and Darwin himself was unable to avoid

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displaying the forward march of this progress, especially in the history of the human species. Only at the end of the century, when the notion of progress was called into question, was evolution's true nature "discovered." What history shows, however, and often counter to the scientists' opinion, is that the nature shown to us by science is a construct of the human mind. The different scientific images of nature that have come along in succession from the sixteenth century to our time display this clearly enough. Modern physicists are aware of it, but their colleagues in other disciplines seem less persuaded. Nonetheless, these successive images must maintain a certain relationship with the "real," whatever the nature of that which we designate as such. I shall return to this point. A final myth, encouraged by the developments in modern science, is that of a "pure science," understood to progress only according to its own logic. Scientists are often surprised, nay, scandalized, by the slow pace of scientific progress in the past. They willingly admit the importance of technological obstacles: without a microscope or a telescope, ancient biology and astronomy encountered an insurmountable barrier. They also know only too well from their own experience the limits that insufficient funding can impose on research. But notions as "obvious" as the basic concepts of classical mechanism "should have been" discovered sooner. The fact that it took three scientists of genius, Galilee, Descartes, and Newton, to "construct" the concept of inertia shows that this notion was not as "obvious" as it seems today. Rather than accept this internal difficulty, scientists often prefer to invoke external obstacles, in particular the regrettable influence of philosophy and religion, as well as the tyrannical authority of the Christian churches. The idea of ecclesiastical tyranny, evidenced, of course, in the Galileo affair as it was interpreted in the nineteenth century, remains deeply anchored in the scientific mentality. As for philosophy, one need only see how Ernst Mayr explains the "tardy" emergence of the concept of "population" in opposition to the baleful influence of an "essentialism" of Platonic origin. 1 In both cases, the fact that religion and philosophy were part of the intellectual world of the scientists, and thus of their vision of the world, has been overlooked. Their influence on modern science has no doubt diminished, for reasons that we shall see, but not to the point of disappearance, especially where philosophy is concerned. There still exists a "scientists' philosophy" that is not always "spontaneous." The practice of modern science can often help in our understanding of science's past, bur it always runs the risk of interpreting that past in the light

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of a modern situation and by way of a mythic ideal. The historian must guard himself against these two dangers as best he can. o I N G the history of science, philosophers introduce very different practices, which vary according to different national traditions. Most Italian historians of science have a philosophical background, but this does not generally keep them from being true historians, in a sense that I shall clarifY below. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, there existed a powerful school of philosophy of science stemming from the Vienna circle and exemplified by the names of Carnap, Popper, or Wittgenstein and their disciples. This "logical positivism," which sought to impose a highly abstract and formalistic conception of science, had only slight influence on the history of science proper, and the younger generation, represented by David Hull, Michael Ruse, and Larry Laudan among others, displays greater sensitivity to the dictates of history. Finally, there is the highly individual case of France, where the influence of Gaston Bachelard long remained dominant. One of the fundamental elements of the Bachelardian theory of the history of science is the distinction between "lapsed" (perimee) and "endorsed" (sanctionnee) science. Endorsed science is the kind that is still valid today. In a sense, it is the only true science. The history of lapsed science is merely a prehistory of science or a history of "scientific ideologies," to use the vocabulary of Georges Canguilhem. Between lapsed and endorsed science, there is an "epistemological break." In his own way, Bachelard belongs to the general movement of the early part of our century that, by reaction against the continuist vision of nature and history that reigned in the nineteenth century, reintroduced discontinuity into the structure of matter as well as into the unfolding of history. As his little book I 'Intuition de !'instant reveals, Bachelard was reacting against Bergson, much as Koyre reacted against Pierre Duhem in developing the notion of a "scientific revolution of the seventeenth century." The extraordinary success of this notion is well known, exemplified among others by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. I. Bernard Cohen has just devoted his recent Revolution in Science (1985) to it. We hardly need recall that the "archeology of knowledge" proposed by Michel Foucault also assumed the existence of discontinuous "epistemes." Unfortunately, Foucault never elucidated the "rule [statut] of discontinuities" as he had promised to do. I cannot possibly examine the notion of "scientific revolution" in detail here; suffice it to say that its fuzziness and its applicability to the most diverse I N

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situations-from the immense movement of ideas that led from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics, extending over at least two centuries, to the fine-focus discoveries that create local modifications in a scientific discipline- make it all the easier to use. This quality of "soft concept," which the idea of "scientific revolution" shares with the Kuhnian notion of "paradigm," risks turning them into a linguistic convenience at best. Pushed to extremes, as Feyerabend has done, 2 the notion of "scientific revolution" raises serious problems for the historian- the same problems raised by the Bachelardian notion of "epistemological break," save that the latter is associated with the lapsed science/endorsed science distinction, which raises additional difficulties. If one accepts this latter distinction, one must immediately observe that depending on the discipline, setting aside mathematics, the history of lapsed science covers between three-quarters and nine-tenths of Western scientific thought. That did not bother Gaston Bachelard, who was more interested in the epistemology of modern science than in the history of science proper. But the historian may ask himself whether his work deserves the time and effort he is devoting to it. If he answers in the affirmative, the object of his search is different from Bachelard's. Perforce more instantaneous than the scientific revolution, the Bachelardian epistemological break raises the question of its precise place in chronology more sharply. Where is one to situate the birth of astronomy? In the work of Copernicus, or in that of Galileo, Kepler, or Newton? When was the modern theory of motion born? With Johannes Philoponus in the sixth century, with Nicole Oresme or Jean Buridan in the fourteenth, with Galileo, Descartes, or Newton in the seventeenth? And from when does biology date? It is well known that the word appears about 18oo, but what of the science? With the cellular theory ofTheodor Schwann or RudolfVirchow, or with the Darwinian theory of evolution, or with the molecular biology of the twentieth century? Since we have no answers to these questions, raising them is pointless. Moreover, unless it falls down from the heavens, endorsed science must be born from lapsed science-that is, truth must issue from error. How can that happen? Must we accept that the phenomenon is inexplicable, indeed, indescribable? The individual act of creation is, perhaps-even though one can quite often analyze it close up, as long as one admits that this does not necessarily imply a complete upheaval and the sudden appearance of an aggregate of entirely new and immediately operational concepts. Even if the instant of creation remains opaque to analysis, one can at least study its exact circum-

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stances and its point of departure-that is, the state of "lapsed science" that allows for the emergence of a truth. Finally, the truth itself has its history, which is not always limited to mere "modifications." Copernicus and Newton had only heliocentrism in common, and it is not always easy to tell what precisely remains of Darwin in contemporary "Darwinism." On attentive examination, the major discontinuities dissolve into an infinity of tiny discontinuities, which make it possible for one another to occur in temporal succession, and among which it is not always easy to establish a hierarchy of importance. The aim of the epistemological philosopher is perfectly legitimate in his domain, and the historian can derive the greatest profit from his analyses. But he must not forget that his own aim is different, nor that epistemology itself has its history. The shifting reality of intellectual history does not always obey the laws of logical reason. If the historian, then, feels uneasy with the definitions of science offered by the scientist and the philosopher, what definition will he furnish himself? The simplest and broadest possible one is: every activity that aims at knowledge of nature. Despite its simplicity, however, this definition in turn raises a certain number of theoretical and practical problems. The first and perhaps most difficult of these problems is going to be that of scientific truth. The definition I have just proposed does not introduce this notion. The historian has the right to consider, in fact, that the study of "lapsed science"- Ptolemy's astronomy, the Aristotelian theory of reproduction, Lamarckian evolution- is every bit as interesting and legitimate as the study of "endorsed" science. What's more, the notion of "scientific truth" inevitably introduces a value judgment that may have unfortunate consequences. Judging a theory may prevent our understanding it. Further still, there is the risk of introducing an oversimplifYing teleology into history. The science of the present is the result, not the end, of the work of past science. One must be on guard against the illusions of a linear history of the "progress of science," a history that tends towards triumphalism and inevitable oversimplification. There is also the danger of introducing the disciplinary categories, as well as the concepts and problems of present-day science, into ancient science. One of Michel Foucault's signal merits was to have pointed out the reorganizings of the field of scientific knowledge, revealing the naivete in thinking that a scientific discipline has been defined from the outset by its object. One need only think of the history of Earth sciences, from Aristotelian "meteo-

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rology" to modern "geophysics," to see that such is not the case, and that the Earth itself became an object of science only in the seventeenth century. A "history of problems," in which the problems themselves are defined by modern science, exposes itself to anachronism and to miscomprehension of ancient situations. Another risk is that of explaining too easily the success or failure of a theory through its truth or falsehood. In the long run, true theories end up gaining ascendancy, but in the short run things are less simple. One finds both "true" theories unaccepted (Copernicus's heliocentrism, Kepler's laws, William Harvey's circulation of the blood), "false" theories accepted enthusiastically (the preexistence and encasement of germs at the end of the seventeenth century), and "true" theories accepted for bad reasons (Newtonian celestial mechanics in the England of the Glorious Revolution). But this handful of examples shows how difficult it is to distinguish the true from the false when inside a theory. Copernican astronomy was based on the idea of the perfection of the sphere, whose motion was an expression of its form. Keplerian astronomy was clearly unaware of the principle of inertia and assumed that the planets were moved by a force emanating from the Sun, analogous to the forces imagined by astrology. For Harvey, the heart was not simply a sucking and expelling pump: as in Aristotle, it was the source of life and regenerated the blood, while the lungs had little use. As for Newton, even leaving aside his passion for alchemy, we know that his definition of absolute time and space and his very conception of gravitation were intimately bound up with his theology. In all of these theories, separating the true from the false leads to the ruin of their internal logic and renders them incomprehensible. Finally, I should mention the well-known idea that "scientific truth" is present-day truth, which will possibly be false tomorrow. The history of science is littered with the ruins of theories, just as political history is littered with the ruins of empires. Scientific truth itself is a product of history, on which it does not gaze down from above. o E s T H 1 s M E A N that science and therefore the study of its history have no specificity, and that there is no difference between the history of science and the history of philosophy, religion, or political theory? This is the claim made by the school of sociologists of science that has developed particularly in England in recent years out of the "Edinburgh group" and that is exemplified by the names of Robert Young, David Bloor, and Stephen Shapin, among others. For this school, science is simply one of the products D

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of social activity: "Society creates its science." Scientific controversies do not end with the triumph of "truth," but by the triumph of the group that turns out to be socially and ideologically the strongest. Thus Newtonian mechanics won out in England because Newton's disciples held all the key positions in English science, in particular in the Royal Society, and because Newtonian cosmology could be used for religious, political, and social ends in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. Developed by Margaret Jacob,3 this thesis created a stir and gave rise to vigorous polemics, and I recognize that it is seductive in many regards. Another classical example is the attempt made to show that in the debate between Pasteur and Felix Poucher on spontaneous generation, Pasteur's success was political rather than scientific. Similarly, but with less success, some have tried to explain the quantum revolution and Heisenberg's indeterminacy theory by way of the situation in the Weimar Republic following World War I. In all this there is surely an element of truth: no one can deny the role of political and social "ideologies" in the functioning of scientific thought. The idea of a "pure science" independent of the historical conditions of its birth is untenable. Nonetheless, the sociologists' reductionism has at least two limitations. To start with, it does not exhaust the analysis of the scientist's creative act. But then, and above all, it is incapable of explaining the future of a theory beyond its original milieu- that is, it ignores the international character of SCience. In this regard, the English sociological school holds to the tradition of Robert Merton, who after World War II explained the birth of classical science in terms of the role of the Puritans, proudly overlooking the work of Continental scientists, to mention only Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes. The Anglocentrism of this school is especially evident in the study that James Jacob and Margaret Jacob devoted to Robert Boyle, whom they make the founder of seventeenth-century atomism, as if nothing had happened before Boyle in Italy, Germany, or France; as if Pierre Gassendi and Daniel Sennert had not existed; and as if atomism had not been introduced into England by Walter Charleton in his 1655 Physiologia Epicuro-GassendoCharltoniana. This Anglocentrism is not just accidental: if one accepts the international nature of science, even in its development, one must accept that it does not entirely depend upon social conditions, which generally differ from one nation to another. Above all, however, this sociological school of necessity concentrates its studies on the emergence of discoveries and theories, ignoring their long-

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term survival- that is, their transhistoricity. Newton's theories for the most part have outlasted the historical conditions that facilitated their success in early-eighteenth-century England. Even if relativity and quantum mechanics revolutionized the old Newtonian universe, it is still the Newtonian laws of gravitation that rule the trajectory of artificial satellites. [Nineteenth-century] ideas of spontaneous generation succumbed definitively to Pasteur's work, and even if the theory of evolution requires the spontaneous emergence of life at the beginning, no laboratory experiment has been able to advance beyond the synthesis of a few relatively simple composites. Mendelian genetics has outlasted the historical conditions of its birth, contrary to the theories of Lysenko. This transhistoricity of scientific knowledge is a historically observable phenomenon, accompanied by an equally observable transculturality. The same equations of quantum physics hold everywhere in the world, whatever the political regimes and local cultures. In this regard, science is different from a religion, even a religion as international as Christianity, or a political ideology like Marxism, whose historical and geographical variations are far more pronounced. E V E N F 0 R T H E H I S T 0 R I A N, then, the history of science must have a specificity that distinguishes it from other intellectual histories. What accounts for this specificity? Two answers can be suggested. The first has to do with the permanence of the object of scientific research. The laws of nature do not evolve, and the structures that do evolve do so at such a slow rate on the scale of human history that their science remains possible. The second answer has to do with the permanence of human rationality, which remains subjacent to epistemological variations. I would borrow here from Larry Laudan the notion of "rational choice," the choice used by the scientist in all periods of history.4 What changes historically is not the nature of this choice, but its terms-that is, what the scientist must take into account. To be "right," a scientific explanation must meet two conditions: first, resolve the problem "rationally"; then, create the least number possible of "conceptual difficulties"- that is, be in accord with the reigning philosophies of nature, ideologies, and even mentalities. From such a definition one may draw some conclusions. The first is that there is a permanence to human rationality, a permanence without which, moreover, writing the history of a historically rather remote science would be completely impossible. The second conclusion to be drawn from this per-

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manence of human rationality, however, is that the "scientific revolution" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be considered as a change in rationality. After all, we can still understand Aristotle's physics, even if we no longer accept it, and Aristotelian logic has not lost its virtues. The scientific revolution that gave birth to classical science, and, at least indirectly, to modern science, had its roots, not in a transformation of human reason, but in a transformation of man's attitude to nature, a transformation that imposed the idea of usefol knowledge, of a science that did not rest content with contemplating nature but enabled us to utilize it. This transformation had its roots in a profound transformation of society and of mentalities. The idea that the "book of the world" is written in mathematical language was not born with Galileo: leaving aside its Greek origins- Pythagorean or Platonic- one finds it already in the fourteenth century, in Ores me or in the school of Merton College. As Alistair Crombie has shown, however, it was the combination of mathematization and measurement that founded a new science, and the practice of measurement came from technicians rather than geometricians. Whatever may have been the demonstrative power of purely geometrical reasoning in Galileo, since the investigations of Stillman Drake, it is no longer possible to believe with Koyre that all the experiments Galileo used were thought experiments. On a deeper level, it is the relationship of geometry to the real that has changed, and it is impossible to believe that the experience of "engineer artists" has no bearing on it. The "geometrization of space" of which Koyre so aptly spoke is clearly tied to the investigations of painters and cartographers into perspective. It is surely not by chance that the first science to acquire the status of a modern science in the seventeenth century was rational mechanics- that is, the science in which geometrization is easiest and, at the same time, the one in which measurement is the easiest and the most necessary. But it is also the science that most necessarily assumes the passivity of matter- that is, the possibility of setting aside material conditions and allowing geometry full power. Here, once more, one sees an ebbing of Aristotelian biological vitalism, but also a generalization of technological experimentation. What guarantees the stability of an architectural structure is the geometrical structure, and one asks of stone only the passive virtues of mechanical resistance. The famous Platonic formula "Only the geometrician is welcome here" is nowhere more aptly placed than at the entrance to a school of architecture. A science that has a grasp on the real necessarily, however, introduces a new criterion of truth-practical success. Experimentation is nothing other

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than practical verification of theory. No need to recall here the symbolic value of the Venetian armory in the case of Galileo. And this importance of practical success led little by little to an elimination from scientific reflection of the ideological elements that were hindering the success of science. One may therefore judge that it was through the development of its capacities for utilizing nature-and even by assigning itself this mission to start out withthat science developed its own rationality at the same time that its new social worth was being recognized. The notion of "pure science," without other ends than itself, dates only from the nineteenth century. Until then the scientist had a social function, as is shown by the assignments given to the Academie royale des sciences, and it was expected of the scientist that he apply the same rationality to both technology and science. In all this, the evolution of mentalities preceded the reality of things. From Leonardo to the beginning of the seventeenth century, the power of "machines," real or imaginary, haunted the general imagination, and the science whose usefulness Bacon and Descartes were vaunting was still quite weak. No matter: what counted was what people believed. In fact, they believed more and more in science, as is evident from the creation of scientific academies throughout the seventeenth century. It is of no concern that the same processes of reasoning and verification were employed for useless discoveries as for research with a practical end. In the last analysis, the very creation of the great scientific societies- in particular the Royal Society in London and the French Academie royale des sciences- provides a precise, albeit sociological, notion of scientific truth. We can therefore say that scientific rationality is a product of history, not in the sense that human rationality itself is such a product-something one might justifiably maintain if one were to reach back to the distant origins of humanity and to the evolution of the primates that were to become humans- but in the sense that the specific rules governing human reason in scientific activity have been able to act independently within particular historical conditions. Hence, the historian's task will be to identifY and analyze all the factors that at a given moment in history intervene in the "rational choice" performed by the scientist. This is an ambitious project, and one that assumes the use of methods as varied as the factors themselves. To provide an idea of the breadth of the task, it is necessary to detail the social, institutional, political, and financial factors; the intellectual factors, from the specific philosophical epistemologies to the intellectual traditions belonging to each discipline;

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and finally the most general factors- ideologies, cultural milieux, states of mind, philosophies, religions, political ideas, and so forth. The factors are so diverse that their study necessarily involves a fragmentation of the community of historians of science, a fragmentation linked to the variety of methods employed, but that is nonetheless regrettable in that all these factors interact with one another. The specialization of historians gives rise to tensions among them and hinders access to an overall view, even of relatively welldefined episodes in the history of science. In what follows I shall myself provide a bad example by concentrating my account on the problems of intellectual history, for the simple reason that it is the variety I practice. Let it be clear at least that this does not by any means signifY that other methods and other fields of research seem of no interest to me. It merely means that I consider myself far less qualified to speak of them, even if I am always ready to integrate the findings of specialists in social or institutional history, for example, into my own. T H E B E G I " N I N G of all research, there is the document. It may be a tool, an experimental practice, an herbarium, an anatomical illustration, or something of the sort, but most often it is a text. The first thing to do with a text is to submit it to philological critique-that is, to verifY first of all that it is properly established and dated. This would seem to go without saying, but such is not the case. The nineteenth-century editions of Buffon's Histoire naturelle often bring together the I749 Theorie de la terre and the 1778 Epoques de la nature. Certain historians have allowed themselves to be taken in, considering as contemporary two texts separated by thirty years of work and distinguished by different, even opposite, views. As for Darwin's Origin ofSpecies, the sixth edition has been the one most often republished, whereas only the first, from I859, permits a study of Darwin's actual thought. In the following editions, indeed, Darwin was responding to criticisms or, worse still, modifYing his text to take into account objections brought against him. Now, this first edition was republished only twenty years ago, and the edition of the first six editions' variants still more recently. Translations create other problems. It is not always possible to read a text in the original language, which is nonetheless the best method. The history of translations often deserves study for its own sake. Rather than use Clement Royer's oft-denigrated translation of The Origin ofSpecies in this regard, I shall merely point to a passage from Ernst Haeckel's Natiirliche Schopfungsgeschichte (r868) in which the author evokes with visible approval the Spartan and Native American custom

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of destroying ill-formed newborns. Haeckel then adds: "If one proposed [the same] to our so-called humanitarian civilization, it would let out cries of indignation." According to Haeckel, this, of course, demonstrates the said civilization's hypocrisy. The English translator renders the text without a hitch. The French translator, de Varigny, writes, however: "it would rightfUlly send up cries." This addition does more honor to de Varigny's sensitivity than to his scruples as a translator. But the French reader is given no access to Haeckel's true thought. These few examples show that persistent philological and historiographical work is indispensable, work too often ignored or even despised, but without which one is exposed to considerable mistakes in meaning. Then there is the problem of the literary status of the text. Every text, even a telephone book, possesses a literary status in the sense that it obeys certain rules of writing. Scientific texts are no exception. Most often they are a posteriori demonstrations of a discovery or a theory. Save in exceptional cases, perhaps such as texts of Kepler's that belong to another literary genre, one never finds in such texts the authentic account of a discovery. Mirko Grmek has studied in this light certain discoveries by Claude Bernard for which we have the laboratory notes as well as the successive presentations to the scientific community and the broader public. 5 The notes give the lie to the official presentations and show that findings that were in fact fortuitous become, in the later versions, methodical discoveries. Are we to speak offalsification, conscious or not? Moral considerations are of little concern here, and it is more useful to note that the published text is the demonstration of an achieved result, a demonstration that must obey certain rules. Here again, one can give no better example than The Origin of Species, which is admirably set up as a plea for the defense and manages to inspire the feeling that a highly hypothetical theory flows directly and necessarily from observed facts, with no preconceived idea. Here, too, it is a reading of the notebooks, not the completed work, that can tell us how Darwin slowly constructed his theory. If the "official" scientific text generally teaches us nothing about the process of discovery, it can on the other hand teach us much on other points, first and foremost, as in the case of Darwin, about the epistemological status of the theory presented. It can also inform us about the methods of demonstration accepted within the author's targeted public, and thus about the scientific rationality of the moment, at least in a given milieu. One need only compare a text by Paracelsus with one by Galileo to see the difference. Still, the text may also give us precise information on the nature of the public targeted by the author. If Galileo wrote in Italian and Descartes in French, if Darwin care-

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fully avoided using technical terms, if Buffon used the glamorous means of literature, it was because all of them, through different means, were trying to reach a broad cultivated public, passing over the heads of the official scientific community, which they had good reason to mistrust. From this simple fact one may draw a certain number of intellectual, epistemological, and sociological conclusions concerning the author and the state of science in his time. The reading of a text must first of all tell us what it says, but we must also pay attention to what it does not say. Establishing what a text says is not necessarily easy. There are all the problems raised by vocabulary, from the bizarre words created by a Paracelsus to the deceptive use of words too familiar to put us on our guard. We all know what "temperature" is, but when Stephen Hales or Buffon speaks of "a more or less humid temperature," we must realize that the word did not have the same sense for them that it does for us. And then, of course, this history of vocabulary is bound up with the very rich, useful, and complicated history of scientific concepts. It is also in what the text says that we must search for the author's modes of reasoning. Nothing seems more simple, bur there are often pitfalls, especially when it is a question of still-valid science. We know the result, and we are always tempted to substitute a modern formulation or reasoning for those of the author, or even to provide intermediary stages of reasoning that he for whatever reason neglected to include, or supplementary arguments he was unaware of. This sort of modernization, conscious or not, which deforms the author's original thought, was often practiced in the nineteenth century with respect to Newton and Harvey, for example. The closer the results of the author are to modern science, the more tempting it is to imagine that he arrived at them by the paths that would lead us to them today. The truth is that it is far more interesting for the historian to determine that the author arrived at them by other paths, or that he adopted a "modern" approach for reasons different from those that would lead him to adopt it today. If knowing what the text says comes first, what it does not say may be every bit as interesting. Let me point first of all to general assertions, made without discussion or proof because they are accepted by everybody as obvious. This is the case, for example, when Copernicus puts forward as a principle that all celestial motions are circular and uniform, or when Darwin abstractly demonstrates the existence of natural selection on the basis of principles proposed by Malthus, which everyone accepted at the time. Another source for researching the "unsaid" in a text is the study of images and metaphors. When in a famous passage Copernicus describes the Sun seated on its throne and

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governing the family of planets, he shows that his heliocentrism is not based purely on scientific geometry. The equally well known image of the "tree of life" in Darwin is doubly interesting, both because it reveals in the author a general vision of the history of life that his theory does not justifY and because it has been the object, both during the author's time and still today among many historians, of a generalized misperception occasioned by readers' having failed to notice that this tree has no trunk. Other formulations have narrower significance, without however being totally without interest. In 1943, in the first edition of Tempo and Mode in Evolution, the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson spoke of "quantum evolution," a formula that reveals the contemporary prestige of quantum physics and discontinuity, but that was, however, to disappear almost completely in the later editions of the book as the synthetic theory of evolution gained "hardness." s L o N G, detailed work that the reading of a text requires, and of which I have given merely a summary idea here, is clearly related to microhistory. It is a question of understanding the thought of an individual at one moment in his life, possibly in the aggregate of his work, and sometimes, beyond the individual, in the thought of the subgroup of which he is part. As we have seen, however, this reading must not overlook the link between the author and his public, real or hoped for. In this regard, the scientist is in the same situation as any other writer. There has to be a certain degree of mutual understanding between his public and himself, or at least the possibility of communication. Here we encounter one of the problems of microhistory. It can be taken as an end in itself, and in the case before us, its object will then be to establish exactly what a particular scientist has said in a particular text, or to understand the internal logic of his thought, and so on. Nonetheless, we can never really remain satisfied with this objective. We are always tempted to know more about it, to find out why the author says what he says, and why he says it as he does. In brief, we are always tempted to explain the text by way of the context, not to seek out causes but, more modestly, to look at least for conditions of possibility. In other words, we are never resigned to limiting ourselves to the text, and we ask what more general conclusions we can draw using it as a point of departure. In this pursuit, there are two diametrically opposed possibilities. Either we can gather together everything we know about what surrounds the text in order to seek in the context elements useful for a more complete understand-

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ing. Or, on the contrary, we can take our point of departure from the text, and possibly other similar or contemporary texts, in order to define a broader ensemble, an intellectual milieu, a scientific discipline, a problematic, even an epoch. Very often, in fact, we do both things at the same time, at the risk of a certain circularity. If we take as an example Carlo Ginzburg's famous book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos ofa Sixteenth-Century Miller, we clearly perceive that he is illuminating the thought of [the miller] Menocchio through contemporary texts, and that he takes Menocchio as an example of a millenary "peasant culture." 6 A double approach such as this may be legitimate, but one must not use it unguardedly. Let us temporarily leave aside the question of the text as exemplar and of the general conclusions it justifies to return to the problem of the context that the text is to illuminate, the context we wish to understand more completely- first of all, the intellectual and cultural context. Here, there is a whole series of levels to be sorted out. The simplest and most evident is the context of the scientific ideas of the moment. We should not have to talk about it, and yet it has been overlooked for a long time, in particular because of the cult of great men that has held sway over the history of science. It took recent studies to demonstrate the role of the Jesuit calculatores in the formation of Galileo's thought, or to demonstrate that pre-Darwinian English science could not be reduced to the "natural theology" of William Paley. Many studies are still necessary to provide a correct image of the real situation of the different sciences at different moments in historv. A work such as this must provide an indispensable foundation, a necessary point of departure for the study of an original work. We must not expect, however, that it will give us the specific key to the originality of the work in question. The process of scientific creativity has undergone much study, but remains difficult to grasp. I can do no better than to recall here Arthur Koestler's ideas in his The Act of Creation and his notion of "bisociation," or "thinking beside the mark," which consists in bringing together ideas that have normally always been separate? Be that as it may, the study of ideas accepted at a given moment in history, and even the study of their problems, will not be enough to "explain" the new solution that a scientist brings to a problem. Beyond the scientific context as such, there is the general intellectual context, the philosophic, religious, political ideas, the artistic activity, and so on- in brief, every aspect of the intellectual life in which the scientist is immersed, whether consciously or not. The best-known example of a historical

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analysis of a milieu and its influence on scientific work is, of course, that of Koyre on the role of Platonism in Galileo's work. Without denying for an instant the importance of the milieu, it must nonetheless be noted that a mind of considerable power does not receive its milieu's influence passively. It is often more to the point to say that it creates its own milieu, just as it creates its ancestors, its authorities, and its sources. It does not receive a milieu ready-made; it chooses it. After all, Galileo could have been an Aristotelian like Cremonini, his colleague in Padua, and have considered his renovated Aristotelianism to be a modern and "progressive" form of thought. One must therefore refine the analysis in order to explain, so far as possible, Galileo's choice. Finally, one must not overlook the specificity and technicality of scientific work. A prevailing philosophy does not necessarily associate well with the methodological tradition of a discipline, or it may not be able to lend itself with ease to solving the problems under consideration. At best, adaptations will be required, and we shall have to look for certain aspects of this philosophy in a scientific formulation where its presence is not immediately apparent. With these precautions in mind, this enterprise [historical analysis of the milieu] must be carried out, and it is worth noting that this has been done primarily for "ancient" -that is, pre-I85o-science, as if "modern" science were independent of philosophic currents. Well, such is not the case at all, and much remains to be done here, in particular with respect to the Western world's "crisis of awareness" between 1880 and I930, a crisis from which present-day science largely emerged, whose unity and ramifications still await elucidation. T H I s w H o L E E N T E R P R I s E of associating the history of science with general intellectual history is classic, at least since the work of Koyre. But beyond the world of explicit ideas and of the intellectual milieu that they constitute, there is a more indeterminate zone, which one might broadly call the "cultural milieu," using the word culture in the ethnologists' sense. Here is where we arrive at the history of mentalities. This is not the place to provide a history of this concept, which comes from the ethnologists of the early part of our century and, in particular (in France at least), from Lucien Levy- Bruhl and the concept of "primitive mentality." The fact, however, is older than the word. Recalling Jakob Burckhart's famous Die Kultur der Renaissance in ltafien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [I86o]), for example, one notes that the word Kultur, which was rendered as "civilization" in English and French, in fact refers in the book

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to something that we would call "mentality" today. 8 This history of mentalities has flourished in France in reaction to the hegemony of economic and social history, and it is eminently represented by Michel Vovelle in the history of religious mentalities and by Maurice Agulhon in the history of political mentalities. This is not the place for discussion of all the problems raised by this notion of "mentality," and I would merely examine here the question of knowing whether it can be usefully introduced into the history of science. The answer is not easy, as we discovered in the course of a debate organized several years ago by the Pour la Science foundation and published in a special issue of the Revue de Synthese (July-December 1983). Historians of science are visibly mistrustful of what they consider a "soft concept." They thus fear an invasion of general remarks that lack documentation. And historians of mentalities share in the responsibility for this problem, so to speak. One of their essential aims is to rediscover, through the study of collective forms of behavior, the thought of those who were not writing, and who have thus left no written testimony in history. This legitimate concern is perhaps responsible for a certain drift of the notion of mentality towards a more restrictive "popular mentality." Now, the history of science as a history of scientific discourse is concerned only with an elite and with people who write. As a historian of astronomy rather bluntly put it: "What concerns me is what Kepler thought, not what his housekeeper thought." Besides, the history of mentalities tends to contrast popular culture and the culture of the elite class. Carlo Ginzburg has vigorously defended this thesis. Seen in this light, "popular culture" risks being considered either as a by-product of an already outdated scientific culture-and this is the opinion of many historians of science- or as an obstacle to the diffusion of science. For example, it has been stated that the masses, especially the working-class populace, were opposed to the medicalization of society because they saw in it a form of "Prussianization," an exercise of authority over their private lives on the part of the politico-scientific powers. Some have interpreted this resistance as a mark of obscurantism and opposition to progress. Others, subscribing to recent condemnations of the scientific and medical technostructures, have applauded it. More exact studies have recently shown that in fact the working masses themselves demanded this medicalization, but expected doctors to supply remedies for their illnesses, rather than advice on hygiene and diet-which was often, unfortunately, all nineteenth-century doctors could do. All these debates have clouded a question that seems basic to me: why

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should the masses, whether urban or rural, be the only ones to have a "mentality," and why should social or intellectual "elites" not have one? I am not speaking here of the conscious borrowings that a Brueghel or a Rabelais, to take two examples cited by Ginzburg and Mikhail Bakhtin, or a Paracelsus, to come back to the history of science, were able to draw from the popular culture. In all these cases, it is not a question of participation but of deliberate borrowings that obey an artistic or scientific intention with nothing intrinsically popular about it. What interests me are the elements of mentality spontaneously shared by scientists and others. As examples, I would cite the belief in astrology that Tycho Brahe and Kepler shared with the common people, or, to respond to the colleague quoted above, that Kepler shared with his housekeeper; the belief in witchcraft, found in Jean Bodin and in the presiding justice Etienne Pascal, and that the latter enlightened magistrate shared with the old woman who cast a spell on his son Blaise; or again spontaneous generation: Menocchio was not alone in believing at the end of the sixteenth century that worms are born spontaneously from cheese. The entire elite scientific community of the time held the same belief. True enough, at the end of the seventeenth century, a gap opens between the popular and scientific mentalities, and the story of Etienne Pascal gives us clear evidence of it. His daughter Gilberte, the older sister of Blaise, tells simply that her little brother had been stricken with a bizarre illness, evidenced by the fact, among others, that he could not bear to see his father go near his mother. We can easily imagine what a psychoanalyst would say about this today. But Etienne Pascal suspected that an old woman in the neighborhood had cast a spell upon the child. He summoned her, threatened her, and the old woman confessed. She merely asked that she be brought a black cat in order to transfer the spell. This was done, and the first cat died. A second was found, the transfer was successful, and the child got well. Gilberte Pascal narrates the story without commentary. A generation later, her daughter, Marguerite Perrier, relates the story once again, but taking care to tell us that, of course, her grandfather did not believe in these tales of witches. We have to believe that inside of one generation, the bourgeois mentality had changed on this point. The notion of mentality may, however, serve another purpose than to demonstrate that the intellectual and scientific elite sometimes shared popular assumptions. Why should these elite groups not have possessed their own mentality? Why should there not have existed a particular "scientific mentality"? If we define a mentality as an aggregate of collective mental attitudes,

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we have the right to speak of scientific mentalities. The collectivities in question may be more or less broad, and may group together the scientists of an entire period or merely of a nation or discipline. And it is truly a question of mentalities, for these mental attitudes have become unconscious, "spontaneous," "natural," and beyond debate. They reveal their existence only at the moment when they are called into question, either by the encounter of two different mentalities-national or disciplinary, for example-or by historical evolution. The nineteenth century alone offers a large choice of these "scientific mentalities," from the belief in indefinite and necessary progress to the sacralization of science, the inequality of human races, hostility towards all religious thought, integral determinism, and so on. When the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science exclaims: "We do not have to provide proofs of evolution, for evolution is science, and science is truth," 9 we leave the domain of intellectual history and enter into the history of mentalities. That is to say, we are dealing with attitudes that have become automatic. In this sense, scientific mentalities are fossilized products of intellectual history, just as religious mentalities are fossilized products of theology. The rational justification has disappeared. There remain only the practices and the "spontaneous" reactions, impermeable to rational critique because they no longer belong to the domain of functioning reason [raison raisonnante]. In this sense, Darwin was right in saying that scientists are not converted by new things. They simply die out. Finally, we especially do not believe that scientific mentalities belong simply to the past. We have our own, just as we have our ideologies. They are simply, by their very nature, more difficult to ferret out. I am therefore persuaded that there is a place for a history of mentalities within the history of science, even if its rhythm is no doubt slower than that of intellectual history. The "scientific revolution" of the seventeenth century, and the "Darwinian revolution" of the nineteenth, brought about changes in mentality that covered generations. The "quantum revolution" of the twentieth century has not yet affected the whole of the scientific community in this way, but many aspects of the history of science, understood as a collective history of science and scientists, remain inexplicable if we do not take stock of the existence of the mental automatisms that I am calling mentalities here. u s F A R I have taken the understanding of scientific texts to be the goal of the historian of science's work, and in order to reach that goal, I have introduced, in ever wider concentric circles, the history of intellectual and

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cultural milieus, and of mentalities. It goes without saying that we must continue on this path, while bringing in the history of institutions, social and political history, and, in short, the aggregate of historical elements that, from close by or from afar, impinge on the activity of the scientific community. There remains one last question here, but one that from another perspective might be a preliminary question: how can the text serve as the point of departure for recovery of a more global vision of the history of science? It is clear that a mere accumulation of individual studies, however necessary, will not suffice for the task. At a higher level of generalization, other problems emerge. I shall cite just a few of them. First of all, there is the general problem of the evolution of scientific rationality, which I have alluded to only in passing. Here again, the seventeenth century has attracted much study, but the profound changes that occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have been relatively neglected. Another important problem is that of the status of science in common opinion, and the related matter of the social status of the scientist. This problem leads directly to that of the relations between science and the political domain. Since the end of the seventeenth century, these relations have been close and reciprocal. The backing of the political establishment provided science with possibilities for work and with a social respectability that it had not previously possessed, but at the same time it imposed constraints on effectiveness, which scientists have sought ways of parrying since the eighteenth century. What is more, by becoming a state institution, science found itself implicated with power, a situation that has caused it serious problems, or at least drawn severe criticisms, both during the French Revolution and in our own time, for example. Conversely, science legitimizes the political power that supports it and to which it gives advice. At the end of the Old Regime in France, the legitimacy of the royal administration no longer depended on the divine right of kings, in which no one any longer believed, but on a technological competence that was supposed to guarantee its efficacy. In this sense, the Revolution signaled a revolt of the political order against the technocracy by abolishing the universities and the Academie royale des sciences and immediately reestablishing scientific institutions that it was well understood the state could not do without. These close links with power have modified the image of science in public opinion and have contributed to the birth of proor anti-scientific mythologies, depending on the different attitudes of public opinion-especially that of the intellectuals-to power itself. All the controversies that have been stirring up the Western democracies, in particular, the

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United States, regarding nuclear research bear witness not only to moral concerns but also to public mistrust of political power. This mistrust is far more traditional in the United States than in Europe, as witness the story of Astronomer Royal Fred Hoyle, who, arriving in the United States confident of the virtues of British democracy, found himself interrogated about ways of controlling the government's activity in nuclear matters. "Since you elected it democratically," he essentially replied, "you have to trust it." No American journalist found the reply satisfYing. Another problem-this one vast-is that of the invasion of Western thought by "objective" attitudes with scientific pretensions, which are progressively replacing traditional normative attitudes. The study of factual data no longer serves to inform judgment, it tends to replace it, and a journalist thinks he has dealt with a topic when he has carried out a poll of what people think. Intellectual analysis and expression of personal reflections thus recede before the "objective" presentation of "facts." The problem is all the more serious in that science and the technologies deriving from it give man an unheard-of power over nature and over himself, and in that it is becoming urgent to impose norms upon the exercise of that power. If all that is possible must be actualized, which according to Jacques Ellul, for one, is one of the guiding maxims of the technological system, our civilization is in danger of going mad. The historical study of this evolution in Western thought, and of the forms of resistance that it has elicited, can possibly provide some enlightenment, and this too is part of the history of science. Much thus remains to be done, and in the society in which we live, study of the history of science is an increasingly urgent task. One cannot-one can no longer-do general history without bringing in the history of science, and insofar as a broadly public scientific culture has become a necessity of our times, the history of science has an essential role to play in the very life of our civilization. Unfortunately, much remains to be done, too, if it is to occupy the place it should have in the universities and in secondary education.

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THE

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the text of the first edition, merely expanded to include a bibliographical supplement and a subject index, the lack of which had been an appropriate matter of reproach. I would no longer write the same book today, if only for lack of patience. Many things have changed in recent years- in history, in the history of science, and in philosophy. I, too, have changed. Nonetheless, I believe this book still has its uses. Its critical reception has generally been favorable, for which I am grateful. On one controversial point, the distinction between preformation and the preexistence of germs, although recognizing that the general opinion differs, I have not changed my views. Two recent works, by a biologist and a philosopher, seem to show that the general opinion is evolving.

1 PREs EN T

HERE

PREFACE ORIGINAL

EDITION

TO

THE

(I963)

F I R s T o F A L L, I must apologize to the reader for having written a book on the biological thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without being either a biologist or a philosopher. I have occasionally referred to modern science, but only when it seemed necessary for understanding the authors with whom I was dealing. At times, indeed, by dint of reading scientists and philosophers, I have yielded to the temptation of personal reflection, offering a few opinions of my own on the conditions of scientific knowledge. These opinions, born of my work, make no claim to general application, however: they relate only to the science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for I have wanted to stay with my historical perspective. I have not investigated how man is able to know the world, a task that belongs to the philosopher. Neither have I investigated how modern science has taken shape, a question for the scientist. I have simply investigated, in connection with a specific issue, how the scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw nature, how they defined themselves with respect to it, and how they thought it possible to know it. It is through them that I have discovered the problems of science and philosophy, from their perspective, in the terms in which they raised them; and it is their language I am speaking. Everyone accepts that the mentality of a period sets its mark on all human activities. The difficulty consists not so much in making the connections as in justifYing them. A serious mind will always be loath to leap from a political theory to an architectural form, from a religious practice to a scientific doctrine. These intellectual leaps risk bringing the history of ideas into disrepute among those of sound mind, through neglect of the contingencies, the material and technical factors, and the traditions pertaining to each science and art. Nonetheless, connections have to be made. Rather than investigate through what mechanisms one order of realities acted upon another, I have felt compelled to attempt to discover the underlying tendencies behind a specific mode of thought. Biological research depends upon those who practice it, on the instruments it has at its disposal, and on the discoveries that it

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comes upon. The early-seventeenth-century medical practitioners could not have the same scientific mentality as the academicians of 1670. A Paris doctor had not been given the same education as a doctor from Montpellier. A naturalist, a microscopist, an anatomist all considered life differently. A Cartesian, a follower of Gassendi, and a Newtonian each had his own way of seeing nature. Certain observations, whether true or false, cast unexpected light on certain phenomena: cases in point were the observations of Malpighi on the unfertilized egg, those of Leeuwenhoek on spermatozoa, those of Trembley on the polyp, and those of Needham on the generation of microscopic creatures. It was through all this that the underlying tendencies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves in the life sciences. It was also by virtue of individual forms of character. It is possibly in this area that the present work reveals one of its most serious shortcomings: because of my inability to carry out unlimited research, I have had to be satisfied with approaching the authors through their works, forgoing the enlightenment that more personal documents might have provided. As a result, I claim to provide only an outline or temporary framework, which more specific and complete investigations than mine will fill in or correct. Other than the handful of connections suggested in the Epilogue, I have not attempted, except in rare instances, to present a synthesis of thought (or even of scientific thought) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I would ask my reader, then, to understand "biological thought" or "biological science" where for brevity's sake I have written "thought" or "science." If at times I have given in to the temptation to generalize, I would ask readers to make the necessary correction on their own. Likewise, my aim was to study biological thought in France alone. It was, of course, impossible to ignore other scientists whose works their French colleagues read daily. But I have not studied them for their own sake: this would have required delving into their intellectual and social milieus, their lives, and their temperaments. The foreign writings I have considered are those that were read in France; nearly all of them, in fact, show up in the catalogue of the Bibliotheque nationale. We are thus quite far from being able to claim a synthetic view of things. Such a synthesis will be possible only after the conclusion of numerous specific studies, those that already exist and those that remain to be done, in each of which, in its own domain, what belongs to the period itself will have to be disentangled from what belongs to a particular order of activity or to a particular individual. Perhaps, then, it will be possible to explain what con-

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xliii

stitutes the unity of an age across the diversity of its forms of art and thought and to justifY the interconnections that draw our attention to areas apparently foreign to one another. Literary history is better able than any other discipline to involve itself in an undertaking of this sort. The writer is at the crossroads of sensibility, art, and thought. Most often unconsciously, but sometimes quite wittingly too, the writer is steeped in the spirit of his age and draws elements from it both for his internal universe and for his conception of art. From Ronsard to Emile Zola, examples abound of writers who have directly experienced the influence of contemporary science. This influence is evident, not only in their way of seeing things, bur, on a deeper level, in their way of conceiving of themselves vis-a-vis their subjects. If the history of a doctoral dissertation had any interest, I would say in this regard that it was Balzac who led me to eighteenth-century biology. Nonetheless, more than the immediate connections between literature and science, I believe a thorough characterization of the mentality of a period can contribute to literary history by permitting it to define more clearly what pertains specifically to art and to the artist. It is in this sense that I have sought, along with many others, to provide materials for a history of literature. Still, my undertaking was unusual, and I am particularly grateful to Professor Rene Pintard of the Sorbonne for having consented to direct it, and, indeed, for having directed it with firm yet gentle rigor. Over several years he had the patience to read the rough first drafts carefully, to lead me towards a more precise conception of research, and to correct doubtful hypotheses and extreme formulations. Now that my work is drawing to a close, I must express my gratitude to him for what was not only the direction of a thesis bur an intellectual education. I also wish to acknowledge my debt to Professor Antoine Adam of the Sorbonne, and to those conversations in Lille in 1945 that enabled me to find my way, and of which the present book is the distant bur direct fulfillment. By procuring me a teaching assignment in the history of medicine at the Centre de Ia Renaissance, Professor Pierre Mesnard enabled me to become familiar with a difficult period, and thus to gain a better understanding of certain aspects of my subject. In the course of my research, several friends specializing in historical or philosophical matters have helped me with their advice and knowledge. I should like to single out with thanks Anne-Marie La Bonnadiere, Claude Lehec, Jean Conilh, and Giuseppe Bufo. Finally, this work could not have been completed had I not found at the

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Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences of the University of Poitiers the most favorable of working conditions and an atmosphere of true friendship. I am particularly anxious to give my special thanks here to Dean Lavaud, Mme Frandon, and all my colleagues of the Department of French Language and Literature.

PART

The End of the Renaissance (r6oo-r67o)

I~

ONE

The Medical and Scientific Spirit of the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

H u G E A N D R I D I c u L o u s, Moliere's Thomas Diafoirus * casts his shadow over all of seventeenth-century medicine. His solemn, scholarly ignorance and bombastic pedantry sum up the medical foolishness of an entire period. None could escape his rule: the tided, the wealthy, the landed, all would have to depart one day, bled dry and properly purged-dead, in brief, according to the rules-to join their forebears and announce to them that, in medicine at least, there was nothing new in the realm of France. Was Moliere guilty of distortion? Before this question is answered, its relevance to the discussion here must be established. Biologists did not exist in the first half of the seventeenth century. There were only doctors who devoted part of their time to biology. This simple distinction is, moreover, of the deepest importance, for if we fail to keep it in mind, we risk misunderstanding and misjudging men who were far from being a band of mindless fools. Educated at universities according to a respectable tradition, members of an important social profession, which was, above all, genuinely concerned with medical practice, French doctors of the seventeenth century were nonetheless ill equipped to pursue scientific endeavors. If, in fact, there were many of the Diafoirus ilk in France under Louis XIII and Louis XIV; if, indeed, medicine and biology played the role of poor relations in the admirable intel-

*Thomas Diafoirus: the name of two doctors, father and son, in Moliere's comedy Le Malade imagi-

naire (The imaginary invalid; 1673).-Ed.

4

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RENAISSANCE

lectual flowering of the period; if one finds only Jean Pecquet to set against the prestigious names of Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Girard Desargues, and Pierre Fermat; and if, in brief, Moliere was truly painting an accurate picture, then we must search for the causes behind so blatant a historical reality, and we must look for them first and foremost beyond individuals, in institutions, in mentalities, in teaching methods, and in the very characteristics of the science of the time. However rapidly conducted, this inquiry should enable us to discover the reasons for such a striking lack of scientific development. It may also lead us to correct or at least provide some shading to the sinister, grotesque caricature drawn by Moliere. Finally, it will help us understand the protracted survival of a tradition that is ultimately impossible to respect without subscribing to the absurd, and without stubbornly resisting truths that are self-evident, or that at least seem so today. For men rarely think for themselves: they generally hand over to their prejudices, habits, self-interest, professions, or the spirit of their times the responsibility of doing so.

I The Teaching ofMedicine and the Sense ofProfissional Community In the seventeenth century, France counted approximately twenty medical schools, most of which had been created in the preceding two centuries. 1 Medical education was therefore widespread, but was of very uneven quality. The faculties of the most renowned universities-Paris and Montpellierdid not hide their scorn for the more obscure schools. 2 Since the purpose here is not to determine the average level of French medicine, I shall ignore the "silent" faculties 3 and degrees speedily bought.4 What alone concerns us is that it was in fact possible to pursue serious medical studies during the reign of Louis XIII. We know, moreover, that the best students did not hesitate to leave their native provinces to go to Paris or Montpellier, 5 even though the course of studies there took longer and was more costly than elsewhere. What was the mentality sustaining this elite education, on the part of those who gave and those who received it? The first concern will be: who did the teaching, and how? Professors were rather scarce. Paris had only two at the beginning of the century, and four in 1650, when it still had a hard time supporting them. 6 Montpellier, better endowed, already had four chairs of medicine at the end of the fifteenth century and received two more from Henry IV in 1582 and

The Medical and Scientific Spirit

5

1596. A seventh chair was to be created in 1673 and an eighth in 1715? But the curricular programs were vast, and a single professor had to deal with diverse and far-reaching subjects. In Paris at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Jean Guichard was teaching anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and dietetics. In Montpellier at the same time, anatomy and botany were covered by a single chair, the one created in 1596 by Henry IV for Pierre Richer de Belleval; the chair created in 1582 included surgery and pharmacy. In these circumstances, a professor could not be a specialist in the subjects he taught. In any case, did specialists exist? Apparently not, except for an occasional anatomist, botanist, or oculist. The professor was himself a physician-professor [docteurregent] who had received a general medical training and had not necessarily done any research of his own. Whether he was designated by his peers, as in Paris, named by the king, as in Montpellier, 8 or recruited through competition, as in Cahors and most other faculties, 9 he was required to know all of medicine and to be able to teach everything. To specialize, he would have had to be, by desire or by bent, a researcher. In point of fact, there were very few researchers among the French professors of medicine in the seventeenth century. Jean Riolan, for whom anatomy was a passion, was an exception, and even he sought in his dissections to confirm what the ancients had seen and described.l 0 After all-and this is the crucial point-was anything left to find out, considering that Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristotle had already discovered everything? The professors, in any case, seemed to think not. The standard method was to take an ancient work in Latin translation and read it aloud from the rostrum, while adorning the reading with a commentary, it too in LatinY At times, but rarely, a modern was honored with a reading. 12 Everything was taught this way, even anatomy. The students, bent over their laps, took notes. For anatomy, however, there was a demonstrator, who pointed out on color prints the parts of the body described in the text. Four times a year, under the best of circumstances, there was a dissection. From his rostrum, whence he never descended, the professor would read a Latin text, generally translated from Galen. Then the demonstrator would go over the reading again in French, attempting to identifY in the cadaver the organs in question.U Seated on the risers of the amphitheater, the students saw as best they could. In any case, the demonstration was limited to the essential organs, for time was of the essence: there was no way of preserving the bodies. Pathological anatomy was out of the question as well, since the cadavers were generally those of executed criminals. Even these were obtained with difficulty, and often the dean,

6

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RENAISSANCE

whose intervention was required, was unsuccessful. In that case, the dissection was canceled. It is easy to understand the incredibly theoretical cast of mind created by this kind of teaching, as well as the intellectual laziness it inevitably fostered, first and foremost among the teaching corps. Outside the classroom, what facilities did a student have for learning? In Montpellier, there was a library, but it was poorly stocked. In Paris, there was no library at all. The handful of works assembled in the sixteenth century had disappeared, despite the iron chains attaching them to reading-stands. Not until 1746 was a library finally opened, created solely out of gifts and legacies. 14 At the time, books were expensive and students were poor. They found it hard, as a result, to obtain the authors studied in their courses or the commentaries of the ancients. They would generally have to make do with resumes or abridgments. Then, too, who was going to introduce truly new "new ideas" to them if their teachers were unaware of the ideas or condemned them? To flesh out their knowledge, students had practically no other recourse than private courses offered for a fee by professors or by more advanced students. These private courses could provide closer contact with medical reality; but they were intended to prepare students for examinations rather than to impart a taste for scientific research. Examinations, quite naturally, rewarded acquired knowledge. Each faculty organized them in its own way, but for the three levels- baccalaureate, licence, and doctorate-the same kinds of tests, oral questions, and theses were to be found everywhere. By the way, we should not be taken in by the word thesis. The four quarto pages presented by the candidate did not as a rule represent any personal work. Indeed, the actual author was often, and quite officially, the professor presiding at the defense. Moreover, the defense alone counted. In the course of it, the candidate carried on a debate with his peers and his teachers and had to give proof of his knowledge, but he also, above all, had to give proof of his cleverness in handling a syllogism. The questions dealt with were nearly always lacking in originality: 15 they reappeared from year to year and from faculty to faculty, dealing with general physiology, medical practice, dietetics, or hygiene. The debate often centered on what kind of knowledge was useful to a doctor: must he know chemistry? astrology? In Paris a favorite question dealt with the effects of bloodletting and purgation in all known illnesses, and the candidate always concluded in favor of their efficacy, except in cases where the two treatments were in competition.16 At times, the questions were more trifling, and appropriate to delight lovers of the picturesque. Discussion continued for four hours in order

The Medical and Scientific Spirit

7

to determine an answer to: "Is dawn a propitious time for lovemaking?" 17 "Is the doctor not a philosopher? Not like a god?" 18 "Should a doctor wear a beard? A toga?" 19 "Is not the transformation of a woman into a man impossible?" Guy Patin wondered as a bachelier, concluding that the change was indeed not possible. But the doctors were also able to deal with current matters, and it took courage in 1638, four years after the affair of the possessed nuns of Loudun, to ask the question "Might not inner heat sometimes create the impression of devils in a body?" and answer in the affirmative. 20 Despite a few extravagant or off-color topics, however, the theses display men filled with good sense and striving to master their art. But for them that meant mastering their texts, and it would be useless to look for originality, a taste for research, and intellectual independence in these writings. In any case, the doctors did not consider their teaching perfect. They petitioned for more chairs and sometimes got them; they required a more extensive praxis of the students, developing clinical teaching 21 and making bacheliers and holders of the licence take part in charitable consultations and service in the hospitalsP This progress, which was real and raised the professional standards of practicing physicians, still did nothing to advance science. Indeed, if one cannot blame doctors for devoting their efforts to the examination of pathological phenomena and methods of treatment, one can reproach those of the seventeenth century for conceiving of medicine as a perfected science and choosing to confine themselves to a bookish theory accompanied by a routine-laden practice. The value of pure and disinterested research escaped them too easily. Only those forms of knowledge from which they could draw immediate benefit interested them. The attitude of Guy Patin with respect to the discoveries of William Harvey and Jean Pecquet illustrates this bias admirably. He scarcely cared ["il ne se 'soucie guere' "] about the circulation of the blood and thought that there were "other more important paths within sound medicine than the supposed circulation." As for Pecquet's reservoir theory, it was a novelty he would be "quite willing to believe when it has been proven, and when it has brought some facility and usefulness in morborum curatione [to the healing of the sick]." To which he adds: "quo excepto, I will have nothing to do with it." 23 If "sound medicine" was above the discoveries of physiology and anatomy, one cannot expect the doctors to have been researchers. The major failing of the medical mentality of the period lay, in fact, in this indifference to research, and the mentality was reflected in and kept alive by the teaching system. This system, dating for the most part from the Middle Ages, had had its usefulness in the sixteenth century, but by now

8

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RENAISSANCE

it was a danger. The ancients, after all, better known and better studied, still had something to teach the scientists of the Renaissance. By the early seventeenth century, however, they had delivered all of their secrets. Instead of a nourishment and an intellectual stimulation, they had become a hindrance, all the more dangerous in that it was not perceived as such. For most of the doctors, "sound medicine" had been established in aeternum: they had arrived at the end of science, at least of all possible science. There was no longer anything to seek; it was enough henceforth to read and comment. The seventeenth-century French physician was not a researcher, but a teacher proud of his knowledge. If he had no students to indoctrinate, he would explain to his patients why they suffered and why they died. This verbose dogmatism, with its imperturbable self-assurance, was the scourge of seventeenth-century medicine. Satisfied, tired-out heirs to the great scholars of the Renaissance, the Louis XIII doctors had forgotten that their elders' admiration for the Greeks had been active, laced with a jealousy bordering on rancor. They themselves instead preferred to admire passively, to comment interminably, and to repeat what they had learned. They intended to reap peaceful benefit from the intellectual capital amassed by their ancestors, handling in good bourgeois fashion the scientific inheritance that was bringing them profit and respect and defending it against any possible loss in value. They were no longer conquerors or adventurers of science: they were responsible offspring living off the paternal investment. 24 Besides, where would they have found the time to work, all these physicianprofessors absorbed in the defense of their privileges, forever taking part in official processions or deputations, wearing out the parlement and the Royal Council with their lawsuits and their petitions? They were doing battle with charlatans, empirics, chemists, all the wrong-thinking hawkers of elixirs, providers of antimony or quinine, who had the audacity to cure their patients some of the time, but who, thank God, also quite often killed them. 25 They were doing battle as well against the scorned or hated doctors of other schools- those outside the Paris Faculty of Medicine were labeled charlatans.26 The Parisian doctors used up their energy throughout the seventeenth century in combating the doctors from Montpellier, who, following the example of Theophraste Renaudot, claimed the right to practice medicine in the capital.2 7 Generations passed, but hatreds lived on. The parlement was called upon to use its authority to smash belief in emetic wine and the circulation of the blood with the weight of its secular arm. All the powers of officialdom were invoked to shore up the privileges of the school. Gone in-

The Medical and Scientific Spirit

9

deed were the days when, history tells us, Vesalius went by night like a thief to steal a cadaver from the gallows of Montfaucon or the Cemetery of the Innocents, in order to search passionately for the key to the mysteries of life and death. Those were considered now the ways of bandits, unworthy of the honorable, wealthy, and respected bourgeois that the great doctors of the seventeenth century had become. Was Guy Patin, representing the salubrious Faculty of Medicine of Paris, going to march behind or ahead of the King's Worthy Secretaries in the procession of the Holy Sacrament? This was an important question, and one that had to be decided before all else. 28 The medical dogmatism of the seventeenth century was one that protected comfortable bourgeois tastes. 29 Social success betokened intellectual attainment. Guy Patin could play the freethinker in religious and political matters, he could crush the Cardinal or the Jesuits with his sarcasms, but he was not free to disbelieve in medicine, which had made of a petty bourgeois from Picardy a high bourgeois of Paris, renowned in all of Europe. 30 And the students, how could they not have believed in medicine? At the start of their medical studies, they were masters of arts who had just finished a course in philosophy preparing them specifically for the education they were about to receive. In the third segment of this course, traditionally devoted to "physics" or "natural philosophy," 31 Aristotle's notions of first principles, form and matter, the four elements, and generation and corruption were discussed. From these overall considerations, they passed on to the precise phenomena of raw matter, the heavens, living beings, the human body, and the soul. Each professor no doubt enjoyed considerable latitude. One was especially interested in the heavenly bodies, another discoursed at greater length about insects. It would, moreover, be improper to say that the teaching did not evolve. Bits and snatches of modern science began to appear, even the modern concern for more concrete knowledge. 32 But the mental parameters remained the same; one always began by reasoning on abstract principles before considering facts, the reasoning conducted according to Aristotle's model. The form was always that of the disputatio, with irs process of objections and replies leading to the conclusion.33 The form was Scholastic, unchanged since Saint Thomas Aquinas. When necessary, there followed a parade of opinions borrowed from Greek philosophers,34 but Aristotle always had the last word, 35 other theories being summed up in a sentence. It all remained schematic and abstract, and it is hard to imagine the students' having retained anything from this teaching other than a certain skill at reasoning about concepts devoid of any real content.

IO

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Under the circumstances, how could the young masters of arts have dealt with a medical training more concrete than that to which they were accustomed? Then, too, they were paying rather dearly for the knowledge dispensed and the degrees obtained.36 How docile and hardworking the seventeenth-century students seem in comparison with their unruly elders of the preceding century, who were still imbued with medieval traditions and took pride in the privileges of the university! 37 No more jolly rollicking in the Pn~-aux-Clercs, no more nocturnal riots, no more brawls with the watchmen. Gone were the "kings" and "abbots" elected by the students of Montpellier, who had organized rowdy demonstrations and presented the demands of their comrades: they had been replaced by "representatives" named by the professors for six-month terms. These young people thirsted for a kind of knowledge that would ensure a proper and well-regarded life. They were more desirous of diplomas than of true learning. One no longer encounters many of those intrepid students who made their way across Europe, enrolling at each university in the courses given by the most famous teachers. Most were now content with Paris or Montpellier, and it was not a disinterested sacrifice on their part, for the title of doctor awarded by these faculties conferred the right to practice everywhere in France and, seen as a recommendation by the clientele, offered every chance of assuring a more lucrative career. Besides, the French universities had wanted to put an end to this scholarly vagabondage since the beginning of the century. A ruling of the parlement of Paris, dated March 22, 1603, and confirmed by a royal decree, instructed French students enrolled at Douai and at Pont-a-Mousson to return to France to complete their studies.38 Apparently, no reminder about this order proved necessary. When at last they left their faculty, well and duly indoctrinated, furnished with a licence or a doctorate, the young doctors most often still had to be accepted into a "college," an indispensable formality for anyone who wished to practice in a city of some importance. 39 This often meant new examinations and always new expenses. This measure was dictated by prudence, as a means of defending the profession against cut-price doctors and maintaining a fitting professional level among the city's medical corps at a time when civil authorities were quite indulgent towards charlatans. 40 It was also, however, a new way of asserting the power of the collective body over the individual. The college kept an eye on its members, when necessary dispensing reprimands or expulsions.41 Thus, if Jean Riolan judged the physicians of the colleges of Lyon, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, or Aix 42 worthy of respect, it is probably

The Medical and Scientific Spirit

II

because these doctors had little liking for chemical medicine, the circulation theory, and other such heresies. The beginner had to fall in line if he wished to establish his practice and make his way. 43 In a word, seventeenth-century French medicine had become a dogma embodied in a social corpus. The dean who piously carried his candle in a religious procession, the student who wore with gravity the gown of Rabelais, and the consulting physician who recited the aphorisms of Hippocrates at the bedside of a patient shaking with fever, all were conscious of belonging to a great tradition and of being acolytes of an exacting religion. This conviction often gave them an acute sense of their duties and of the sacred character of their functions. Guy Patin forbade doctors to accept money from the poor or to solicit, even indirectly, gifts from their patients. 44 The eulogies of Bernard Le Bovyer de Fontenelle present us with several fine images of doctors, indefatigably devoted to their patients, to the ailing and the needy. But the nobility of their task also gave rise in them (even among the best) to just as lively a feeling of the majesty of the tradition they represented. Guy Patin defended his medicine against innovators with the acerbic, dolorous passion of a believer who hears someone blaspheme his God. To him, the empirics and chemists who scandalously made light of a venerable science were not only common criminals, they were impious. Respect for tradition and filial attachment to inherited teachings, those great virtues of yore, had become blind devotion to the masters of antiquity. The serene dogmatism of medical teaching and the rigidity of the corporate structure seemed destined to maintain this mentality indefinitely. In more prosaic souls, these fine sentiments were accompanied by a solid desire to preserve acquired privileges, not to question a lucrative science, and to hold on by main force to a clientele all too easily led astray by th.e golden words of occultist healers. Whatever the ulterior motives, however, and whether the intentions were saintly or secular, noble or self-interested, the result was still the same: an unshakable dogmatism and a nearly absolute scientific immobility. The preceding commentary on French medicine could no doubt be applied, with slight alterations, to most of the countries of Europe. The Spanish doctors found themselves officially requested in 1617 to limit their teaching and commentary to the doctrine of Hippocrates, without wasting their time on "vain and irrelevant questions." 45 In England, during Harvey's time, the organization of medicine was analogous to that in France,46 but the influence of chemical medicine was more widely felt. The German universities, prolific in Aristotelian commentaries, felt the chemical influence just as strongly,

12

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0 F T H E

R E N A I SSA N C E

and it was not much more propitious than Galen's for the flowering of rigorous science. Not until the end of the century did the Lowlands assume their historic role as a scientific center. 47 The intellectual vigor of the Renaissance had not yet died out in Italy, however, which remained for three-quarters of a century the hotbed of European biology. 48 Even in Italy, however, scientific progress was slow and uncertain. This fact helps us understand, moreover, the lack of movement in France, for letters circulated, books crossed frontiers, and no faculty, however stuck on its privileges, would have been able to resist the triumphant march of knowledge for very long. We must therefore extend our inquiry into the reasons for the slow pace of scientific progress, seeking them first in what had already occurred-that is, in the weighty intellectual inheritance of the seventeenthcentury doctors.

II The Historical Situation: Tradition or Paracelsus

The first fact to be noted is that seventeenth-century medicine was to a large extent the victim of its own history. If Descartes's contemporaries were still looking for the secrets of the healing arts in Hippocrates without wondering if they really might not have something better to do, it was because the mental set in question, by now natural and spontaneous, was itself an age-old tradition, whose origins are to be found in particular historical circumstances. Greek science is the source of all Western medicine. Its creative vitality had already been exhausted for several hundred years when the Arabs discovered it in the sixth century. The School of Alexandria was in its decline. The School of Jundishapur, founded in the Persian city of that name during the reign of Chosroes [Khosru I, r. A.D. 531-79] by Greek Nestorian or Platonist refugees fleeing persecution, 49 was no doubt still thriving. But since Galen, medicine had not seen a great original mind. The Arabs accentuated the "conservationist" aspect of medical science, organizing an immense enterprise of translation that brought over from Greek to Arabic, in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, most of the great works of the Greek physicians and particularly those of Hippocrates, Galen, and Dioscorides. 50 Unearthed at high cost and with great difficulty, translated carefully and with respect, these texts naturally acquired immense value. Starting in the ninth century and continuing until the twelfth, the great Arab physicians added their com-

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mentaries to them or used them in their own medical summae. This is not the place to present even a sketchy history of Arab medicine. 51 It is relevant to note, however, that while this body of medical knowledge considerably enriched the pharmacopoeia and added much to clinical knowledge, it brought virtually no progress to physiology or to anatomy. 52 Moslem physicians, including Avicenna, whose famous Canon was the medical encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, and the illustrious Averroes, translator of and commentator on Aristotle, and, in medicine, faithful above all to Hippocrates and Galen, never freed themselves from the tutelage of the ancients, who remained the great masters of these sciences. In any case, another undertaking in translation had begun, this time from Arabic into Latin. Christian Europe was emerging from its intellectual lethargy and was seeking instruction from the brilliant Islamic civilization. Already in the tenth century, Gerbert of Aurillac, later to become Pope Sylvester II, went to Barcelona to look for manuscripts. In the second half of the eleventh century, Constantine the African brought Arabic medicine to the School of Salerno, which placed on its program the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and the Therapeutics of Galen, along with Avicenna's Canon. In the twelfth century, Gerard of Cremona translated Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, Abulcasis, and Avicenna. 53 The great medical-surgical encyclopedia of the thirteenth century, the Cyrurgia of William of Saliceto, brought together Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and AI Razi. 54 Through the Arabs, the Christian West recovered the treasures of Greek science from which it had been cut off.5 5 They were recovered under difficult circumstances and already surrounded with a respectful admiration that Christendom could not but share. This history, then, left a profound mark on the mentality of the doctors. The pursuit of manuscripts, translations, and commentaries had been for too long a time the essential activity of the scholar for texts preserved in this way not to have acquired invincible authority-and all the more invincible in that the moderns had practically nothing with which to compare them. Indeed, they could not even imagine comparing them with anything. The Renaissance was to change nothing in this mentality-quite the contrary. One can of course point to independent scholars, such as Vesalius, who strove to correct Galen's anatomy, or self-taught researchers, such as Ambroise Pare and Bernard Palissy. But on the whole, the authority of the ancients remained intact. The return to the original texts, unearthed like treasures, the more accurate translations with which the scholars filled their days, the greater accessibility of editions thanks to printing, all these revealed to the

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physicians of the sixteenth century a still purer and more admirable Greek science. To know Greek was as important for a doctor as to know anatomy and may have brought with it higher consideration. Nor did the Arab commentators and the schoolmen lose their credit. Avicenna, Averroes, and Albertus Magnus were cited constantly in medical works, up to at least the midseventeenth century. If Vesalius attacked Galen, a crowd of anatomists cried scandal, and among them even the famous Eustachius. De genitura from the Hippocratic collection was printed at least six times between 1542 and 1580, without counting one Italian and two French translations. De natura, from the same collection, saw nine editions or translations between 1502 and 1579· The authority of Aristotle remained immense, as the entire output of Andrea Cesalpino weightily attests. Where medicine was concerned, the Renaissance changed nothing in the respect accorded Greek science. Attempts at revolt were the doing of only a few great minds, and they remained practically without influence on the future. 56 When they turned to science, the seventeenthcentury physicians were heirs to ten centuries of respectful submission to the masters of antiquity, and the inheritance was not easy to reject. Only one current of ideas, resolutely rebellious towards the authority of the ancients, was able to develop fully and acquire important and lasting influence: the current commonly known as chemical medicine, whose most famous exponent was Paracelsus. He carried out, in fact, a revolt against the Greco-Arab tradition in the name of empiricism and Christian religion, considering the latter the only fountainhead of truth, whose knowledge gave the moderns absolute superiority over the pagans of antiquity as well as over their Muslim commentators. Paracelsus, named professor of surgery at Basel in 1527, is known to have solemnly burned the works of Galen and Avicenna in front of his students. 57 The question of whether Paracelsus was a great experimenter or was simply recycling recipes provided by the Orient is of little importance here. 58 What concerns us is that his doctrine drew heavily upon Neoplatonism, the Gnostics, and the Kabbala. In him, then, the least rationalistic tendencies of the sixteenth century came together. He admitted and used in his therapeutics the principle of affinities among the metals, planets, and parts of the body. He made fun of the astrologers' claims, but believed in the "imprint in all things," in amulets, and in remedies that acted through sympathy. Freed from the thralldom of the ancients, he nonetheless became a disciple of the alchemists and occultists of the Middle Ages. He sought to derive his science not from Galen but from a special, God-given intuition. 59 Chemical medicine spread rapidly, especially in Protestant areas: in Ger-

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many, in England with Robert Fludd, in the Lowlands with Jean-Baptiste van Helmont. In France, its influence was far from negligible, despite the energetic efforts of the Paris Faculty of Medicine. As early as 1566, there was the dispute about antimony, which pitted the Parisians against Joseph du Chesne (alias Quercetanus) and his colleague Julien Le Paulmier de Grentemesnil. In 1615 Paris condemned antimony unanimously, but soon Montpellier was to be contaminated, in the person of the Protestant Lazare Riviere, professor from r622 to 1655 and a convinced iatrochemist. Even in Paris the situation became serious. If the faculty resisted, the king's physicians, who had the right to practice in the capital despite the Parisians, were almost all from Montpellier and had their weakness for chemistry, which was becoming the fashionable brand of medicine. Mazarin's physician was an iatrochemist, whom Antoine Vallot jokingly called Gargantua because he had had the misfortune of losing one of his clients, the minister of finance, Gargant,* to an overdose of emetic wine.60 Also an iatrochemist, or suspected of being such, was the Montpellierian Theophraste Renaudot, who organized medical consultations and lectures at his Academy in which a Paracelsist was always a participant. And then the malady worked its way into the faculty itself: in 1643, the bachelier Michel du Pont asked, and answered affirmatively, the revealing question, ''An curandis morbis amuleta?" ["Is an amulet to be used for treating the sick?"]. Twenty years later, in Reims, the same question was asked, but in Greek. It received the same affirmative answer. But the serious matter here was that the author of the Reims thesis was not the bachelier Nicolas Richelet, who defended it, but the professor, Pierre Oudinet, who presided over the defense. 61 To no avail did Guy Patin rail and heap sarcasm; to no avail did he in 1649 have his son Robert sustain a thesis whose tide bears the imprint of the father's raging style: "Sunt-ne ridicula, commentitia et chimaerica chymicorum principia?" [''Are not the principles of the chemicalists ridiculous, fictitious, and chimerical?"]. In 1658, the abominable Guenault cured the king with antimony. In r666, the parlement itself defected to the enemy: despite the opposition of Le Vignon, dean of the faculty, it issued a ruling allowing physicians to use emetic wine. Le Vignon stepped down, and Moliere's friend Jean-Armand de Mauvillain, a determined antimonist, succeeded him, with the support, moreover, of a majority of the teacher-doctors. A seductive antithesis is unavoidable: in the one camp, Pierre Oudinet with his liking for chemistry, for the circulation theory, and for the use of an~ "Gargant

tua" means "He killed Gargant."- Tr.

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timony and quinine; in the other camp, Guy Patin, the rabid Galenist: the future and the past. The opposition would not be entirely false, and it is quite certain that, most often, a taste for chemical medicine was accompanied by a greater openness of mind and a greater concern for observable facts. But we should remember the amulets, lest we jump to hasty conclusions. Can the Paris physicians seriously be blamed for their long-standing opposition to antimony, an effective remedy no doubt, but extremely powerful and used by the chemicalists haphazardly and in highly uncertain dosages? Was it blind enslavement to tradition not to adopt posthaste Paracelsus's famous "weapon cure," the following recipe for which was quite seriously presented during a lecture at Renaudot's Academy: Take an ounce of the oily substance that gathers on the inner wall of the cranium of a hanged man left in the open air, collecting it during the crescent Moon when it is in the house of Pisces, Taurus, or Libra, and as close as possible to Venus; the same quantity of mummy and still warm human blood; two ounces of human fat, plus two drams each of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian stone; mix it all together in a mortar and store it in a well-stopped long-necked vial. This must be done while the Sun is in Libra. Then the weapon must be smeared with it, beginning with the part that committed the offense. 62

It must be understood that the medicament acts at a distance by sympathy, and not by direct contact with the wound. Reading this, how can one not but be carried away by a marvelous surge of friendly feeling for bloodletting and purging? After all, in the eyes of a Paris physician in 1640, chemical medicine was not only antimony but also the weapon cure, amulets, and bezoar, the last moreover handed down by the Arabs. Chemical medicine, hermetic and mystical, violently shocked good sense. It was new, of course, and revolutionary, but it had all the trappings to alienate men of sound mind irretrievably, and to propel them towards Galen and Hippocrates.63 Such was the alternative, then, confronting seventeenth-century physicians: the ancients or Paracelsus. It is easy enough for us to say today that they should have made a choice, saving what was serious and useful in the tradition and keeping what was new and reasonable in chemical medicine, while discarding what was freakish and absurd. But to have made such a choice would, in the last analysis, have been tantamount to creating a new science free from both tradition and the irrational. Were seventeenth-century physicians equipped to create such a science? This question, clearly the main one, is what we must now explore.

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III Obstacles to the Creation ofa New Science: Medical, Social, and Theological Issues Attempts to explain the weaknesses in seventeenth-century biology immediately bring to mind the poverty of technical means of observation. In particular, the microscope was still in its infancy,64 and it was not to make its serious contributions to the progress of knowledge until the end of the century. Unquestionably, then, an entire world inevitably remained closed to observers. But that was not the real problem, at least for the period in question. An instrument answers only those questions we ask of it, and the unexpected discoveries made with the microscope raised more questions than they answered.65 Even with good microscopes, the scientists of the early seventeenth century would have been just as powerless, for it was in themselves that they encountered, without realizing it, the greatest obstacles to the progress of science. This is not the place to review either the dogmatism of contemporary medical education or its subordination to the ancients. Let me rather return to a statement I made at the outset, that there was no such thing as a biologist at that time, there were only doctors. Now, a doctor does not possess a scientist's detachment from contingent circumstances. Concerned first of all with healing, he is called upon as well to play an important role in society, and moral considerations cannot remain foreign to him. These concerns have nothing to do with pure biology. They may even turn the physician away from it or, conversely, influence his scientific ideas. Indeed, this would be still more strongly the case during a period when the different intellectual domains were not always clearly separated. Seventeenth-century doctors normally devoted most of their activity to resolving problems raised by the practice of their art. It was more important for them, given the state of their knowledge, to know whether mineral waters made women fertile, 66 or if beer was good for nursing women,67 than pointlessly to investigate the process of fecundation. Predictably, then, many theses and other writings treat of hygiene during pregnancy or problems of delivery. And there is no great harm if the doctors, in a jovial humor, debate gayer subjects, such as, "Does a toothache derive from the coldness of the lover's hands?" 68 or "Is sex after a period of abstinence more pleasurable? More apt to produce offspring?" 69 Playful inquiries such as these probably did not

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get in the way of more serious undertakings. Whether solemn or facetious, it was practical concerns, in general, that kept seventeenth-century doctors from doing true biological research. As already noted/ 0 they did not see any practical advantages to be realized from such research, and only occasionally devoted themselves to pure science. And there was no one, at the time, to fill the gap in this area. Besides, the doctor was a social personage, whose scientific authority ran the risk of being solicited in more dangerous areas. By vocation he was the family counselor, responsible for returning a young profligate to the straight and narrow path, 71 for hastening the wedding of a somewhat jumpy or anemic young lady, 72 or for that matter of a young widow suffering the pains of deprivation.73 He guided the choice made by the head of the family who wished to marry off his son and was concerned for his posterity.7 4 To these eternal questions, the period added more particular problems of its own. How twins came to be was a mystery, but in a land where the law of primogeniture held sway, it was particularly important to know which of the twins was the firstborn. The faculty discussed the matter, leaning in favor of the first to enter the world75 Bur was the firstborn the first-conceived? That was the true problem, debated to no conclusion by the doctors participating in Renaudot's gatherings?6 And in these matters it was not sufficient merely to know the operations of nature: one also had to know how to control them. It was important to have children, but the children also had to be good physical specimens, preferably males, who alone could inherit the name. How to achieve this was a fine subject for discussion among the doctors of Renaudot's Academy? 7 It also constitutes the subject of a long chapter in the Callipaedia of Claude Quillet/8 and of the Tableau de /'amour . .. dans l'estat de mariage by Nicolas Venette? 9 The physiology is that of the school, but the practical advice is based just as much on Aristotle, Pliny, or astrology as on Hippocrates or Galen. The success of works of this sort was considerable, with the CaLlipaedia counting nine editions by 1832 and the Tableau de !'amour reaching the astonishing number of seventy-one editions, the last of which appeared in 1835. It is understandable that, well into the eighteenth century, the clever Michel Procope-Couteau entitled his little book on the problem of generation L'Art de foire des garrom. In this way, society imposed its own problems on the doctor, perhaps keeping him from pursuing more scientific questions. Worse still, society often imposed its own solutions. In France, where only a male could reign, and where nobility was handed down through the father, how could one refuse this eminent progenitor the essential role in the production of offspring? Aris-

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totle had awarded him this function with full rights, but Hippocrates and Galen had been less favorable to him. Now, the old university doctors, disciples of the last two, were no more inclined than their Aristotelian colleagues to grant much importance to the weaker sex. They strove, therefore, to safeguard male superiority, emphasizing that this superiority must be manifest in the very act of generation.80 Unconsciously, no doubt, they went so far as to misread Hippocrates in order to adapt his text to their prejudices and to have him say that, even in pleasure, the man was superior to the woman.81 How could one admit that the wife, an eternal minor, might be equal to the father of the family? Even the doctors of Renaudot's Academy could not entertain this notion. 82 One of them, and a Galenist at that, proved the male's superiority "by virtue of the organs of generation, which, being more evident in man than in woman, suggest to us that the former makes the major contribution." 83 Family name, courage, nobility all came from the father. Therefore, the father played the primary role, and his seed was predominant. 84 At the end of the century, the ovist theory, which stripped the father of his prerogatives, was to encounter great resistance on these grounds, and in 1750 Jacques Gautier-Dagoty would still affirm that the father alone had an active role in the matter, invoking Holy Scripture as well as Salic and Roman law. 85 The Faculty of Medicine was not immune to gallantry, however, especially when important private interests were at stake. Matters could be delicate and sometimes involved personal honor. Had a widow consoled a bit too soon just given birth to a child best attributed to the deceased despite the calendar? The doctor remembered immediately that these problems fell within his bailiwick: he hastened to the rescue of virtue compromised, discoursing in scholarly fashion on "the time of gestation" (de tempore partus), emphasizing the possibility of delayed births, lengthening by several months the customary term, citing examples, soothing doubts, and silencing calumny. All this, by the way, not in the privacy of the office, but in the full light of university debate.86 In this way, everyone's reputation was saved and no legal problems with the inheritance arose. The patrimony remained intact, sheltered from the avidity of collateral heirs, and the family pursued its history. For- and it was Giovanni Costeo who made this clear, since such things happened everywhere- "lawyers often discuss the moment of birth, but normally they defer to the opinion of the doctors, as experts in this kind of question." 87 Everything could be explained, even in the rare case of an infant arriving with exceptional coloring: there was still an Aristotelian text that could be adapted to the situation.88 The doctor watched over the peace of society.

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Once again, I am not reproaching the seventeenth-century doctors for preoccupations that may have been legitimate and permanent. But I believe that these social preoccupations made disinterested scientific research far more difficult in a period when no clear distinction existed between the practitioner's and the biologist's activity. Similarly, and with perhaps more serious consequences, the seventeenth-century doctor was almost inevitably persuaded to introduce into his work theological considerations, the relevance of which to the moral obligations of doctors need not be gone into here, but that must concern us insofar as they impinged on research. The endless discussions of the role of the soul in the constitution and governance of the human body, which led doctors to quote Scripture and the Fathers as well as Pliny and Hippocrates, must obviously be taken into account. But the problem of the soul was unquestionably a biological problem in the seventeenth century, a fact to which we shall have occasion to return. What is noteworthy here is the intrusion into biological issues of religious elements that were by then foreign to biology-for example, the concern, principally among the doctors of the faculty, to back up Hippocratic theses with quotations from the Bible,89 or apropos of the question of the suffusion of the soul into the body (again, a biological problem in the seventeenth century), the use of the soul of Christ as an example. Did it take on flesh at the moment of the angel's words, or only when the body had taken shape in the Virgin's womb? 90 This example allowed for quotations from Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Ezekiel. The best evidence was found in the impossibility of considering sexual coupling from a strictly biological and medical point of view, setting aside all moral preoccupations. For it was, in the last analysis, moral preoccupations that led the authors to ask whether Adam and Eve had coupled in Paradise before the Fall.91 Dealing exclusively with mankind, because they were physicians, and living in an intellectual universe in which everything was related and interpenetrating, ignorant of the distinctions that the modern mind has introduced among the various human activities, these old doctors drew connections in a way that confounds us. Who would imagine that one could deny spontaneous generation by recourse to the single argument that, if animals were capable of spontaneous emergence, God would not have commanded Noah to take into his Ark a pair of every living species? 92 This synthetic view of the universe, which we find so hard to reenter, was one that the minds of the seventeenth century entertained quite naturally. It no doubt brought them much satisfaction and security. But they held it at

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the cost of complete confusion and total misapprehension of what the rigor of scientific research requires of the researcher.

IV The Illusions of "Factualness," the Pitfolls of ''Nature, " and Undiscoverable Certainties It would be childish to imagine that the seventeenth-century naturalists and biologists most attached to the traditional forms of knowledge would deliberately have turned their backs on nature and the facts, treating their science as mere logical gymnastics. They were all persuaded, on the contrary, that experience is the sole guide, that submission to the facts is the foremost virtue in a scientist, and that the authority of the ancients must never be the decisive argument. Mundinus Mundinius constantly refutes Aristotle in the name of anatomy, but he ends his book "exhorting and begging studious minds to remain faithful to the ancient opinion of Hippocrates and Galen concerning semen, the opinion [I have] expounded and defended, and always to flee like the plague any conclusions contrary to these two authors." 93 Fortunio Liceti asserts that "all the philosophers followed the judgment of the senses in matters pertaining to nature, which fall under their jurisdiction." But "the senses and experience have shown" -at least to Fortunio Liceti"that after a scoundrel coupled with a cow, the cow was made heavy by him, and there resulted from it a boy resembling a complete man in every regard, except for his sharing the cow's inclination to graze on the grass in the pasture, and to chew its cud." 94 Thomas Feyens proclaims that he is "not the kind of a man to swear upon the words of any master, but prefers the truth and the weight of reasoning to the authority of whoever it might be." 95 Indeed, when Feyens went to prove that "the effective agent of conformation is a soul introduced into the semen after conception," he would follow "the triple path of reason, experience, and authority." 96 Similarly, "proof by the senses and experience" was that "in plants, it is obvious that conformation occurs through the introduction of a soul." 97 In 1639, when the doctors of the Renaudot Academy examined the case of "two freakish brothers living in a single body," 98 the third interlocutor began by saying that "in order to pass definite judgment on the present subject," they would first have "to describe it," 99 a laudable concern for method. Having finished the description, he concludes that the monster "comes from some extraordinary encounter of

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stars that occurred at his conception." 100 Giovanni-Benedetto Sinibaldi, who had marshaled Noah's Ark against spontaneous generation, cites this "golden opinion" of Celsus: "When experience has proved a physical fact, one must give up reasoning." 101 And this in order to support Galen against Aristotle. On the other hand, Andre Graindorge defended Aristotle against Galen, while proclaiming that "we would all commit the same mistake if, walking continually in the footsteps of our predecessors, we refused to distance ourselves from them by the width of a fingernail," 102 a singular image, but one borrowed from Jean FerneJ.l 03 What, then, did these scholars understand by the "experience" and the "witness of the senses" that they invoked with such good faith in support of the most contradictory and at times the most absurd conclusions? According to the famous words of Claude Bernard: "It is one thing to experience, another to carry out experiments." Here, one could at best speak of observations. Even then, one would have to specifY the conditions under which the observations were made. Setting aside the cases of a few great scientists- a Fabrizio d'Acquapendente or a Harvey-the observations are not those of a biologist, carried out methodically, but the conclusions that a doctor might draw randomly from his practice and from oddities he encountered in his patients. These would have been rapid, superficial observations, which could only rarely have permitted the pursuit of cause-and-effect relationships within the inextricable complexity of the elements to be considered. 104 An examination in depth was almost never possible. If the patient recovered, one thanked Heaven, one congratulated oneself on the success of the treatment, and one thought no more about it. If he died, a proper understanding of the matter would have required an autopsy, ruled out most often by the custom of the time. Then, too, if autopsies had been required for all the patients who died without it being known exactly why, the lifetime of a doctor would not have sufficed. Only exceptional facts held the practitioner's attention. Thus, the medical literature abounds in surprising instances. The elite of Europe's doctors gathered around a fetus from Pont-a-Mousson discovered petrified in the abdomen of a woman of over 6o, widowed long since, and killed in an accident.105 Fifty years later, a simple extra-uterine pregnancy would frequently provide the subject for a detailed presentation to the Academie des sciences. And here we find in fact an important aspect of the evolution of the scientific mentality in the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, it is important to note that the doctor was not always an eyewitness to the fact that he reported or used. Most of the monstrous births that

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grace the teratological literature of the seventeenth century occurred in rural areas, far from any physician. Their only passport for entry into the world of science was a certificate signed by the village pastor or the local lord, using information provided by a midwife or, at best, the local barber-surgeon. The certificate in question might have been taken to the physician in a nearby city, who, instead of troubling himself to investigate whether the child in question indeed had an elephant's head, two eagle's wings, and a cock's foot, wrote a learned dissertation on the errors of the formative faculty in a teratism [abnormal or monstrous birth] that he had not seen, but of which he would have more to say. Thus Fortunio Liceti had no qualms in believing that a snake could couple with a hen. "For," he states, "a servant-girl I had, and who was named Julia, assured me that, while still with her parents, she had noticed more than once an asp covering a hen, which, after incubation, hatched out not chicks but little snakes." 106 How could the reader not believe this story after having been told that the servant's name was Julia? 107 How could he fail to believe that a hen's egg contained a man's head bristling with serpents when he learns that this monster was discovered in Autun, at the home of a lawyer named Baucheron, by a servant who was cracking eggs for an omelet, and that the egg in question was given to the baron de Senechey, who sent it to King Charles IX, who was at the time in Metz? 10 H If it were true that King Charles IX, whose existence had never been a matter of doubt, was indeed in Metz, a city known to all, if it were true that one had to crack eggs to make an omelet, a notorious fact, it must also be true that said egg contained a man's head bristling with serpents. Thus, as long as a physician who was the friend of some big-city doctor came across a dubiously formed rural teratism, as long as an obscure country gentleman seized the opportunity to cut a figure, the fame of the the aberration was assured. The details of its history would be gathered by some man of learning, picked up from there by a scientist-Ambroise Pare, Arnaud Sorbin, Martin Weinrich, Fonunio Liceti, Johann Georg Schenk. The story would be published, with ingenious illustrations by an engraver who had seen no more than the scientist, but the power of whose imagination would make up for the lack of sensory witness. It would then have entered into tradition; henceforth, it would be a universally recognized fact, to be considered by anyone wishing to reflect upon nature. Schenk got the story from Ambroise Pare, as did Fortunio Liceti. 109 In the process, it may have undergone some little accidents, and reading a bit hastily and ignoring geography, Schenk has our egg hatch "in a city of Burgundy named Baucheron," 110 mistaking in his manner

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Piraeus for a man. But surely that would not keep him from discoursing on the matter. As for Fortunio Liceti, was he not justified in believing this egg with a Medusa head to be the product of the coupling of a man with a hen? The human seed, in the process of corruption, had formed both the head and the serpents, for stale semen "becomes a poison." Thus, "corrupted and taking on in some fashion a poisonous nature, it is not surprising that snakes should have been the product. And, indeed, the experiment performed by feeding a cat (which died immediately after) the white of this egg, shows that the substance contained in the egg was poisonous." 111 Was this not tantamount to dutifully heeding the lessons of experience? Let us recall that Fortunio Liceti, who died in 1657, was one of the great professors at Padua, and that his treatise De monstrorum causis, natura, et diffirentiis, first published in 1616, was reissued in 1634, 1665, and r668, before being translated into French in 1708. We may conclude from this that Fontenelle was optimistic, and that, in fact, it was not sufficient merely to consult a goldsmith.* Now what has been going on, so to speak, before our eyes between 1550 and r6so is a very ancient phenomenon. The seventeenth-century doctor had at his disposal a considerable mass of facts, many of which went back at least to Hippocrates. Herodotus and Aristotle, Plutarch and Pliny, the Arabs, Albertus Magnus, and many others had contributed to the common treasure, which had passed from age to age with constant enrichment. The reader finds in it, pell-mell, the courtesan of Hippocrates whose embryo resembled an egg; the black baby in Herodotus born into a white family; the productive couplings of men with animals reported by Plutarch and Pliny; the woman mentioned by Averroes who found herself pregnant from having bathed in a public pool; the ox that fell out of the sky, as Avicenna attests, and the man of like descent noted by Diogenes Laertius; and a woman who had 7 children at a time according to Tragus Pompei us, or 70 according to Avicenna, or even 150 according to Albertus Magnus. 112 The scholar drew from this arsenal according to his whim, his critical spirit, or the ideas he wished to defend, but always with the same passion for supporting his reasoning with facts. This passion was so great as to triumph over the critical spirit: Weinrich cannot bring himself to blame Albertus Magnus for the care he takes to report miraculous occurrences, "even though he mixes in with them examples from *As perpetual secretary to the Academie royale des sciences, Fonrenelle obtained this information and disseminated it to his readers. The reference to the "goldsmith" alludes to having recourse to an alchemist.-Ed.

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his own time that not everyone can believe." 113 The passion is so lively that, when it is a question of knowing who, the man or the woman, derives more pleasure from the act of love, we see Francesco Plazzoni regretfully forgoing the witness of Tiresias, who, having been both man and woman, could have made the comparison, but was so inconsiderate as to be a mythical character.114 The passion was, moreover, far more that of the collector than of the scientist and remained in large part inspired by the taste for the wondrous that had impelled the authors of the Middle Ages and the late sixteenth century to go one better on the absurdities handed down by Plutarch and Pliny. Thus we find Ulisse Aldrovandi pleased to observe that "the Tritons, Sirens, Nereids, and other such monsters, considered by many at one time as fables, have turned out, rather, to have been seen such as they were depicted." 115 As for normal facts, they come from the "experience" that Claude Bernard warned us not to confuse with "experiments." It was "experience" that taught the Galenist doctors that there was a female fluid produced during intercourse, and that taught the Aristotelians that this fluid was not always present. It was "experience" as well, allied with the authority of Plato, that taught certain doctors that the womb had an attractive virtue, felt by women and at times even by men. Common observations, fleeting and hard-to-verifY sensations, combined with the facts reported in books, constituted the body of "experience" from which medicine drew its arguments. Moreover, it is surely not a matter of reproach to the seventeenth-century scientists that they were born before the publication of Claude Bernard's Introduction a la medecine experimentale (r865). It should be no surprise that they did not perform well-planned and conclusive experiments or that they were content to make rapid and superficial observations. But the modern reader is astonished to see them accepting silly tales devoid of the slightest plausibility and manifestly contrary to the most elementary common sense. It would nonetheless be a mistake to believe that these doctors possessed no critical faculty. In reporting an extraordinary occurrence, they did not always lend it credence.U 6 Regarding the woman with 71 babies at a time, Jean RioIan pere specified, indeed, that Avicenna had been "not an eyewitness but a witness by hearsay," 117 and this as early as 1578. Many authors refused to believe Albertus Magnus's account of the single birth of 150 babies, and when Schenk seriously cited women who had had 350, or even 364 children at a time, he was severely taken to task by MundiniusY 8 Also, when Fortunio Liceti read in Pliny that a woman, having coupled with an elephant, brought

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forth a little pachyderm, he remained skeptical. Why? Because, as everyone knows, the elephant is an extremely chaste animal: "He hides carefully in order to make love-how then could he impregnate a woman?" 119 The fact of the matter is that plausibility and implausibility exist only with respect to what one already knows, and the critical faculty can operate only on a solid foundation. It is precisely this foundation that was lacking in the early seventeenth century. Where it existed, the scientist reacted accordingly. Fortunio Liceti rejected the story told by Pliny because it ran contrary to what he knew of the ways of elephants. But he rarely possessed such certainties. Almost everything seemed possible, even things that most violently shocked common sense, which did not stand up for very long against erudition. A scholar surrounded by his tomes, the seventeenth-century doctor did not even react with Aristotle's, Lucretius's, or Galen's spontaneous startlement at the fable of centaurs. 120 He could accept, with Pliny, that a baby girl had been born from the love of a man and a mare, 121 or, with Caelius Rhodiginus, that a sheep had given birth to a lion. 122 But above all, in place of the good sense that scholarship had killed in him, the man of science would have needed the conviction that nature's operations are regular, that there exist laws of nature, inviolable, permanent, and accessible to human reason. Precisely this basic conviction was absolutely foreign to him, and his very idea of nature made such a conception largely impossible. This conception of nature, expressed more or less clearly by most of the doctors of the first half of the seventeenth century, reveals an extreme confusion in their minds, and there is a striking contrast between the dogmatism our authors display when they are reasoning about illnesses and the uncertainties in which they thrash about as soon as they attempt to understand the general operations of nature. At the outset of the seventeenth century, no one had yet considered nature as a whole consisting of material, perceptible, and measurable phenomena. 123 The doctors had not yet had the example of Galileo. But at the same time, and with the exception of a few philosophers in Padua who were more philosophical than medical in stripe, doctors seem to have become incapable of understanding Aristotelian "physics" and its effort to explain the facts of existence rationally. In this regard, the doctors mark the culminating point in the irresistible movement of thought that throughout the sixteenth century had progressively smashed Aristotelianism with the hammer blows of the "Neoplatonism" stemming from Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johann Reuchlin, and Leon the Hebrew, which notoriously combines elements from the Gnostics, the Kabbala, and alchemy.

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The Paracelsist tradition expressed this hybrid "Neoplatonism" in its purest form. It did not at all claim to be leaving the bounds of nature when it studied the correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm and among the planets, the metals and parts of the body, or when it listed the different principles functioning in the human body: archeus, iliaster, astral body, or imagination. The Paracelsist who gives the recipe for the weapon cure cited earlier was persuaded of the natural action of this treatment, a "magnetic" remedy acting by "sympathy." The most seemingly absurd details of the recipe are, on the contrary, the most logical. A person who has died a violent death, such as a hanged man, has not had the time to use up all his vitality. His "astral body" may still be active, and it is this activity, employable for therapeutic ends, that is to be gathered in the "oily substance that collects on the inner wall of the cranium." It is also perfectly obvious that this must be done at the moment when the stars can increase the vitality of the mummy. And since the weapon that struck the blow has retained "sympathies" with the astral body of the wounded man, it is precisely this that one must smear with the unguent thus prepared. In any case, it is specified that this treatment "must not be used for wounds to the arteries, the heart, the liver, or the brain, because it would be useless." 124 Nothing here, then, except what was natural. But how are we to know, predict, and measure this vitality and these "sympathies"? If we would but set aside our anachronistic notion of measurement, Paracelsus will tell us that we must expect no help from discursive reason for a "knowledge" of nature. True knowledge is an identification of man with the object of knowledge, an identification that occurs between the astral body of each, and that is made possible only thanks to the presence, in man the microcosm, of an element that "corresponds" to the particular element of the macrocosm that he is studying. Such knowledge is a participation, an inner feeling for the "virtues" and "powers" of the known object. And above all, this knowledge attains the object in its specificity, its uniqueness, in what belies all generalization. Understandably, Paracelsus attacked formal logic violently, as well as the physics of qualities and medicine based on humors-that is, everything claiming to introduce general principles into nature, everything susceptible to abstract rationalization. 125 It is equally understandable, however, that this "admirable science" should not have promoted a clear and distinct idea of a nature where occult forces reigned supreme, forces whose effects experience can sometimes uncover, and that may be used therapeutically, but whose action reason cannot predict. In rejecting, for the most part, the pantheism of Paracelsus and in specifying that the physician should be the object of a divine

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"illumination," Helmont may have altered the philosophic significance of the doctrine, but he did not render it more rational. True enough, the practitioner could take consolation in the thought that his uncertain science was cloaked in a sort of religious dignity: "If you take away from medicine the cures obtained through occult means, it will lose that which is admirable in it." 126 To those who preferred knowledge acquired through more human means, rather than grand secrets, however, other systems offered a nature no less richly endowed with mysterious forces. The rationalism of Aristotle, founded on the interplay of "form" and matter and on the passage from potential to actual, could not withstand the double assault of Neoplatonism and Galenism. In Aristotle himself, how was one to conceive of the precise difference between the "innate heat" found in "the sperm of all animals," a heat "that is not exactly fire," but was "analogous to the element of the stars," similar to "the heat of the sun"? 127 This explained how the sun could produce frogs, fish, and even, as we have seen, a man or an ox out of the air. These stories looked like fables, and yet they were perfectly plausible: "nevertheless very like the truth" (multo tamen vera similia). 128 But where Aristotle was only "plausible," the sixteenth century hastened to correct him. Fernel himself, the only modern regarded as a master by the traditionalist doctors, did not believe it possible to be satisfied with the physics of qualities. He did not reject it, certainly: the classic disorders were always for him the result of a "dyscrasia," and most of the treatments acted through their elementary qualitiesheat or cold, dryness or wetness. But beyond that, there were also occult disorders, those of "the entire substance," and "specific" remedies, which acted through their "form" and not through their qualities. Nothing in all this was accessible to reason, everything had to do with an "occult quality" that observation alone could reveal. And it was not only through heat that the stomach digested or the liver transformed chyle into blood: it was through a virtus insita [inherent power] that derived from the "form" of the organ and the "totality of its substance," which was also occult. In light of this doctrine, the Galenic "faculties," whose nature was already ambiguous in Galen, definitely became occult qualities, even entities whose actions were unpredictable by virtue of the "errors" they committed, as witness illnesses and freaks. And yet, it was these "qualities" that increasingly took the place of the Aristotelian "form," dividing the unity of life into a multitude of distinct activities, each unintelligible and following an unknown order of succession. In this way, the doctor was faced with a nature in which matter was scarcely needed any longer except as a support for a multitude of occult forces,

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which might be the direct instrument of the divine will or the expression of harmonies and hidden affinities between different parts of the universe, but that were always incomprehensible. If he wished to explain the formation of a living being, the doctor could refer according to preference to God himself, to the soul of the world, to celestial influences (which despite their rejection by Paracelsus still had many partisans), to the plastic force of the uterus, to the soul of the semen, to a divine virtue that assisted the parental soul, to innate heat, 129 or quite simply to the formative faculty, which, as everyone knew, comprised the generative faculty and the alterific faculty, the latter itself divided into the ossific, neurine, cartilaginific faculties, and so on. 130 Behind all these forces, what was there except God, or rather nature, a personalized nature invoked in case of need? But surely it was no definition of natural law to say that nature "loves nothing so much as union," and that she "immediately hastens in to join what has been sundered" ;131 or that nature lent herself to hybrids, so desirous was she of seeing beings reproduced; 132 or that, conversely, given that the mule was "a mistake of nature, nature returns to her first path as soon as she can, and not being able to do so by means of those freakish parts, she ceases to engender rather than create a second set of monsters out of the first." 133 And then, what was this natura medicatrix so dear to the Hippocratics, that sometimes cured but often allowed to die as well? The doctor could well reject the supernatural, 134 but nothing allowed him to set aside once and for all these indecipherable and natural forms. As Feyens put it, the action of a "soul" or a "faculty" in living matter is selfevident, as much so for the doctor in 1630 as the action of universal gravitation on a falling stone for us. 135 And then, with what could the doctor have replaced these "faculties" or "souls"? The physicist could well afford to reject the notion of nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, for he could immediately replace it with that of the weight of a column of air. As for the doctor, he had no solution in reserve. The doctor thus found himself helplessly enclosed inside a nature that acted everywhere through forces that were ill defined, subject to incomprehensible failures, and in practical terms unknowable. 136 He was fighting with shadows, his only weapons being syllogisms, quotations, and ill-proven facts, among which he chose by the play of chance. Nothing was certain, because nothing authorized certainty. The permanence of animal species seemed in the last analysis as incomprehensible as spontaneous generation, "there being no philosopher who can say why a horse produces a colt rather than a calf." 137 Before the awesome complexity of phenomena, the doctor was left quite without means. Each fact was an isolate, as if self-enclosed and refrac-

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tory to inclusion under a law whose existence could not be proved. Nothing was left except to collect anecdotes and to formulate hypothetical reasonings on the workings of the faculties, which the doctors generally accepted with good grace, unable for the most part even to imagine the possibility of doing otherwise. Scholarship and syllogism took the place of science. At the same time, however, they made all science impossible. The reason for this is that, unable to distinguish error, the seventeenthcentury doctors were unable to recognize truth when they came upon it by chance. Moreover, most often-and even in the mind of the one who discovered it-the truth was bound into a questionable system. The same was true of chemical medicine, where the least rational metaphysics was inextricably allied to correct observations. But in the best of cases, when the scientist who had made a new discovery was capable of presenting it with what appear to us the most convincing arguments, he ran into general incomprehension stemming from the readers' inability to distinguish between serious argumentation based upon observable facts and Scholastic argumentation based upon citations. It would be still more accurate to say that the second argumentation would have been preferred over the first, for it corresponded to nearly invincible habits of mind. An experimental truth could not be established on its own merit because people did not know the characters of truth. A famous example is that of Harvey and his circulation theory. The circuit followed by the blood was not totally observable, because Harvey had not been able to see the capillaries, which allow the blood to pass from the arteries to the veins. 138 But how could anyone deny the beating of the heart, as did several venerable doctors? 139 Harvey's discovery was not, however, completely unexpected. The way had been prepared by the work of Michael Servetus, Cesalpino, and Realdo Columbo on pulmonary circulation. But the new discovery went outside the schematic bounds of traditional science, overturning an essential component of Galenist physiology, and the venerable doctors preferred to listen to Galen rather than to the beating of the heart. They did not even try to hear the beating. The icy reception Harvey's Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis received in England, France, and Italy when it appeared in r628 is well known. 14° Forty years later, the battle was not yet won. In Paris, the young Guy-Crescent Fagon was to sustain the "new" idea in a thesis written in 1663, while the bachelier Valentin Lallemand was defending it in Reims. 141 Fagan's thesis was closer to Descartes than to Harvey, and yet, according to Fontenelle, who reported this "action of noteworthy daring," the old doctors had done no more than to judge that the young man "had

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defended this strange paradox intelligently." 142 In r665 the Parisian bachelier Claude Mattot was to sustain a thesis completely faithful to Harvey's ideas. 143 Yet in 1670, Guy Patin had the bachelier J. Cordelle condemn the circulation theory/ 44 and he did so again in 1672 with the thesis ofFranc;:ois Bazin. 145 The poet Nicolas Boileau was being thoroughly topical in r67r when he inserted into his Arret burlesque a paragraph forbidding "the blood in future to be vagabond, to wander or circulate in the body, under pain of being utterly consigned and abandoned to the Faculty of Medicine." Thomas Diafoirus, who in 1673 offers Angelique a thesis that he has just sustained "against the circulationists," may be a preposterous suitor, but he is not an anachronistic doctor: he is a good colleague of Franc;:ois Bazin's. In r674, Nicolas Malebranche was to protest once more against those persons "quite well regarded for their erudition and their studies, who write books and give public lectures against the visible and perceptible experimental demonstrations of the circulation of the blood," and he remarked that there were discoveries that were "despised only because they [were] not born already old and, so to speak, wearing a venerable beard." 146 Only the intervention of Louis XIV, the teaching of Pierre Dionis in the Jardin du Roi, and especially the disappearance of the old doctors and the birth of a new scientific spirit, would move the faculty finally to accept a discovery already more than fifty years old. For in the eyes of those who did not wish to see, there was no such thing as a "visible and perceptible" demonstration. No, in the first half of the seventeenth century, those who did not wish, or were not able, to see were the immense majority. Did not Harvey himself always refuse to believe in the existence of the chyle ducts? 147 While under lengthy discussion by the scientific eminences, then, the new ideas kept more or less peaceful company with the old. No doubt one finds certain closed minds who embraced one doctrine to the exclusion of any other. But how many eclectic spirits there were, gathering their material more or less everywhere, and blithely tossing Hippocrates and Aristotle, even Galen and Paracelsus, into the same sack! As Father Marin Mersenne wrote: "Never mind that there are so many different opinions concerning the principles of nature: everyone has known something true, even if they mixed some false in with the true for having neglected to consider all the causes, circumstances, and effects." 148 This is what justified not only the most unexpected syntheses, but also, in the eyes of most, the peaceful coexistence of several solutions to the same problem: the diversity of explanations did not look like a mark of error. A theory was neither true nor false: it was possible-they would have said "probable" -as long as it satisfied the mind with its ingenuity and its

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logical coherence. The opposite theory could be just as probable. For the doctors meeting at Renaudot's Academy, a teratism could be caused by a quantity of semen insufficient for the intentions of the formative faculty, but also by God's anger, or the influence of a constellation. The wisest procedure, then, was to bring together these three equally "probable" causes. 149 Did a male child result from thick semen, abundant in spirituous elements, hot, emanating from the right testicle, lodged in the right half of the uterus? Or did it owe its sex to a favorable constellation? The theoreticians debated these six explanations. The practitioner Claude Quillet came up with a synthesis: he advised his clients to take hot, thick, and spirituous nourishment, with Burgundy wine and Champagne. But he also counseled them to observe the stars, and to choose the favorable conjunctions of Aries, Leo, and Mars. And finally, the wife had to sleep on her right side, while the husband tied up his left testicle, as the peasants did with their bulls when they wanted a male calf. 150 In this way, all the necessary circumstances would have been brought together, in line with all the accepted theories. This was the wisdom of the greatest number: let the stars hop to it, if the sanguine elements could not! It was a wisdom that rested less on prudence than on the impossibility of making a choice. Under these circumstances, the importance of a theory resulted not from its truth, which was impossible to demonstrate, but from the renown of its author. In the case of a "serious doctor," an indefinitely long life could be seen for his works. As we have seen, Fortunio Liceti's treatise De monstrorum causis, natura, et diffirentiis, first published in r6r6, was reissued in 1634, r665, and 1668, then translated in 1708. This was because the validity of Liceti's opinions about teratisms still remained "probable" in 1708. The Opera chirurgica of Girolamo Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, dating from 1619, the year of his death, was reissued either in French translation or with the Latin text in 1628, 1643, 1649, 1666, and 1723. His Opera physica anatomica, published posthumously in 1625,151 was reissued in r687 and 1738. It was not that the scientists who bought the work in 1738 hoped to find in it the true solution to the problems posed, for example, by the embryology of oviparous animals. Rather, even at this late date, after the work of Harvey, Malpighi, Regnier de Graaf, Leeuwenhoek, and many others, the opinion of Fabrizio was still "probable." It had not been superseded by those coming after it and often contradicting it: it was still worthy of examination and discussion. This was all the more the case in the first half of the seventeenth century for the great scientists of antiquity, "serious doctors" par excellence.

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In practice, then, there was no way out of the situation. Weighed down by the authority of the great names of ancient science, which kept them invincibly chained even when they sought freedom; maintained in this state of intellectual minority, which they did not acknowledge, by a bookish and routine mode of teaching; too easily persuaded of the excellence of their knowledge; incapable of defining the object of their science precisely; lost in a welter of uncertain facts with no method for examining them; lacking solid principles for getting their bearings; and too sensitive to the peculiarities in the phenomena of life, the physician-biologists of the seventeenth century lacked the power to create a true biological science, whose requirements they could not even imagine. As Fontenelle puts it, not only did they lack the rudiments of conveyance to the true, they possessed others well adapted to the false. So long as the authority of an ancient writer was able to counterbalance the weight of a well-made observation in their minds, so long, above all, as the scientific world was unable even to recognize a well-made observation, it would remain impossible to assemble a body of secure knowledge, even in anatomy, and the surest discoveries presented in the most conclusive manner would never be admitted except as part of an inventory. Each and everyone would think himself entitled to contest them, in the name of Aristotle or Galen, in the name of an illusory "experiment" or an ill-observed "fact," or in the name of an old wives' tale, dutifully collected by a credulous scholar and produced at the right moment from the dust of the folio volumes. Thus, everything always had to start again at the beginning.

v The Birth ofa New Scientific Spirit Despite all their inadequacies, these seventeenth-century doctors were not without their strong points. Each of the great intellectual clans had its own strengths to offer the development of a new scientific spirit. Despite the veils separating them from his true thought, the Aristotelians had inherited from their master the sense of a biology that was not limited to the study of man but considered living nature in its entirety. This may be one of the reasons why the great biologists of 1570-r6so- Cesalpino, Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, Harvey-were Aristotelians. The university doctors possessed certain prudential virtues: a taste for clarity and an instinctive mistrust of grand metaphysical ventures. These were minor virtues, no doubt, and above all negative ones,

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but quite necessary at a time when the scientific mind could be too easily tempted by rash imaginings. The skeptical Gabriel Naude and the sarcastic Guy Patin were not always wrong. 152 Conversely, the partisans of chemical medicine dared to leave the beaten paths and display an independence, an openness of mind, and a taste for the empirical that provided a precious antidote to the overly docile respect accorded the ancients. In alliance, all of these qualities could have created a lively mentality capable of adding to the progress of a science already sure of its principles. But the principles remained to be found, and, moreover, instead of uniting to lend one another a helping hand, the qualities in question clashed and tended to neutralize one another. The needed revolution, then, could come only from outside. And come it did, as we know, from the physical sciences and the new scientific spirit born in the seventeenth century. The history of this birth is too well known for us to spend time on it here; 153 let it simply be noted that biology could not remain alien to this evolution in ideas. Even though physics and mechanics reigned supreme, the life sciences were not totally absent from the circles in which the new science was being forged. In the drawing-rooms of the Dupuy brothers, Harvey's and Pecquet's experiments were discussed. 154 Pecquet and even Guy Patin were guests of Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor's, even despite the host's weakness for antimony and his wife's for quinine, better known at the time as "Jesuit powder"! 155 At the home of Melchisedec Thevenot, Steno *could be seen performing his dissections in November r664. 156 And finally, the abbe Pierre Michon Bourdelot's academy, organized at the Conde residence around a man who was himself a doctor, counted among its members the greatest French and foreign names in contemporary medicine and biology. 157 Officially, there, "no one espouses a party, no one embraces a sect," and "Aristotle is no less favorably listened to than Descartes and Gassendi." 158 Indeed, it is easy to see that the group's Aristotelian is an imaginary creation and a laughable figure, and the gathering's doctrine can be summed up as follows: a physicist "must consider nothing but motion and matter in natural operations, without seeking final causes or relationships that occur only in the infinite wisdom of the supreme Craftsman, who made everything for purposes and through means unknown to us." 159 All of past science was thus thrown out en bloc. According to Bourdelot-and it is Guy Patin who tells us this-- "everyone is ignorant ... the world has never had a philosopher *Niels Stensen, or Steensen; following tradition, however, he is referred to here as Sreno.-Ed.

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comparable to Monsieur Descartes ... the common notions of medicine are worthless ... we must have new treatments and new rules ... all of today's doctors are nothing more than pedants who know Greek and Latin." 160 Bourdelot was mistaken, however, in condemning all the doctors of his time. In the second, post-1670 part of this study, we shall see the results of this evolution in mentalities; if biology was indeed at least a half-century behind physics, it is nonetheless true that it was going through a period of slow, preparatory evolution, which began to manifest itself long before 1670. In the lectures at Renaudot's Academy, it was affirmed that "the freedom of our reasoning faculties" did not allow our minds to remain "entirely captive under the rod of magisterial authority," for "nothing is more inimical to knowledge than to keep men from seeking the truth, which appears primarily in the opposition of contrary ideas." 161 And although this freedom may have been anarchical at times, it made it possible to accuse Paracelsus of intellectual confusion,l 62 and to recall that the scientist had to be concerned only with the "regular movements" of nature. 163 Little by little, we see the emergence of the critical spirit empowered to reject a "fact" in the name of plausibility. When a colleague presented the members of the Bourdelot Academy with a young man's tooth that, enclosed in a box, had produced three other similar teeth, Polidor could say: "This is not plausible ... and if my eyes convince my mind through this very perceptible fact, my mind gives the lie to my eyes through reasons still stronger than the certainty of the fact." 164 Here was the first victory of reason over so-called experience. In this way, the new physics and the new philosophy were freeing biology from its age-old bonds. The ransom paid by the life sciences for this liberation, and the efforts and the progress still required, will be noted later. But at last the indispensable freeing of minds was beginning to occur. The age of science was going to be able to replace the age of scholars. Guy Patin, the last combatant of the old school, who had seen the intellectual edifice in which he had enclosed himself and for which he had lived collapsing around him, died on August 30, 1672. A few months before his death, he had written the following melancholy lines: "I have just learned from young Vanderlinden that Monsieur Gronovius is dead in Leiden. He alone remained, practically, of the Dutch scientists. There are no longer in that land men of the caliber of Joseph Scaliger, Baudius, Heinsius, Salmasius, and Grotius. I have also just learned in letters from Brussels that Monsieur Plembius, the renowned professor of medicine, has died .... We can say fare-

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well to sound doctrine in that country! Descartes and the ignorant chemists are endeavoring to wreck everything, both in philosophy and in sound medicine." 165 It is a moving sight: an old man who had outlived his gods. With Guy Patin, a period came to a close, a period that was, quite simply, the end of the Renaissance.

TWO

The Battle with Shadows

r G H T A N D D A Y, the ignorant as well as the learned give themselves over to the pleasure of making children. But no one knows how he has engendered his own progeny. If someone does understand it, he will not persuade others; because for thousands of years, those who study nature have been crossing swords with one another, and they will go on with the duel as long as the names of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen continue to float upon men's lips." 1 This disillusioned observation could have been made by any of the seventeenth-century doctors/ all of whom knew that the generation of living beings remained an impenetrable mystery for them. They knew that the battle over this problem had gone on for centuries without a single combatant ever having admitted himself beaten. They were familiar, at least in part, with the immense literature born out of the struggle, yet they continued to arm themselves with courage and erudition to take their turn in the lists, tireless champions of causes ever under attack. Battle is what it came down to. Tides trumpeted fiercely. In response to a modest Conjectura, there rose up an acerbic Disputatio, an impassioned Apologia or Defensio, merciless Animadversiones, an indignant Responsum, or a triumphant Perturbatio calumniatoris. And if the work was often calmer than the title, it was because syllogism ill suits the philippic, and because no flow of rhetoric can hold up against ten pages of quotations with references. Still, the syllogism sometimes has a bite to it, and the end of a chapter, sharpened into the form of a spear by an artistic typographer, can often hide some sly venom. Ironic or scornful, dogmatic or impassioned, a treatise on procreation was rarely a quiet exposition of facts and conclusions. It was always a question of proving something against someone. N

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And here come the armies: '~istotle does battle with the support of his centurions ... Hippocrates, backed by the ample band of the sons of Asclepius, hurls himself into the attack on the Peripatetics and strives to smash their arms." 3 The centurions of Aristotle- did the master of the Lyceum ever dream of such military glory?-were Athenaeus and Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna and Averroes, those valiant Arabs, Saint Thomas the deep, Albertus Magnus the wide-ranging, Pietro d'Appone, Cajetanus, Zimara, and Durandus, with reinforcement over the past hundred years from Cesalpino, the divine Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, 4 the acerbic Cremonino, and Harvey the methodical. Behind all these great men came the erudite throng of those whom paltry knowledge could not satisfY, those who wanted to grasp nature in the depth of her essence. They come from every land, Caspar Hofmann and Andre Graindorge, Antonio Santacruz and Vittorio Cardelini, Luigi Bonaccioli and Johann Horn, Geronimo Barbato, Giovanno-Vincenzo Ruggieri (called Rogerius), and more. There were more Germans and Italians than French. A few great names failed, however, to respond to the call to arms: the Scholastics of Coimbra and the renowned Fortunio Liceti, usually so faithful to Aristotle, in this instance had crossed over to the enemy. Behind the ever-valiant old Hippocrates the "ample band of the sons of Asclepius" (ampla manus Asclepiadum) pressed forward. In the first rank, the immortal Galen. Then the great names of the Middle Ages: Duns Scotus, Occam, Mendoza, Saint Bonaventure. Behind them, the elite of modern medicine: Fernel and Sylvius, Mercurialis and Sanctorius, Vallesius and Laurentius, Capivaccius, Sisinius, Costaeus, both Riolans, the first two Bartholins, Mundinius and Lussauld, Sinibaldi and Plazzoni, Guy Patin and Claude Quillet, Deusing, Feyens, De Gardin. "But who could count them all?"* Further back bustled the noisy crowd of bacheliers and licencies, who fiercely brandished their theses, light weapons befitting their youth. Hippocrates's troops were outside the main force: the master's authority was by now largely nominal, and Galen, the dangerously brilliant lieutenant, had the real power. Side by side with the "old doctors," proud of their title and of their spotless fidelity to the doctrine of the School, a sacred battalion entirely safe from the assaults of doubt, there were less reliable troops and bedfellows of opportunity, Neoterics with little respect for the Galenic faculties, partisans of the spiritual soul who rejected the notion of vegetative and sensitive souls, even followers *A quotation from CorneiUe's Le Cid, describing a great battle scene.- Tr.

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of modern heresies, mystical iatrochemists, tight-mouthed Gassendists, and honey-tongued Cartesians. But these will be further examined at our leisure. At least the adversaries were fairly much in agreement on the choice of terrain and weapons. "When one knows that the subject here is to be man," writes Caspar Hofmann at the start of his book De generatione hominis, "one understands immediately, without any possibility of doubt, four things. First: at issue is a sublunary substance composed of matter and form. Whence derives a second point: since the forms of things are either auloi, outside of matter, not bound to matter, or enuloi, immersed in matter, it is a question here of a form that is not auto but enulo-of a form, I say, that would be unable to do anything whatsoever without its matter." 5 The "old doctors" and their allies understood this language perfectly. They were quite able to discuss at length the question of whether semen was animated potentia, vel actu, a matter they thought just as significant as all the rest. But since we moderns have a weakness for attributing great significance to the rest- that is, to anatomy and physiology, let us begin here by asking what our protagonists knew of these subjects.

I The Known Facts ofAnatomy and Physiology In the first half of the seventeenth century, what was commonly thought of as known about procreation owed virtually nothing to contemporary scientists.6 All modern discoveries of any importance date from after r66o. Nor did the sixteenth century contribute anything definitive. Fallopius's description of the uterine tubes remained virtually useless, and the works of Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, respectfully corrected by Harvey, were more admired than used. In any case, they did not make a revolutionary contribution of any sort. Harvey himself, before 1651, was merely a very controversial writer on experiments with the circulation of the blood. After the publication of the Exercitationes de generatione animalium, he was purely and simply classified as an Aristotelian. The essential part of what was known, or what was thought to be known, thus still came from Aristotle for animals and from Galen for man. The generally accepted facts were very few. The anatomy of the male organs was known in a rather summary fashion, and there was no question, of course, of knowing the fine points of anatomy, which constituted an insurmountable obstacle to serious study of the subject. On the functioning of the

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organs of generation, there was no possibility of agreement. If the function of the penis posed no problem, that of the testicles was the subject of much debate. It was generally admitted that the "male seed" was "elaborated" there, a vague and meaningless term, which everyone interpreted as he wished. For some, indeed, the testicles were not part of the generative process. As for the male seed, there was agreement only that it was "whitish" and "foamy," and that was all. Its origin, composition, and role were all objects of controversy. No one knew even whether it made its way into the uterus. The general notion was, however, that when the growth of the body had stopped, the nourishment no longer necessary for growth was transferred into the preparation of seed. This would explain why adults alone were capable of producing offspring. The anatomy of the female organs, except for the vagina and the uterus, was still more unclear. Did the ovaries, called the "female testicles," play a role in procreation? A subject of debate. What was the function of the Fallopian tubes, which did not even connect with the ovaries? Another muchdiscussed question. The function of the uterus was to shelter and nourish the embryo, but how did it carry out this function, and did it have any others? So many questions, which received many diverse answers. There was agreement on the different membranes surrounding the embryo, but everything concerning embryonic existence was always questioned anew. It was accepted that the mother's imagination could act upon the fetus, but the limits of this action and how it occurred remained debatable. All this concerned man, the only object of general interest, and the higher animals, at times an object of curiosity. As for the other animals, if one excepts the hen, which was the subject of a few isolated studies, knowledge was restricted more or less to the unverified opinions of Aristotle. In other words, everything was reduced forthwith to a tradition that everyone could interpret as he wished. In brief, nothing was certain, nothing was uncontroversial, except what was blindingly apparent. The reasons for this were examined in Chapter I. Now we must forget everything that we ourselves may know and attempt to enter into the thought processes of our protagonists for a look at the problems they posed themselves and the ways in which they posed them. Only thus are we likely to understand these scientists. Nonetheless, it has been worthwhile first to weigh their clear and certain knowledge, especially since on balance they can be shown to have had little or none.

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II The Problems ofthe Seed

The first and most difficult of all the problems posed by procreation was that of the seed. The word itself-semen-was equivocal, because it referred not only to male and female sperm, indiscriminately called genitura, but also to the initial product of sexual union, that as yet indeterminate mass that would become the living being, of which it was conceived to be precisely the seed, or semen, often also called the conceptus. The authors rarely made a distinction,? and it was the word "seed," semen, that tradition had imposed for designating the personal contribution of each of the parents to procreation. No doubt we see here a faulty analogy with plant reproduction, at a time when it was not known that the seed of plants was already the result of a sexual fertilization. 8 (There will be other occasions to note the influence of plant biology on our subject.) Male semen is not very hard to describe, and our doctors had no problem there, whether they had perhaps examined it themselves or picked up the descriptions provided by Aristotle 9 and Galen. 10 No one had yet thought of examining it under a microscope. Thus, they were content to say that sperm was white (dealbatum), thick (crassum), and above all foamy (spumosum). This last quality was particularly imponant, for it permitted the application of various hypotheses to the origin of the male seed and also the attribution to it of an extremely "lively" [spiriteux] character. And then it is worth recalling in this regard that Aphrodite, the goddess of procreation, was born from sea foam, surely a significant fact.U Still, the origin of the male seed was no clearer for all that, and investigators were reduced to a set of mere hypotheses, founded on the one sure fact: that from this seed there came a living being of the same species as its parents.U The seed had therefore to "represent" the being that produced it. But how? Here was where the controversy began. For Hippocrates,13 as already for Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras,' 4 "sperm is derived from the entire body, solid and soft parts included, and from all liquid material in the body." 15 Through movement, in fact, "the liquid heats up in the body, expands, becomes active and foamy." "The most active and rich part" separated out of it and moved into the testicles, passing through the marrow and the kidneys. 16 "Most of it descends by way of the ears to the spinal cord," 17 which may be a concession to the ideas of Alcmaeon, for whom semen came from

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the brain. Originating in this way from the entire body of the progenitor, the seed could easily "represent" the body. Except for a few scientists, discussed later, this theory had little success in the seventeenth century, for it had against it the double and formidable authority of Aristotle and Galen. For Aristotle, in fact, as for Pythagoras before him, the male semen came from the blood. According to Pythagoras, it was spuma sanguinis ["foam of the blood"] ;18 according to Aristotle it was a spumosum excrementum ["foamy excretion"] that derived from the purest blood and was the result of a slow coction in the sperm ducts. 19 These ducts, moreover, played no role in the coction. The testicles, in particular, contributed nothing to procreation, the best proof being that certain animals had none. 20 They merely served to "calm down the process of spermatic secretion, thus assuring its greater circulation in viviparous animals." Also, animals without testicles "are far more rapid in their coupling." 21 Moreover, Aristotle cites the case of a bull that continued to procreate after having been castrated. Unlike Aristotle, Galen and his followers refused to deny the usefulness of the testicles. The story of the castrated bull that impregnated a cow was considered an old wives' tale (fobuLae anifes sunt). 22 For them, animals without testicles possessed an equivalent organ. To say that testicles served only to slow down the progress of the seed, to keep the sperm ducts from being drawn up into the penis, and to give strength to the heart by pulling on the seminal conduits that supposedly originated there, all this did not even merit discussion. 23 Indeed, the seventeenth-century Aristotelians avoided discussion of the subject or else frankly admitted, like Anton Everaerts, that their master had been mistaken on this matter.24 They thus admitted along with Galen that "the testicles transform into semen the blood prepared in the sperm ducts." 25 It was the testicles that possessed the vis spermatopoietike, as Johann Sperlingen puts it. 26 They were thus able to define semen as "that part of the blood not needed for nutrition, mixed with spirit, bleached, made viscous, thickened, transformed first in the veins and particularly in those that are sinuous, well cooked, and carried at last to its perfection in the testicles." 27 This definition could satisfY everyone except a handful of stubborn Aristotelians or a few faithful devotees of Democritus. If this way of explaining the formation of seed was more satisfYing to the mind and seemed closer to the facts than the Hippocratic dejluxus, it nonetheless raised a serious problem, which Hippocrates had solved without difficulty: how did the seed "represent" the progenitor? There were atomists around to claim that the blood bore in it particles, originating throughout

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the entire body, that were gathered up by the testicles.Z 8 But for the vast majority of scientists, other notions were necessary. If the seed could pass life on, if it could assure the continuation of a species, it was because it was "animated," "mixed with spirit," the bearer, in brief, of an immaterial force. That was its essential virtue: "Seed ... is graced with several qualities, thickness [crassities], viscosity [lentor], whiteness [albedo], an odor of elderberry or of palm oil, fecundity [ubertas], and above all heat and spirit [calor et spiritus]." 29 The heat was an innate heat, calidum innatum, calor nativus, not to be confused with ordinary heat. Rather it was in some way the physical element of life, the origin of movement in the embryo, and at the same time one of the elements in the temperament of the seed. Following their master, the Aristotelians were happy to discourse on the subject 30 and sought to define the nature of this heat as analogous to the heat of the stars. 31 This opinion had against it weighty authorities- Averroes, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas- but it nonetheless enjoyed great success with the sixteenth-century Aristotelians, as one might expect: Pi co della Mirandola defended it vigorously, and Jean Fernel himself adopted it. 32 For Riolan pere, it was thus the sun that "engenders an ox with the seed of the ox, and man with the seed of man." 33 It was the sun that engendered in the air the frogs and fish that had occasionally been seen to fall with the rain. This in turn allowed Avicenna to say that "if all men down to the very last were to perish, the sun could, through its heat, bring one back into existence from the mud." 34 The Galenists were less disposed to concede so many virtues to the sun, but they preserved, along with the term "innate heat," the idea of a vital heat required for the action of the seed's soul. Thus no great controversies surrounded the matter. On the other hand, the spirit, or soul, of the seed provoked an interminable metaphysical discussion. It had to be determined, first of all, at what moment the seed received this soul. This was a relatively easy question, to which the reply was, as with Mundinus Mundinius, that the seed received its soul in the testicles. 35 This was the broadly accepted solution, except among the Neoterics, who, along with Parisanus, wanted the seed to be ensouled in every part of the body from which it derived. 36 But where did this soul come from, and what was its nature? Clearly, it was not a rational soul, because, by common consent, including that of Galen 37 and Aristot!e, 38 understanding came from without and was of divine origin. It had to be, then, a humbler sort of soul, a nutritive soul, as Aristotle called it, 39 or a vegetative soul, as the School was to say. And this vegetative soul raised many difficulties, to which we shall return when considering the ensoulment of the embryo.

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In the meantime, a major difficulty immediately arose: the seed, endowed with a visible body and a proven soul, was a complete animal. It must then live a life of its own and, furnished with a vegetative soul, it must nourish itself. It was impossible to avoid this consequence if one admitted, along with Galen, that "the seed is animate not only in potentiality, but in actuality." 40 One might, if absolutely necessary, suppose that the seed in fact nourished itself,41 but this would be a highly gratuitous assumption. It seemed preferable, in the last analysis, to adopt Aristotle's notion and to say that the seed possessed a soul in potentiality, which awaited conception in order to become actual. 42 But what bothered the Galenists terribly was that within Aristotle's system, it made sense to say that the seed was ensouled in potentiality but not in actuality. Aristotelian thought even required scholars to specifY, along with Fortunio Liceti, that there was a primary actuality, the seed itself, which was the potentiality for a secondary actuality, namely, the being that would come from the seed.43 But none of this made sense in the Galenist system, as Galen himself had seen, or for Mundinius, who still preferred to maintain that the seed nourished itself. After all, for Aristotle the soul of the male seed, insofar as it was the form of the animal to be born from it, was a form without matter, which could not therefore yet pass into actuality, since, as Hofmann said, it was a question of a form that was enulos by definition: in materia immersa. In the Galenist system, on the other hand, the soul of the seed would already be united to at least a part of the matter that it was destined to inform. This meant that there should be no visible reason why it could not pass into actuality, and why a man should not be procreating on his own. 44 It is at this point that we must broach the major issue, the great problem of procreation among viviparous animals that divided the seventeenth-century biologists into two irreconcilable camps: the problem of female seed. For Hippocrates, as for Parmenides, Empedocles, and Democritus, "The woman also produces an ejaculate, provided by the body and originating at times in the internal organs-when these organs become wet-and at other times outside, when the internal organs are more dilated than they should be." 45 This doctrine was based first of all upon an observation: in the sexual act, women as well as men produce a specific liquid. Second, it was based on an analogy: the contribution of the two sexes to procreation should be the same, because children could resemble their mothers as well as their fathers. When the physician Herophilus discovered the ovaries (which he called didymoi) and the canals to the womb around the fourth century A.D., the theory

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of double seed was made more plausible by the symmetry of the male and female sexual organs. Also, Galen, who had insistently opposed Aristotle, as we have seen, on the role of the male testicles, attributed the production of a specific seed to the female didymoi, which he called the female testicles. In this, too, he was opposing Aristotle, who, sharing the opinion of Pythagoras and Zeno, did not believe in the existence of a female seed and thought the mother's only contribution to generation to be her menstrual blood. Whether in a simple statement or an extensive discussion, all seventeenth-century biologists writing on procreation took part in this dispute. The arguments were primarily physiological. Aristotle did not disagree that the female put forth a liquid secretion in coupling. But "this liquid is in no way spermatic; it is a special fluid of this organ among some women." 46 An error, replied the Galenists: this liquid was a true seed, it was "cooked and bubbling with spirits" (excoctum et spiritibus turgens). 47 In that case, why did it flow out instead of remaining in the womb? 48 It did not flow out, or at least not all of it, at conception. And the Aristotelians' contention that women resembled children in their voices, their lack of beards, and the frailness of their bodies-and that since children had no seed, "neither do women" (ergo et mulieres) -was futile. 49 Likewise the argument that women were imperfect males, 50 and that, as such, they could not have seed. To counter all these explanations, which they judged to be without merit, the Galenists had a definitive argument: the female genital system. "In itself, the highly ingenious conformation of the spermatic vessels, the testicles, the deferent vessels, the tubes, and the other related parts, as well as their position and connection, provide enough argument for believing that nature has assigned these parts a very different use than to secrete externally, or to irrigate the uterus with, some sort of aqueous liquid." 51 The parallelism between the male and female genital systems was too evident: "Males have their testicles on the outside because of their excessive heat," 52 but that was the only difference. There was no point in saying that men had breasts that did not produce milk: male breasts had no mammary glands, whereas the female testicles had the same anatomical structure as the male ones. 53 And even if one ultimately admitted, with Galenist anatomists such as Riolan fils and Gaspard Bartholin, that the parallelism of the male and female organs was more apparent than real, 54 it was still the case that the entire female apparatus must serve some function. Mter that, why bother to debate the question? One could only shrug one's shoulders. "What a wretched waste of time it is to seek to deny something so evident!" 55 "The function [of female testicles] is to develop the seed, as reason and experience

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attest. And I am astonished that Aristotle dared maintain the contrary ... ," Bartholin exclaimed. 56 "It is surprising that Aristotle ... should have been unaware that they produce a seed," Riolan pere remarked. 57 ''Aristotle dared, against all reason, to refuse this role ... to women," Franceso Plazzoni fulminated. 58 Mercurialis-Girolamo Mercuriali-got it right: "What is good in Aristotle he owes to Hippocrates." 59 The argument was so powerful that a convinced Aristotelian such as Anton Everaerts had to recognize the existence of a female seed. The female testicles were different from the male ones, but they were indispensable in procreation, for "if they are removed, females remain sterile, as is demonstrated by experiments carried out on animals." 60 It was therefore necessary to suppose that the female seed was responsible for preparing the uterus for generation, or for provoking the menstrual flow that nourished the embryo. For an Aristotelian, the seed could in no way contribute directly to the formation of the embryo. We shall see why in a moment. There was another physiological argument in favor of female seed that the Galenists were fond of, and on which they were glad to expand: that of the pleasure that the woman could take in the act of procreation. It was of course evident that, in the man's case, the spending of seed was accompanied by pleasure. If, then, a woman experienced pleasure as well, it was because she too emitted seed.61 The discussion on this point was very old, and Jean Riolan pere already considered it timeworn: pertrita. He nonetheless got involved in it, quoting, of course, the conclusion that Tiresias had drawn from his dual experience. But he gives physiological reasons: the woman's pleasure is greater, "for the man empties himself, while the woman is filled up, and feels pleasure both through emission and through reception: the womb delights in the semen, as a famished belly delights in nourishment." 62 He adds, however, that "lest the ladies scratch my eyes out and make me suffer the fate of Tiresias, I shall not conclude facetiously on this topic." Led by Riolan, all of the Galenists broached this question, one devoting a paragraph, another a whole chapter to it. Plazzoni, who seems to have been more of a poet than Riolan, places himself under the aegis of Horace: The poet from Venusia [Horace] was right to sing: "He wins entire approval who mixes the useful with the pleasurable." This is why we, too, in order to strew roses on thorny matters of nature and medicine, are pleased to set forth and discuss a question as pleasurable as it is useful, a question that of yore drew the attention of the gods themselves, namely, whether the greater pleasure in lovemaking is the lor of the man or of the woman.63

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Whereupon, like everyone else, he cites the authority of Tiresias, whose mythical character he regrets. But the Aristotelians were not without means. They naturally cited Hippocrates, in the faulty translation of]ean de Gorris, 64 and shored him up with the authority of Fernel.65 Above all, however, they sent their reader to Aristotle, who maintained that women could conceive without pleasure,66 and that in any case the pleasure they felt was produced by the motus titillativus of the spirits in the male semen throwing themselves upon the female parts. 67 Clearly, it was not the question of pleasure that would put an end to the debate on female seed. In any case, it was not very useful for the Galenists to amass proofs of a physiological order or to invoke, like Guy Patin, the "uterine suffocations" that particularly affected young widows and that stemmed precisely from the feminine semen (for "there is a danger in retaining this excretion, however useful it may be in itself, because it rots if kept in, and becomes as pernicious as poison").68 It was just as fruitless to aver that women could have nocturnal emissions like men. 69 The Aristotelians quickly moved the debate onto the terrain most favorable to them, that of logic. They claimed that for every action there were an "agent" and a "patient," form and matter. In procreation, "it is the male that brings the form and the principle of movement; the female brings the body and matter." 70 Now, to assume the existence of a female seed analogous to the male was to propose that generation was the result of the cooperation of two seeds, each of which was active and passive at the same time? 1 This led to a double absurdity. For, on the one hand, the form would be brought to act on its own matter, which was impossible; and then, if the form was in actuality in the seed, as Galen would have it, each sex should procreate separately. This point had already been made regarding the male seed, but it would be even more the case for the female, which possessed organs suited to the reception of the embryo and the menstrual blood destined for its nourishment. It was silly to say that the form contained in the female seed was "utterly idle and practically asleep" before being mixed with the male seed.72 What, indeed, was an "idle and sleeping" form in actuality? Moreover, and this was still more serious, if there were two seeds, both active and passive at the same time, the single embryo would have two efficient principles and three material principles (the male seed, the female seed, and the menstrual blood), "which flies in the face of nature's law." 73 An Aristotelian could not imagine a nature not in conformity with the schema set up by Aristotle. "Who could ever imagine that nature-which always acts according to the perfection and the well-being of things-could behave in

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such wise that a single effect would have two distinct efficient causes, and three matters?" 74 There was no need to insist further, and Cremonini merely said to his listeners: "Observe, I pray you, the absurdity" ("Videte, obsecro, absurditatem")? 5 As everyone knew, Riolan pere said, "Philosophers teach that synthesis differs from genesis in that nature engenders and art puts together: the artist puts together [composes] by creating a being-in-actuality out of several things that exist in actuality, whereas nature engenders through the passage from potentiality to actuality." 76 It was therefore doubly impossible for the embryo to derive from two seeds ensouled in actuality. "Considering the strength of the premises posed," Hofmann wrote, "I can be persuaded of only one thing: that the menstrual blood is the female seed." 77 How awesome the sway of logic! And it was useless to make concessions. The Galenists, impressed after all by the authority of Aristotle and more or less inclined to leave the male a certain supremacy, were quite ready to agree that the female seed was not as perfect as the male. They would admit that it was "more aqueous, less fecund, and less full of spirits than men's," 78 that it was weaker and less warm,7 9 because the woman herself was of less warm and more humid a temperament than man; that her seed served only to "temper" the male seed, "as wine is used with water." 80 No one went further in this direction than Riolan pere, who recognized that the female seed was "a spermatic humor, improperly called seed," "not very dense, diluted," and such that "if a man put forth fluid similar to it, he would be considered sterile." 81 The Galenists were wasting their time. Aristotelian logic cut short all attempts at conciliation. And here was a final, irrefutable argument: women, as was well known, had a cold and humid temperament. They must therefore have an excretion that was cold and humid, which was to say, raw. This excretion existed: it was the menstrual blood. If this excretion did not exist, it would already be absurd to grant women a seed, which was to say a cooked (excocta) excretion contrary to their temperament. But to suppose that they possessed two contrary excretions, one raw (the menstrual blood) and the other cooked (semen), was to imagine that "woman is at one and the same time of hot and cold temperament, which is the height of absurdity [absurdissimum]." 82 And so the two doctrines faced each other with no possibility of reconciliation. The Aristotelians were secure in their coherent system and their imperturbable logic. The Galenists felt that good sense was on their side, but they thrashed about awkwardly in the net of their adversaries' argumentation, in which they had thoughtlessly become entangled, and from which they could

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escape only with ill-supported assertions or inadequate reasoning. The discussions raised by the problem of conception offer us a similar spectacle.

III The Problems of Conception It is easy to imagine, in fact, that the Aristotelians and the Galenists would have radically dissimilar views on the manner in which conception occurs. Indeed, if there was a single Aristotelian doctrine on the matter, there were not one but several Galenist doctrines, or more specifically, there were several ways of conceiving of fertilization for the partisans of the two-seed doctrine. The Aristotelian theory may seem surprising at first glance, but it was perfectly coherent. The male seed, which contributed spirit and heat (that is, the form and the principle of movement), penetrated into the womb, which attracted it "by virtue of its own heat." 83 There, "the material body of the seed is dissolved and changes into spirit, being of liquid and aqueous nature. Nor should one seek to determine whether the seed is externally manifest or if it is some constitutive part of the form, any more than whether rennet is a part of the milk that it causes to curdle; it modifies the milk, without being in any way a part of the clots that it forms." 84 The male seed therefore acted on the menstrual blood that it encountered in the womb the way rennet acted on milk. Its material part disappeared and did not contribute materially- corpora/iter- to the formation of the embryo. "The semen is not a part of the embryo that is produced, any more than the matter of the wood fashioned by a craftsman is part of him; in the finished product there is not the slightest part of the craftsman's art, except the form and ideas realized in it by the movement that he has determined in matter." 85 The contribution of the male seed was therefore entirely spiritual. The seventeenth-century Aristotelians further refined their teacher's doctrine. They decided, along with Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, that the matter of the male seed did not even penetrate the uterus. It remained at the entryway, in uteri principium immissum et jactum. 86 Only the spirit entered, which was natural, because the spirit alone played an active role. Fabrizio had arrived at this conclusion through a careful study of oviparous reproduction. Aristotle had already noticed that this type of reproduction fitted his theory particularly well. Mter all, females could lay unfertilized eggs that were materially complete but that nonetheless remain sterile. Among fish, in particular, the

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female laid eggs, over which the male deposited his seed, or milt; "and those eggs that the milt has touched become fertile, while those it does not reach remain sterile. This proves that, among animals, the male does not contribute to the quantity but only to the quality." 87 The male seed therefore acted non materia/iter ... sed ejjicienter. 88 It did not penetrate into the uterus.89 It acted only through its power (sua focultate), which was to say "by the irradiation of its spiritual substance [spiritua!i substantia irradiante]." 90 In Fabrizio's thought, this "spiritual substance" was quite simply the volatile part of the semen, and the "irradiation" was a material phenomenon, referring to the aura semina/is, the exhalation from the male semen whose nonexistence the abbe Lazzaro Spallanzani was to demonsrrateY 1 Much ambiguity remained, however, if only in the terms: one might wonder what kind of action is performed non materia/iter. This way of conceiving the action of the male seed allowed Aristotle to explain certain extraordinary modes of fertilization naturally. Thus, "it is enough for a partridge to be downwind from a male to become fertilized; often indeed it has sufficed for her to hear the male's song during a time when she was disposed to conceive, or that the male has passed above her in flight and that she has breathed in the odor he emitted." 92 Both the fact and the explanation were to be accepted by seventeenth-century Aristotelians, including Harvey, and even by some Galenists influenced by Arisrotle. 93 The same idea would be used to explain how birds could achieve fertilization through the beak, for in this manner "the male transmits the fecund spirit into the female." 94 The Aristotelian definition of fertilization was obviously rejected by the Galenists on two essential points, the action of the male seed and the nature of the female's contribution. For them, "conception is the reception, retention, mixing, heating, and stimulation of the seed of the male and the seed of the female in the uterus." 95 Because a female semen existed, it, and not the menstrual blood, was what contributed to the initial formation of the embryo. Besides, even though Aristotle claimed that "the menstrual flow is sperm, but sperm that is not pure, since it lacks ... the principle of a soul," 96 it was certain that menstrual blood was impure and not suited to generation. 97 As for the male seed, it was quite certain as well that it moved into the uterus. Since Hippocrates, moreover, it had been known that "if a woman is not to conceive, she normally allows the seed coming from the two individuals to escape; if, on the contrary, she is to conceive, the seed does not escape, but remains in the uterine chambers ... and the mixing of what comes from the

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man and what comes from the woman takes place." 98 Galen brought to this point decisive arguments drawn from his observations on animals, 99 from the admission of women who had noticed a contraction of the vulva when they were going to conceive, from the authority of Plato, who had affirmed that the uterus drew the seed to it, and from the experience of men who had felt this attractive force. 100 It was therefore evident that "since the (male) seed is drawn up and retained in the uterus, and since its mass [corpulentia] cannot be transformed into spirit and disappear from out of the uterus, the mass of this seed is necessarily kept inside the uterus, as the matter for certain parts that constitute the embryo." 101 If the Galenists were in agreement that the embryo resulted from a mixing of the two seeds, the agreement ended when it came to imagining the manner in which the mixing occurred, and in which a living being resulted from it. Aside from Thomas Wharton, for whom the male seed penetrated as far as the female testicles,102 everyone accepted that the two seeds gathered in the uterus, where they found the heat favorable to their transformation. This heat was not merely of a physical nature, like that of fire, but was also a vital heat, analogous to that contained in the two seeds and capable of reinforcing its action. This notion of vital heat is definitely of Aristotelian origin, but it is found also among the double-seed theorists, who had not forgotten that the great Ferne! had attributed a principal role to the uterus, comparing it to a fertile field: "Through an innate force [ingenita vi], granted to no other part of the body, the uterus wakens the potential power that had been latent and dormant in the seed [here, the mixture of the two seeds] and impels it to action." Then, "the potentiality of the seed bursts forth into actuality [erumpit in actum] and is stimulated by the power of the uterus: this very stimulation is conception." 103 Although there were two seeds, there was only one formative virtue, which passed from potentiality to actuality under the action of the womb's power. In this way, it was thought possible to avoid the problem of the ensoulment of the seed and to reconcile Galen with Aristotle. Pure logic might suffer, but good sense won out in the process. 104 This Aristotelian influence is found among many partisans of the doubleseed theory. Thomas Bartholin, who attributed to each of the two seeds a "plastic virtue," considered nonetheless that "the male seed provides the animate form, and the female seed receives it," 105 an odd notion. Mter which, under the influence of its own inner heat and that of the uterus (which here too possessed a "unique virtue"), the seed saw the awakening of the "plastic force," which began its work "in a manner that we do not know suffi-

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ciently well [modo nobis non satis cognito]." 106 This characteristic explanation shows how uncomfortable the Galenists were with a way of conceiving natural phenomena based on Aristotelianism. The vocabulary sometimes survives emptied of its substance. But it was all very well to change words and speak of the "soul of the seed," of "virtues" or "faculties": the problem remained, still the same and still insoluble, of knowing how two of these entities could unite into a single entity, and why, having long been inactive, they suddenly sprang into action. As will presently be seen, certain physicians attempted to frame the question differently in order to find an acceptable answer, freeing themselves, at least to some extent, from the influence of both Galen and of Aristotle. Be that as it may, whether the male seed acted upon the menstrual blood or the two seeds mixed with each other, conception took place. The doctors were interested in describing the signs that indicated the fertility of a union. Most of the indicators go back to Galen or to Hippocrates, and we need not linger over them here. Among the pieces of advice given concerning moments propitious to conception, note merely the attention paid to the conjunction of the stars. This attention was perfectly natural among the Aristotelians, since the vital heat contained in the seed was of the same nature as the substance of the stars, which could therefore favor its action. But the Galenists were no less convinced of a planetary and astral action. Since the surrounding air was altered by the stars, "it is evident that the power of the stars and the air intervenes in the generation and dissolution of living bodies." 107 In this vein, Claude Quillet was able to scan in hexameters the names of the constellations possessing "a virtue suited to the propagation of males." 108 These considerations were part of the most broadly accepted science and should not be confused with the theory of "sympathies," dear to the Paracelsists, but suspect in the eyes of the Galenists as well as the Aristotelians. One last problem arose concerning conception: that of twins. It had been known since Hippocrates that twins were formed when the seminal material is superabundant. This material, coming from a single coupling, apportioned itself among the cavities of the womb. 109 However, in the seventeenth century, few believed any longer in the existence of multiple cavities in the womb.110 Above all, it was difficult to explain how the Aristotelian form could divide itself up in order to inform several embryos, even if Aristotle himself had made it clear that "the sperm has no specific differentiation; if the divided portion has a regular and proportionate relationship to the matter, that is, if there is neither too little to be able to ripen the matter and give it an

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organization, nor too much, so that it will dry out, then several embryos are formed." m It was therefore sometimes accepted, along with Parisanus m and Sisinius,113 that twins were the result of two different couplings, and that they might even be born of different fathers. This belief was, however, contested by some of the orthodox Galenists.U 4 In any case, the result of the conception, the conceptus, was described as a liquid, thick, homogeneous mass, some parts simply being more volatile and ethereal and others heavier and more material. The virtues, the faculties, and the souls could start their work, and embryonic life would begin.

IV Embryonic Lift The initial stages in the embryo's formation offered little matter for discussion. It was generally agreed that the primordial mass was rapidly covered with a sort of film, which would turn into the fetal envelopes. Then organization began, and along with it, controversies. For almost all of the scientists, the organization of the embryo meant the formation of organs starting from an undifferentiated mass; that is, what everyone followed Harvey in calling epigenesis.* With a few exceptions, to be discussed later, 115 no one thought that the organs were "preformed" in the seed. 116 They really "formed themselves," one after another, and Aristotle's victory on this point was complete. 117 Moreover, epigenesis offered no serious difficulty if one accepted the notion that an inner force, whatever it was called, ensured its perfect order. This primary formation of the organs was carried out first from the seed, with its substance alone, and then using the menstrual blood, generally considered the embryo's nourishment. There was debate about which organs were made directly from the seed and which from the blood. But this was just one aspect of a more general discussion bearing on the order in which the principal organs were formed. As for those who wanted all the organs to have been formed immediately from the seed, they had their own reasons for this, of which more later. On the order of the organs' formation, as on other questions, the discussion went back to antiquity, and latter-day adversaries had no shortage of authorities to cite. For Aristotle, the first organ to be formed was the heart. 118 *As used by Aristotle and Harvey, the term epigenesis signifies the formation of new individuals from undifferentiated material.- Ed.

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This assertion rested on "the evident observation that states that this is the way things happen." 119 But Galen, who had begun by more or less following Aristotle, 120 had subsequently changed his opinion. It was the blood vessels that were formed first, born directly from the seed itself. Then came the liver, "which is formed very rapidly from the blood, for its composition is very close to that of the blood. In fact, if one cuts the vein of an animal and allows the blood to flow from it into moderately warm water, this blood, in coagulating, will become similar to the substance of the liver." 121 Mter the liver, the heart was formed, at a moment difficult to specifY, and then the brain, last formed because it was of no use to the embryonic life. 122 Aristotle's opinion was based on an observation that was easy to make by, for example, following the development of the chick in the egg, as was done by Fabrizio d'Acquapendente and Harvey, not to mention Descartes. But this view also rested on a line of reasoning. One could, Aristotle said, assure oneself of its truth "by reflection." 123 The heart was a privileged organ. It was the "principle or source of the blood," 124 and it was the "first to have feeling." 125 It was "the principle of sensation, movement, heat, and the emotions." 126 We must, then, "assume that the heart is the principle of life for the animal and its whole organism, as soon as the animal needs to nourish itself." 127 Thus Aristotle had working for him not only the facts, but also logic. On his side, Galen had not only based his argument on a bad experiment; if he had abandoned his first opinion, it was out of concern for logic. If, following the philosophers and the physicians, it was true that man acquired the three souls he possessed-that is, the nutritive, or vegetative; the sensitive, or animal; and the rational, or human souls-successively in the course of his embryonic existence, he must successively acquire the corresponding organs: the liver, seat of the vegetative life; the heart, seat of the animal life; and finally the brain. This line of reasoning was further bolstered by the following observation: the liver was closer to the uterus than was the heart, which in turn was less distant from the uterus than was the brain. 128 Whether owing to the weaknesses of Galen's proofs or the strength of Aristotle's reputation, the liver found few defenders, 129 and even among the most convinced Galenists, many remained undecided, like Sperlingen/ 30 or adopted the Aristotelian point of view, like Sisinius. 131 Perhaps they felt less strongly the need for logic that had swayed Galen. Besides, for some, the problem did not exist, and one simply had to accept, with Hippocrates, and against Aristotle and Harvey, that the various parts of the organism were formed at the same time. 132 As for knowing at what point the organs were

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formed, they generally gave up on the matter. Riolan pere says that on this question there are no general rules. 133 Costeo devoted a most scholarly book to the subject, but ended up with an admission of frustration. 134 Better, then, to let the Pythagoreans meditate on the harmony of numbers and the astrologers specifY, month by month, the action of the planets on the fetal existence (unfortunately, there were only seven planetary bodies, including the sun and the moon, for nine months of pregnancy, which obliged Saturn and Jupiter to return), 135 and the Hippocratic scheme, according to which the male embryo was formed in thirty days and the female in forty, could for the most part be preserved, leaving aside doubts about the preciseness of these numbers and consideration of other opinions on the subject, in particular those of Aristotle, Galen, and Avicenna. Another question debated was the nourishment of the embryo. It was generally admitted that at the outset, the seed produced the blood vessels that formed the umbilical cord on its own, attaching the embryo to the uterus the way the root of a plant plunges into the earth. Afterwards, it was the mother who nourished the embryo. The nourishment was blood," 6 more precisely the menstrual blood,w which needed only to solidifY in order to be transformed into flesh, 138 and whose usefulness was therefore ''clearer than the noonday light Liuce meridiana clarius] ." 139 This opinion, the most widely received, ran into some naysayers. Anton Deusing, in Groningen, taught that the menstrual blood played no role at all in the nourishment of the fetus; nor did it change into milk after parturition, as Aristotle had believed. The milk itself was the fetus's food. Anton Everaerts, decidedly unfaithful to Aristotle, followed his erstwhile teacher Deusing on this point. 140 In the same fashion, it was asked, even in the medical schools, whether the fetus might not receive its nourishment through the mouth, and whether it might not even breathe. 141 It was accepted moreover that the fetus produced excretions that were expelled along with the placenta. 142 This idea was natural enough, since the circulation of the blood was generally unknown and the return of the blood through the umbilical cord was not considered a possibility. However, the most serious problem remained that of the ensoulment of the fetus- that is, the true cause of embryonic development. For if everyone recognized the indispensable role of heat, everyone, or almost everyone, 143 believed that this was an instance of a subalternate agency, of a means that could not enjoy the status of a true cause. Aristotle clarified things admirably here. 144 Heat, coldness, dryness, and wetness, purely physical qualities, defined a raw material that had its importance, but no more so than the quality

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of the wood in the making of a stooU 45 Animal or "psychic" heat- thermotes psukhiki-a principle of movement contained in the male seed and analogous to the substance of the stars, communicated the vital movement to the menstrual blood. But it would seem clear that this vital heat, spread throughout the initial embryonic mass ("all of it is filled with soul") ,1 46 could produce only an amorphous living matter. 147 The true cause acting in the development of the embryo was the cause "in intention of something [ou heneka]" -that is, looking towards the perfect being that was to come from this development, or, more precisely, its "form." 148 Now, this very "form" would be the soul of the completed being. This was where the difficulties began, for everyone, or almost everyone, was ready in the early seventeenth century to accept Aristotle's dictum, "In the study of nature, one ought to speak of soul rather than of matter." 149 But the nature of this soul had necessarily to be established. On this point, Aristotle seems to have been following two contradictory tendencies. In De partibus animalium, he allows that the soul is composed of several parts. "There is one part, the one in fact that is found in plants as well, that is the principle of growth; another, the sensitive part, is the principle of alteration [i.e., of sensation]; still another is the principle of locomotion." This was not counting the "noetic part," which belonged only to man. 150 This division of the faculties of the soul, believed to be of Platonic origin,' 5 1 was not supposed to affect the unity of the soul itself, which was the single and total "form" of the living being, the single principle of its development and its activity. Aristotle's thought was clear, but its expression was sometimes ambiguous. In his treatise De generatione animalium, the philosopher speaks most often of the soul in general, while making clear that at the outset the embryo has a nutritive soul and that it subsequently acquires the sensitive or animal souU 52 As for the rational soul, or understanding, it was a "divine parcel," 153 and it was difficult to know when and how it entered into man. 154 It should not concern us here, because "the activity of the body has nothing to do with that of understanding," 155 but quite obviously its particular nature and its external origin called into question the unity of the human soul, which must at the same time be a viral principle immersed in matter, like the soul of the animal, and an intelligent principle, external to matter and participating in the divine. 156 One may guess what difficulties this caused the Christian doctors, who, as physicians, concerned themselves virtually exclusively with man, and who, as good Christians, were obliged to insist upon the divine origin of the soul, on its unity, its individuality, and its immortality. 157 Most often, moreover, the problem was approached through the ideas of

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Galen, who remained very prudent on the nature of the soul acting within the embryo. Was this soul that formed the body the soul that governed it when it had been formed? Galen seems to have come quite close to believing so, even though, in the last analysis, the treatise "De foetuum formatione" ends with an admission of ignorance: "There is a particular cause of the generation of the fetus, which we all call nature, while ignorant of its substance." 158 What Galen called "nature" in this instance was, as we know from other sources, a "vegetative soul" that must not be confused with the animal soul. 159 It was a vegetative principle (plantaticium) that formed the first organs of the embryo.160 In stressing this distinction between the two souls, Galen seems to have been less concerned with the metaphysical unity of the living being than with particular physiological phenomena, whose totality no doubt constituted the life of the animal, but that had each to be studied separately, in its relations to the relevant organ. This division oflife into a collection of particular activities appears clearly in the analysis of the "faculties." In each part of the living body there was "a faculty suited to the action exerted by this part," 161 a "sanguifical" faculty in the veins that produced blood, a "coctical" faculty in the stomach, "sphygmical" in the heart, and so on. 162 A "work" (ergon), for example, the blood, was the result of an "action" (energeia), here, the action of the veins made possible by a "faculty" (dunamis), in this instance, the sanguifical facu!ty. 163 Thus, each organ accomplished on its own the action for which it had been made, thanks to the faculty with which it was endowed. Here we get a clear expression of the particular nature of Galen's teleology, quite different from Aristotle's. The Aristotelian form, which was the final cause of the development of the embryo, was "immersed in matter," and above all, it was the unique and total final cause of all aspects of this development. In this sense, life had no cause or end other than itself. On the contrary, the Galenic analysis introduced a kind of dissociation of vital phenomena and led to the assignment to each organ of something like a knowledge of what it had to do: "There must exist in all the parts an inclination and, as it were, a seeking-out and a desire for the particular quality; and conversely an aversion and something like a hatred for the contrary quality." 164 But this sort of knowledge was not simply an expression of the power of life. It was a quality given by "nature." And this time it was a question of universal nature: It is neither by chance nor without calculation that nature created the uterus large enough to surround and retain the fetus: it is so that the fetus may attain its appropriate size inside it. When therefore the fetus is at its term, the uterus, which for its benefit had put into action its retentive faculty, leaves this faculty alone and brings it

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back to rest. In place of which, it employs another faculty, idle up to this point, the propulsive faculty.... And here one must take note of the art of nature, which has not only placed in each ofthe organs the faculties for useful actions, but has also provided for the suitability of rest and movement. 16 5 Thus neither the "faculty" of the organ nor the coordination of all the "actions" resulting from these "faculties" at work in a living being was explained by life itself, since life was the result and not the cause. It was "nature" that distributed and coordinated the "faculties," it was "nature that was rational," 166 it was in "nature" that all intelligence resided. Before so perfect an organization, "what small person will be mad enough, and enough an enemy of the works of nature, not to admit the art of the workman? ... Who will not immediately perceive that an intelligence endowed with admirable power soars above the earth and penetrates into each of its parts?" 167 The rationality of life, then, was not in life itself; it was external to living beings. It resided in the organizing "intelligence" that foresaw all, presided over all, and whose "faculties" were the agents of execution. There no longer existed a "final cause," properly speaking, immersed in the matter where it acted. There were "workers" that carried out on matter the plan of the ordering intelligence that "soars above the earth." What most of the scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were to call, improperly, "final causes," would be, in Galen's fashion, the visible marks in beings of a general organization of things by the superior intelligence. And no doubt this intelligence was, for Galen, simply "nature's" intelligence. On our Earth, it functioned in part through the mediation of the stars. 168 It was, however, very easy for the sixteenthand seventeenth-century doctors to see in it God's intelligence. Galen himself seems to invite his reader to do so when he compares the last book of his treatise De usu partium, the one in which he celebrates nature's intelligence, to the segment of lyric poems "that is sung standing before the altars to celebrate the gods." 169 Whatever may have been the true intentions of Galen, it is in any case certain that most of the doctors interpreted his thought in a Christian sense. And insofar as the Galenic "faculties" were assimilated to the "occult qualities," which was no doubt a misinterpretation,170 they contributed to the wreck of Aristotelian rationalism: the rationality of the world lay henceforth in God, and thus outside the world and inaccessible to man. We have had to pay special attention to Galen's thought because it is clearly to his rather than Aristotle's that seventeenth-century biologists, Aristotelians as well as Galenists, owed their way of conceiving the animation ofliving mat-

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ter, especially the embryo's. An Aristotelian like Fabrizio d'Acquapendente gives a description of the development of a chicken embryo in which Galen's influence appears at every moment: Under the effect of the generative faculty, the parts of the chicken, which at first did not exist, are produced, and the egg changes thus into the chicken's body.... This procreation is accomplished through a commutation and a conformation of substance. It is thus a transformative [immutatrix] faculty and a formative [jormatrix] faculty that are the causes of these actions [fimctiones] . ... The first faculty, called the formative, is purely natural and acts without awareness, through the action of heat, coldness, wetness, and dryness .... But the second faculty, called formative, which differentiates the homogeneous parts and graces them with a suitable shape, with a proper size, and with an appropriate placement and congruent number, is far more noble than the first, and endowed with very great wisdom. Indeed, Aristotle wondered whether it was not of divine origin, and of an entirely different nature than that of heat, coldness, humidity, and wetness. And in fact, once the eye has been engendered by the alterative faculty, it must be placed in the head, and not in the heel, given a spherical shape and not cubic or other, the number established, which is not one, nor three, nor more; one has to realize that these operations are not performed naturally [natura/iter] but rather with choice, awareness, and intelligence [electione, cognitione atque intellectu]. 171

One certainly finds here the Aristotelian distinction between uniform, or homogeneous, parts-corresponding more or less to what we call tissuesand differentiated parts, namely, the organs, formed from the tissues. But this distinction is also found in Galen. Moreover, it is Galen who describes at length the action of the alterative faculty, which acts through heat, coldness, dryness, and wetness, in order to create the homogeneous parts/ 72 and he as well who adds that "for the putting together of the parts, for the coaptation of those implanted (in one another), for the insertion of the ones into the others, for the configuration of the internal cavities," and so forth, there is another faculty "which we name configurative" and of which "we say that it is ingenious, or rather that it displays an excellent, superior art, creating everything towards an end." 173 It is Galen once more who had written that the function of the eyes "requires an elevated placement," for "from a height ... we perceive a more extended landscape than on a plain," 174 and "that it is preferable that there be two eyes rather than one." 175 Fabrizio dutifully culled all these notations and attributes the functions noted to the formative faculty.I76

It is not Aristotle, then, but Galen who must be held responsible for everything the seventeenth-century doctors were to say about the "forma-

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tive faculty," its wisdom, its foresight, its role in the survival of species, even its occasional mistakes. (For is any being so rational as never to be wrong?) Reigning unrivaled over embryonic development, the formative faculty quite easily eclipsed Aristotelian form, too difficult an entity for those not of a metaphysical bent to grasp. The formative virtue had a more human faceall too human. It was not immune to all debate. Was it found only in the seed or was it also in the progenitors, as Giovanni-Benedetto Sinibaldi would have it? 177 Or indeed, did it come from the progenitors, as Louis Dugardin thought? 178 Or just from the father, as Fortunio Liceti believed, suddenly remembering that he was an Aristotelian? 179 These interpretations raised many difficulties, according to Mundinius. 180 And then, how did the formative virtue act? Was it conveyed by spirits as Ferne! had thought, a belief picked up by Dugardin/ 81 to the great scandal of Thomas Feyens, 182 who asked whether "the faculties travel about on the backs of spirits like a man in a carriage or a sack on the shoulders of a street-porter." Did it act alone and spontaneously, or was it awakened by the heat of the uterus, 183 or by its own power? 184 Did it act through the mediation of spirits? 185 Was it simply a property of spirits? 186 It is impossible to go into detail here about the interminable discussions and impassioned controversies occasioned by the nature and action of the formative faculty. It is rather easy to ridicule the notion of a formative faculty, especially when certain authors assign it intentions, 187 reflection, even moral qualities. 188 Nonetheless, it was not all that absurd. To an insoluble problem it brought a solution that at least did not prejudge reality. It could bend to the requirements of the facts; it could even abstain from leading the researcher away from the study of these facts. It had only one fault, but a grave one: that of satisfYing the mind at too low a cost, and even, insofar as the "faculty" blended with the "occult quality," of convincing the scientist that the cause of phenomena was inaccessible to all research. But what was responsible for this sterility, if not the scientist's own mind, which was too easily satisfied with a word or too easily tempted by a mysterious philosophy? In any case, the good and bad points of the "faculties" in general and of the formative faculty in particular will appear in clearer light when we look at the other solutions that the seventeenth century was to bring to the problem of embryonic development. In any case, the relevant question was that of spontaneous generation. For if it was quite easy to imagine that a living being brought forth from another living being of the same species was animated by a formative virtue, it was much more difficult to understand how a being generated from dead or inert

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matter was animated. The fact [of spontaneous generation] itself was not seriously questioned by anyone. It had in its favor the unanimous authority of the ancients, as well as innumerable proofs drawn from everyday experience. It is not surprising, then, to find that neither Father Marin Mersenne, Harvey, nor Descartes questioned it. 189 It was not, then, a belief held only by backward-looking minds and, if Jean-Baptiste van Helmont's mice might seem a bit much/ 90 at least fleas, lice, and other "worms" had full license to be born from rot, mud, dead wood, and so on. Now, if one had to give in to the evidence of facts and accept the phenomenon, it was still not easy to explain, even leaving aside the theological difficulties it occasioned,l9l and the differing opinions possibly held on the final cause of this anarchical mode of generation. 192 Aristotle's explanation itself lacked clarity. Indeed, according to him, this type of generation was always accompanied by putrefaction and humidity. The putrefaction was merely a sign: what rotted was merely the residue of usable matter that had become the object of a coction analogous ro that which menstrual blood underwent and that seemed here indeed to be the work of the "heat of the weather in the ambient milieu [he tes iirm ev to periekhonti thermotes]." 193 As for animation, it derived from water, seawater for marine animals, rainwater for terrestrials, for "in water there is pneuma, and in all pneuma there is psychic heat [thermotes psukhike )" 194 The commentators agreed in seeing in this "psychic heat," which was that of life, an emanation from the substance of the stars, and particularly the sun, because these elements were known to be of the same nature. 195 This had already been Galen's interpretation, 196 and he scarcely added to the explanation. But if it was understood how, in these conditions, life could come into existence, it was not well understood precisely how an animal came into existence. Indeed, an essential element was lacking: form, which had to give living matter the organization required and ordained for a species, and that had to do what was required for amorphous matter to become an animal. Could it be said that matter itself determined the species produced? Or even that matter could spontaneously acquire movement? Nothing was clear in all this, 197 and it is understandable that the seventeenth-century doctors had no better luck than their teachers with a subject to which Galen had brought nothing new. They generally accepted, therefore, that spontaneous generation worked "through the vivific virtue of the heavenly heat," 198 without there being a soul in the putrefied matter. It was enough to make clear, with Fortunio Liceti, that not just any matter could give birth to just any animal.l 99 Liceti imagined he had regularized the phenomenon by defining it as follows:

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It must therefore be established that the spontaneous generation of living beings is, generally speaking, the primary collaboration of the nutritive or sensitive soul with the native heat necessary for life, in matter previously devoid of life, under the influence of a nonvivif)ring soul, or one born originally in that matter as in a vessel, or even residual in it, to a lesser degree, as a consequence of the necessities of the matter; a soul that communicates with the matter in question when the latter has been prepared through coction effected by the ambient heat, for the formation of a new being and the perpetuation of its species. 200

So proud was Liceti of this formula that he repeated it verbatim in his conclusion; but I shall not take upon myself to comment on it, although it does reveal a certain will to reduce a difficult fact to the dimensions of a commonplace phenomenon. Thus, spontaneous generation, far from being the facile explanation of a prescientific age, constituted yet another difficulty that required resolution by virtue of its having been imposed by experience. A biologist specializing in "souls" found himself confronted with brute matter that took on life, and he felt obliged to call upon notions that, as the century progressed, became more suspect every day. Not everyone, however, harbored such scruples, and rather unorthodox solutions began to put in their appearance: a direct action of the universal world-spirit, acting on its own because no other spirit was disposed to do so; an encounter of nature, which was never idle, with parr of the "moist interior," "filled with a seminal virtue and a vital spirit" ;201 or finally, from a chemist, an action of salt, which "stands in for the male seed," along with the action of moisture that, corrected bv the salt, stood in for the female seed. 202 These explanations inspire nostalgia for Aristotle's rigor. And indeed, someone did step forward to say that they were utterly incomprehensible.203 If spontaneous generation was difficult to explain, regular generation was no less so. The survival of species, determination of sex, and resemblance of offspring to parents all raised serious problems requiring our attention. J

v The Problems ofHeredity In general, seventeenth-century biologists studied problems involving heredity-which they called the resemblance (similitudo) of children to their parents-according to the schema set up by Galen, who had distinguished three types of resemblance: by species, by sex, and by structure. Here I shall simply follow the plan adopted by our authors.

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The permanence of animal species was not seriously questioned in the seventeenth century. It even possessed a metaphysical foundation, clearly set forth by Aristotle and repeated by Galen. Guillaume Chrestian, a sixteenthcentury physician, explains it thus: Aristotle ... in his treatise on the soul and its potencies, speaking of the generation of animals, writes that all things, each in its fashion, desire not only being but also eternity, as far as possible; and indeed, that the end and intention of the generative virtue is an imitation of divine things .... For, given that things subject to corruption cannot endure eternally, nor themselves remain in great number, they acquire a kind of eternity through succession, procreating others of their species like themselves. And this our Galen attests to in chapter 13 of his book on the function and utility of the parts, saying that nature would above all have desired her works to be eternal, if that had been possible: but because this was made impossible by the corruptible nature of the elements and of the ethereal spirit, she made and fabricated for herself a surrogate or substitute provision for immortality.204

This text dates from 1559, bur one could find its like among the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century? 05 The continuation of species could not, at that time, be fully justified except by metaphysical or religious reasons, and it may be noted in passing that religious reasons are not invoked by our authors. The purely biological reasons reduce themselves to the facts of observation, and the manner in which the problem of hybrids was dealt with proves that the notion of species was not yet clearly enough defined to permit the question of the continuation or evolution of animal species to be raised in precise terms. Besides, the doctors were only marginally interested in zoological matters. Nonetheless, a man produced a man, and a horse, a horse. Why? According to Aristotle, this was an effect of the soul, the "form" of the embryo, which had issued from the soul of the parents and could not organize another kind of animal than the one of which it was itself the form. This immediately led, however, to the problem of hybrids. If two different species were crossedand the seventeenth-century biologists had no difficulty imagining the crossing of distant species 206 -the product would necessarily, for Aristotle, be of the father's species. This was what Fortunio Liceti believed, faithful to Aristotle here too, despite the double seed. For him, in fact, a cow impregnated by a man could give birth to a complete man: it was undeniable "that a true man can be engendered in the womb of a cow, from the matter of her seed, through the power of the seed of the man and the heat that he transfers into it. The power of the cow's soul cooperates indeed with the power of the soul in the man's seed; but it is a second agent, moved to act by the movement

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that the former imparts to it .... The heat of the cow's body can maintain the heat of the man's seed, and serve as an instrument for the formative virtue in the man's seed in organizing the parts of the human body." 207 Nothing surprising here, since cows nourished [human] infants with their milk. In any case, the fact was attested. 208 Conversely, a woman bred with an animal would produce an animal of the same species. Plutarch and Pliny are filled with examples of this, and if Liceti backed off before Pliny's elephant,209 RioIan pere does not seem to have been startled by it. 210 For Galen, however, it was the mother that assured reproduction of the species-type, although not to the degree that the father's influence would be lacking in the case of hybrids. Galen had spoken of crossings between rams and nanny goats that produced nannies with soft coats of hair, and between billy goats and ewes that produced ewes with coarse hair. These examples, which had not struck much of a chord with Riolan pere, were taken up more seriously by the seventeenth-century Galenists. 211 Moreover, it was specifically by reason of her formative virtue that the female played this role, and not, as maintained by a few Galenists too much under the sway of Aristotle, by her material contribution. For "if it is true that the matter and the nutriments can produce remarkable transformations, these transformations never change the species. One does not see a peach tree, when transported to Egypt, change form under the influence of the sun and the nutrients, nor sheep placed in a new pasture come out resembling the goats that had been grazing there before." 212 The continuity of the species was thus in any event not assured by matter, which was incapable of doing so, but by an immaterial cause, a form or formative faculty. Finally, the metaphysical necessity of this continuity was confirmed by the sterility of hybrids, a proof of nature's wisdom and foresight. For if the jack-mule procreated with a mare or a she-ass, it would produce intermediate species, participating more or less in two natures, "that is, they would find themselves more or less asses or horses: in this way, dividing, augmenting, and diminishing the forms; which would amount to transmitting more or less substance, counter to the philosophers' axiom. This is why mules do not reproduce," Renaudot says. 213 Having established the final cause of this sterility,2 14 one might discuss the efficient causes: absence of "internal form" in the genital organs of the male and female mule, or incompatibility of temperament between the ass and the horse, "the former being very melancholy, which is to say cold and dry, which it shows through its deliberateness," whereas the horse was "very hot and dry, which it displays through its impul-

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siveness." There was, then, just "enough natural heat and radical moisture to make one animal," but "not to the degree required for making another." 215 After "resemblance" by species came the issue of "resemblance" by sex. For determination of sex was not conceived of as a result of chance, but as a resemblance to one of the parents. It was, in a sense, a victory of one over the other. The Aristotelian theory was very simple on this point and flowed directly from Aristotle's definition of the two sexes. To his mind, the male was in fact the perfect animal, and this perfection lay in the male's ability to produce, thanks to his heat, a "cooked" and animated [ensouled] seed. The female, who could produce only raw matter, the menstrual blood, was an imperfect animal, and might even be considered a monster, although a monster produced according to nature's rules. 216 This being the case, a perfect generation, in the course of which the spirit of the male seed had completely animated the female matter, necessarily produced a male. If, on the contrary, "the principle [arkhe] does not win out, and cannot perform the coction for lack of heat, and does not bring the matter to its proper form but is defeated by it," 217 then the generation remained imperfect and produced a female. This was proven by the facts: for parents who were too young or too old, whose seed was less warm, produced girls; and the south wind, which made bodies more liquid, diminishing the density of the male seed and increasing the quantity of the menstrual material, also caused the production of girls. 218 On this issue, however, to judge by the lengthy discussion he felt it necessary to devote to it, 219 Aristotle encountered definite and no doubt very widespread convictions, which as relayed by Galen, or borrowed directly from their authors, were still clashing with Aristotelian theory in the seventeenth century. The most widely accepted system related sex to the heat of the mixture of seeds, which approached Aristotle's view but was derived mainly from Empedocles and Galen. If the heat of the male seed won out over the cold of the female seed, a male would result. Otherwise, the offspring would be female.Z 20 To the notion of heat might be added that of consistency. The male semen had to be thick enough not to become too diluted by the female semen. Otherwise, a female would be born. 221 But above all, the heat of the seed was made to depend on its place of origin, and that of the embryo on its place in the womb. It was commonly accepted that the right side of the body was warmer than the left. Males would therefore be engendered by the right testicle and lodged in the right side of the uterus. This theory allowed for four combinations, according to Avicenna: for the infant coming from the right testicle and lodged on the left in the womb would be a woman-

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ish man; whereas the one that, coming from the left testicle, was lodged on the right side of the womb, would be a mannish woman; the perfect woman would have come from the left testicle and have been lodged on the left in the womb. 222 This was an old idea, coming from Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and it was very widely accepted. One could, however, bring in the constellations and the planets: Aries, Leo, Mars on one side, Venus on the other, with easily grasped influences.Z 25 Finally, there remained the last of the resemblances, that of "effigy and of the other accidents of the body and of the mind's habits," which were "more difficult to resolve, there being a virtue hidden in one and the other seed that is maintained, says Aristotle, through the fourth generation," says a Galenist at Renaudot's Academy. 224 In fact, Aristotle had elaborated a rather subtle theory of resemblance, allowing an understanding of why a child might resemble his grandfather rather than his father. But the delicate point, for him, was explaining the resemblance of children to their mothers, since the mother's contribution to the process of generation was only materiaJ.2 25 The maternal material contained in potentiality the spirit and the form that it was going to receive. But if, jointly with the male, it contained in potentiality the form of the species, it could nonetheless not contain in potentiality the personal form of the male-that which made him, not only a man, but specifically Socrates or Coriscus. It was therefore necessary to accept that the matter contained in potentiality the personal traits of the mother. In this fashion, Socrates might win out as a male by siring a son, but be beaten as Socrates, as a result of which the son would resemble its mother. Aristotle justified this by explaining that whatever acted on something else experienced the inverse of its own action: what heated was cooled by what it was heating. This reaction, moreover, could be stronger than the initial action, which was what had happened when the child resembled its mother.226 Besides, when the spirit derived from the father was insufficient, it could be replaced by a spirit derived from the grandfather, or from the great-grandfather. 227 Hence the child might resemble a more distant forebear. Despite the great subtlety of this explanation, it was evident to some that the metaphysical natures of the active and the passive participants differed in degree, which made a material influence on the form problematic; moreover, a difficulty remained in understanding how matter could contain in potentiality and realize in actuality a form other than that which was supposed to inform it. Be that as it may, outside the circle of strict Aristotelians/ 28 this doctrine seems not to have had much success. Specifically retained from it

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was the fact that resemblance could skip a generation, with citation of the story told by Plutarch of the white woman married to an Ethiopian who had a white daughter by him, who in turn married a white man and had a black child. 229 The resemblance of a son to his mother could be explained, according to Hippocrates, by the assumption that certain women had a warmer seed than that of the male, 230 or, better still, by reference to the essential role of the mother, who furnished a seed, nourished the embryo with menstrual blood, and continued to nourish the infant after its birth. She could thus transform it "entirely in its nature," for "the spirit of the developing infant," as well as its body, was "a blank slate susceptible to any impression." 231 This met with the familiar objection that it attributed too much influence to nourishment. 232 Formative virtue, which was quite capable of seeing to it that children resembled their parents, had, then, to be invoked yet again. 233 In connection with resemblances, an issue of particular interest to modern biologists arose: what has been called the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The doctors we are studying were familiar with the phenomenon, already noted by Aristotle. But Aristotle had concluded that "on this point there is no certain rule." 234 Fortunio Liceti thought that if two parents displayed the same mutilation, the child would be mutilated. If one of the parents was not mutilated, neither would the child be, for the seed of the intact parent would furnish the necessary part. 235 This was a highly Hippocratic conception, to which we shall return, 236 and one that seems to have been generally accepted to the extent that the question was raised. Nevertheless, in the case of an extremely remarkable particularity, it was thought possible for it to be transmitted thanks to the effect of the maternal imagination. 237 This might be the case with skin color, which the doctors considered an effect of the sun perpetuated by the imagination of the mother, who was capable of conceiving only a black child if she was of a black people, or if she lived among whites and was struck by this exceptional color. 238 This solution to the problem of race was no doubt judged preferable to attributing blackness to the effect of heat and humidity. "For," it was added, "if the primary qualities could take on colors, cold would no doubt be white, as one sees in water, ice, snow, white hair, and animals that live in the polar regions, at least in the Arctic: which are all white, even though of the same species as ours that are other colors, like our bears and hares." 239 But no one seemed to like this need to assign colors to the qualities. Thus, the maternal imagination was made responsible for birthmarks. In this connection, however, one of the interlocutors at the Renaudot meetings recalled that certain marks were "associated with certain

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families." One had therefore to believe that they came "from the formative virtue in the seed, which, containing the idea of all the parts, gives expression to them in the infant in the quick." 240 Thus the formative faculty was the vehicle of the hereditary legacy, even if this idea was not very clearly expressed. We must also relate the question of teratisms to the problem of heredity, for the teratism was precisely a creature that did not resemble its parents. Now, in a universe ruled by final causes, the teratism raises a thorny problem. The finaL cause of the teratism is, as for every being engendered, the propagation of the species. Here, however, the final cause ran up against obstacles in need of analysis. The remote formal cause-that is, the soul of the specieswas certainly not responsible for the teratism. On the other hand, the proximate formaL cause, the soul that informs the body of the teratism, might be defective. There we have the first cause of teratisms. The material cause might play a role as well, for certain teratisms would be the result of an excess or deficiency of matter. As for the efficient cause, distinctions were in order. Fortunio Liceti noted: The proximate efficient cause is subdivided into first, assistant, second, and instrumental. Now, there are two remote efficient causes of monsters; the first is our God, who collaborates powerfully with all the natural agents in the production of their effects and their functions, and upon Whom, because of this, depend the being and the life of all things, in a more or less evident way, as Aristotle teaches, according to the capacity of each thing. And the second remote efficient cause of monsters is the heavenly body, which, through its perpetual movement, and by means of its light, governs and rules over everything that occurs down here, as Aristotle recognized and taught, saying somewhere that it was necessary for this lower world to be contiguous [i.e., contingent] and to be subject to the heavenly influences, in order that all of its strength and virtue might be guided and directed by them. The instrumental proximate efficient cause at work in the production of monsters is the natural heat of the mother's abdomen, and the second efficient cause is the mother's womb. The first efficient cause of monsters is subdivided again into a principle that works actively, and that is the portion of the seed that is most full of spirits, and that gives, according to Aristotle, fecundity to the seed; and into a principle through which the first efficient [cause] works, namely, the soul communicated by the father and mother to the seed, inasmuch as it is the faculty that sets up the organs of the animal's body, not absolutely, in truth, but to the point where it becomes unable to achieve to perfection the end that it proposes itself.2 41

The conclusion flowing from this analysis was that teratisms arose from the fact that "the virtue that forms, puts together, and organizes the parts of the animal's body ... is at a loss and prevented from performing its func-

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tions properly." 242 To study the impediments, a classification of teratisms was needed. Fortunio Liceti's classification distinguished ten types, divided into two classes: uniform teratisms (mutilates; excessive; of doubtful nature or sex; malformed; formless; and enormous) and multiform teratisms (of the same species; of several species of the same genus: child-dogs; of several close genera: the child-duck-frog; and of different genera: man-devil). 243 Each type of teratism had its own particular causes, divisible into material causes (semen insufficient in quantity or quality; too constrictive a womb; deficiency or excess of nourishment; embryonic illness) and "formal" causes (deficiency of formative virtue; the action of the mother's imagination). A lamb with a man's head, a man with a horse's head, were owing to the fact that the soul of the seed had degenerated into another nature. On the other hand, if a woman who had seen shrimps during her pregnancy brought forth a baby and a shrimp, it was through the power of her imagination. Irregular couplings normally furnished perfect beings of the paternal species. A female who had had two successive couplings, one natural, the other unnatural, might spawn a double teratism [i.e., Siamese twins].z 44 Liceti's classification and analyses were not original. They are found, in more or less the same form, in Martin Weinrich and Ambroise Pare before him. 245 At most, Liceti brings an exactness to the analysis and a cleverness to the research into causes not found among his predecessors, and scarcely found after him. The principles, however, remained, along with the two orders of causes, material and formal.Z 46 The fact of conjunct twins would normally be explained by a quantity of semen excessive for one embryo but inadequate for two. 247 The excessive hairiness of a "furry little girl" would be attributed to the maternal imagination, "which, as a superior agent, often prevents the formative virtue from doing what it had intended," for the imagination belonged to the sensitive soul and the formative virtue merely to the vegetative soul. "Now, here is how the imagination acts. It presents the woman with a thing she likes: this thing excites her desire: which in turn impels by dominion and command the motive power that executes its wishes." This power then set in motion the spirits, which received into the brain the image of the thing desired and, proceeding to the embryo, "engrave in it the image consigned to them." 248 This explanation, which already supposes a very modern interpretation of the action of the faculties, was of course subject to debate,Z 49 yet it was nonetheless widely accepted. Some did, as a last resort, invoke the

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influence of the stars, 250 but Weinrich no longer believed in it, and Liceti speaks of it only secondarily. At least all these explanations remained natural. 251 The time was past when the birth of a deformed child was necessarily attributed to trafficking with the devil and would lead the mother to the stake. 252 Liceti himself scarcely saw any monsters attributable to the devil except those formed of parts coming from three or four different animals. 253 Even so, he did not use this explanation for specific cases he had to resolve. On the other hand, although God was the remote first cause of teratisms, He remained a sufficiently distant cause for the question not to raise the insoluble problems it was to raise later on.Z 54 The formative faculty, as agent of the final cause, was too involved in matter for an error on its part to implicate the direct responsibility of Providence. With this faculty, and thanks to it, the problem of teratisms remained in the domain of "natural questions." This was not a negligible merit, as would be recognized one day. In the meantime, if anyone asserted that "the true cause of monsters is the wrath of God," 255 one could reply, respectfully but firmly, that while such was no doubt the case, causality on that level did not belong to science.

VI This, then, is how the problem of animal procreation presented itself in the first half of the seventeenth century. In this hasty review, we have looked at only the theories inherited from tradition, those that directly or indirectly derived from Galen or Aristotle. In the next chapter, we shall see those stemming from a more modern mentality, of whatever denomination. I have not sought to give numerical weight to the partisans of Aristotle and of Galen on any of the doctrinal points in question. To be done accurately, such an investigation would require, if not an "exhaustive enumeration," which would be impossible, at least a broad tallying that cannot be envisaged within the framework of this study. Such an investigation, moreover, might well give disappointing results, inasmuch as doctrines intertwine to the point of forming a skein impossible to tease out, and inasmuch as the doctors expounded opposing theories equally prolifically, without making a choice or without indicating which of the innumerable arguments they preferred. Who can say why Sinibaldi accepted Galen's two-seed theory, but thought, like Aristotle, that only the spirit of these seeds contributed to generation? 256 Why did Jean Riolan pere consider, along with Hippocrates, that a part of the seed comes

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from the entire body, while reasoning afterwards, like Aristotle, about the animation in potentiality or in actuality of that same seed? 257 How was Everaerts able to come to reconcile in turn following Aristotle, Hippocrates, then Aristotle again, and then Harvey? 258 Such syntheses were not rare, if indeed one can call a "synthesis" what might better be labeled a harlequin outfit. To the extent, however, that I can draw general conclusions from my readings, it seems necessary to distinguish the Aristotelians, on the one hand, from the doctors of the School on the other. The true Aristotelians were few in number, especially in France. They were a minority among the philosopherphysicians, and far more philosopher than physician. They repeated the doctrine of their master only more or less faithfully, for the doctrine came down to them laden with interpretations and glosses, from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Pietro Pomponazzi, passing first through Averroes to Saint Thomas Aquinas. They were happy to refine on Aristotle's ingeniousness but they had lost the biological mentality that had, after all, animated the work of the Stagyrite. They preserved, on the other hand, his feel for abstraction and his impeccably logical reasoning. On these grounds, they won out easily over their adversaries. The latter, conversely, were more physicians than philosophers. They were not true scientists, of course, and they often allowed themselves to fall into the pitfalls of dialectic. But they had a certain good sense, a certain experience, and in the last analysis, they remained closer to the phenomena of life. It was unfortunate that the medical tradition remained imbued with the Scholastic- that is to say, Aristotelian- mentality. From this point of view, however, we cannot consider the period just studied as one of immobility. While the manner of approaching questions, the anatomical and physiological knowledge, the doctrines themselves, and the explanations they offered for phenomena, underwent practically no change between 1550 and 1650, it is certain that during the same period the influence of Aristotle on the physicians lessened considerably. It was predominant in Ferne! and even in Riolan pere-sti!l more powerful in them, one might venture to say, than in Galen himself. It led them, moreover, into untenable positions. Whether for this reason or out of a distaste for too abstract a form of reasoning, the physicians began rather quickly to move away from Aristotle by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The strange ways in which Aristotelians like Parisanus Liceti were simultaneously interpreting their master's doctrine remain to be seen. Emancipation would soon turn into open hostility. In the eyes

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of the doctors, Aristotle was no longer the "most divine prince of philosophers," as he had been for Guillaume Chrestian in 1559. Now he was classed, at least regarding the question that concerns us here, among those who are "not very knowledgeable in anatomy." 259 In the general decline of Aristotelianism visible in the first half of the seventeenth century, the doctors, and by this we mean the doctors faithful to the Galenist tradition, the doctors of the School, played their role. The true aim of this chapter has been, however, to use the doctrinal discussions to bring into focus a general state of mind relative to one of the essential problems of biology. The authors I have cited were not exceptions. I chose them over others because of the clarity of their writing, the celebrity of their names, or the success of their books. But the same mental set shows up among the other authors I have read. And in this, the Aristotelians and the Galenists found themselves united. At least what they had in common, in their way of interpreting the phenomena of life, was the rejection of two opposite types of explanation: through recourse to God and the spiritual soul on the one hand, and through recourse to mere mechanisms of matter on the other. Life was for them a natural fact, which assumed no unmediated intervention by the divinity. The spiritual soul of man was not in the seed, nor was it in the embryo during the first weeks of its life; and when it had entered the embryo, created by God and brought in from ourside, it remained idle until birth. Aristotle and the Fathers of the Church were in agreement on this point. But on the other hand, the fact of life was a special fact, which could not be reduced to the mere movement of material particles or to a simple combination of heat, cold, wetness, and dryness. What informed their often overly naive teleology was a highly acute sense of the complexity of vital phenomena, a complexity so great that they often felt powerless to explain it and thus had recourse to a superhuman, quasi-divine science. Moreover, insofar as this complexity of life was for them just one aspect of the infinite complexity of nature in its entirety, they felt perfectly justified in having recourse to the notion of faculties. In any case, they did not confront the issue. Whoever attempted to deny these forces was for them an object of scandal. "You cannot debate with those who reject your axioms." In the last analysis, it was for them a simple question of good sense. What doomed this attitude without appeal was not its wrongness but, clearly, its sterility. The attitude itself was fairly inevitable in the early seventeenth century, given the character of phenomena, the absence of method, and the conception generally held of nature. A few minds, however, refused

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to adopt it. At the risk of falling under the sway of other illusions, they abandoned the beaten paths. They are the ones we shall now look at. But we must not forget, in studying these innovators, that the host of physicians around them were striving vainly to grasp appearances and tirelessly pursuing their battle with shadows.

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physiology as understood in the seventeenth century was founded on the notion of "faculty" or "soul." It was recognized, too, that the faculties were much more than mere physical qualities of matter, that they wielded power over matter and possessed a knowledge of sorts concerning what they had to do, but that at the same time they were not spiritual substances, that they could exist only embedded in matter, and that the natural (vegetative and sensitive) "souls" had, by their nature, nothing in common with the spiritual soul of man, which was created individually by God and survived the death of the body it inhabited. Conceived in this way, the faculties and souls opened themselves up to criticism on two flanks. On the one hand, the relationships they entertained with the spiritual soul were highly equivocal. Aristotle had made it clear that the understanding was divine, and that it was another kind of souP He had not always, however, avoided confusions between intelligence and life, 2 and an Aristotelian as important as Alexander of Aphrodisias had been able to maintain that the intellect was never separated from the body and died along with it. 3 Galen, moreover, did not see why the rational soul should be immortal and even seemed persuaded to the contrary. 4 With Aristotle, the "form" (i.e., the soul) always ran the risk of issuing e potentia materiae [from the potentiality of matter]. To appreciate the extent of the problem, one need only consider the stubborn energy with which most of the doctors of the period fought the Scholastic opinion, largely under the aegis of Jean Ferne! and Giulio Cesare Scaliger, and with what strength they remind us that the soul (i.e., the form) is created by God. With respect to Galen, it was crucial to make clear that the faculties were potencies of the soul, working through

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the organs, rather than potentialities of these organs themselves. Thus, we should not be surprised that traditional physiology was attacked first of all in the name of Christianity. In the other direction, this conception of life had always run up against the long-standing materialist tradition, going back to the earliest Greek thought. This tradition is represented above all by the great names of atomist philosophy-Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius-but it also includes on various grounds almost all the pre-Socratic philosophers, who set forth specific doctrines on life, and a large number of famous physicians, including Erasistratus (attacked at length by Galen in his treatise De usu partium) and the greatest ancient physician and father of all medicine, Hippocrates himself. For if Hippocrates was indeed one of the masters of traditional medicine in the seventeenth century, his real effect was felt far less strongly in physiology. He was quoted, his works were used as a storehouse of facts or arguments, but his ideas were rarely adopted. The reason for this is that a portion of the Hippocratic corpus sets forth a physiology quite alien to the AristotelianfGalenist frame of mind. By attempting to recapture the spirit of this physiology, of which the School tradition had preserved only scattered fragments, and by relying heavily in this quest on Greek materialist thought, especially the atomists, the seventeenth-century physicians would work to formulate a theory of life freed of all the impediments of traditional physiology. The two movements, spiritualist and materialist, were to undergo parallel developments. While we tend to grant far more importance to the materialist current, 5 historically the two are bound to each other. To the extent that people rejected the notions of form, faculties, and secondary souls in the name of a particular conception of the soul, they rid matter of them. This appears clearly in Descartes. Moreover, the contributions of the spiritualist chemists to the transformation of the biological mentality are also relevant here.

I The Spiritualist Movement

For ten centuries the Middle Ages had attempted to reconcile ancient philosophy with Christianity. In many respects, the Renaissance was merely the final episode in this long effort, involving science as much as metaphysics. The powerful movement of Christian spirituality that ushered in and accom-

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panied the Reformation made itself felt in the scientific domain as well. It led to the revision and even the rejection of pagan science, which had been ignorant of the True God, in order to construct a Christian science that, given the spirit of the time, was almost certain to be tinged with Neoplatonism. Marsilio Ficino set forth what the doctor has to gain by being a Christian and a priest,6 and Paracelsus conflated knowledge of nature with knowledge of God. Ferne! himself affirmed the superiority of the Christian scientists of his age over the pagan philosophers: "Now that, by the grace of the AllGood and All-Great God, the very light of truth has shone out for us through Christ, much knowledge has been divinely taught us that the ancients did not completely grasp." And he adds immediately: "Who among us is ignorant of the immortality of the soul, its dwelling-place, its power, its nature?" 7 Indeed, for biology, the problem of the soul was what most urgently required a Christianization of science. The identification of man's immortal soul with the Aristotelian form had raised grave difficulties, and the classical solution, founded on the distinction between the "biological" soul and the rational and immortal soul, appeared inadequate to many minds. In order to avoid the vitalist materialism into which they risked being led by the biological treatises of Aristotle, they found themselves obliged to hand over to the divinely created spiritual soul the job of organizing the body and directing its functions. Already in 1557, Scaliger revived the opinion of Themistius, who, commenting on Aristotle's De anima around the middle of the fourth century A.D., had written "that the soul is the architect of its dwelling-place," 8 a formulation that could have expressed the action of the "form" functioning as final cause, but that took on a Christian value among all those who quoted it in the seventeenth century. This opinion would gradually gain ground at the expense of the Aristotelian notion of "form" and the Galenic notion of "faculty"; at the expense even of the panvitalism of Paracelsus. For entrusting concern for organizing the body to the spiritual soul had the effect of distancing the worker from his product and, by the same token, led to an emphasis on the exteriority of God with respect to His creation. This evolution can already be seen in the work of Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, who so clearly bore the mark of his time. In 1594, Helmont was a q-year-old student. Twenty years before Descartes was to do so, he realized the futility of his knowledge, the uselessness of formal logic, and the vanity of the ancient science with which his teachers were still imbued. Twenty years before Descartes, he set off in search of certainty. But unlike the later philosopher, he did not look for it in the self-evident principles of reason. His

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mystical temperament and the example of Paracelsus moved him onto other paths, and through the combined observation of nature and meditation on the Bible, he prepared himself to receive the special enlightenment he asked of God in ardent prayer. Once he had received it in the form of dreams and visions, he no longer harbored any doubt: "I know now that I am teaching the truth, perforce, and that the doctrine in this book, even should it lose its strength over the course of time, will endure until the end of the world." 9 He would thus be able to refute the illusions of pagan science, the errors of Galen, and the sophistries of Aristotle. He particularly reproached Aristotle with not having known the principles of things. The four elements were a useless invention; for that matter, so were the three principles of Paracelsus. There was just one matter, not the indefinite and impossible matter that Aristotle spoke of, but a real and concrete matter, namely, the element of water. 10 Above all, Aristotle was wrong about form and final cause. "Every cause, in nature and duration [successio dierum] precedes its effect. Therefore the form of something created cannot be the cause of its coming into being .... Form can neither be acquired nor possessed in parts or in degrees. Thus, beings cannot have greater or lesser form." 11 In truth, Aristotle had likened natural beings to man-made objects. That is why he had thought that every efficient cause was external to its effect, 12 and that "what engenders cannot be part of what is engendered." 13 That, too, was why he brought in a final cause when "the external final cause of the Scholastics, which exists only in products of art, is absolutely pointless in nature .... In the Creator's mind, this external final cause is a rational being; it absolutely cannot play the role of a real and natural cause." 14 This critique no doubt distorts Aristotle's thought. At the very least one can say that it emphasizes the intellectualist aspect of it at the expense of its dynamism. It is nonetheless interesting to see Helmont affirming, on the one hand, that every natural being must be formed as an effect of an internal force, an idea that can lead to vitalism, and, on the other hand, raising the same objections to final causes as Descartes. What, then, were the real principles of things? "They are two in number, and no more." The first was "the element of water, or principle our-of-which [initium ex quo]." 15 Genesis taught, indeed, "that before the first day, the waters had already been created since the beginning." 16 Experience demonstrated, moreover, that all forms of matter could be brought back to their primitive state of waterP But the transformation of water into a body of some kind was not spontaneous. The second principle must intervene, "the semi-

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nal principle, or principle through-which [per quod]," called the ferment. Its role was to dispose matter to form the seeds of things. Its nature was less easy to grasp: it was "a formal created being, neither substance nor accident, but neutral." It had been "established since the beginning of the world in the places where it reigns, to prepare, stimulate, and lay the groundwork for the seeds." "The ferments are thus gifts, roots, established by God the Creator, that endure and are passed on through a continual propagation until the end of time, in order to stimulate and to bring out of the water the seeds proper to them." 18 Each seed was thus produced by a particular ferment. The further organization of bodies, starting from the seed, required the intervention of an agent of higher nature. "For all that comes naturally into the world must have a principle for its motions, a stimulator and an internal director of its generation." This is the Archeus Faber. "As an internal efficient cause, it contains the fecundity of generations and seeds." "It is composed through the combining of a vital breath, which is its matter, so to speak, and a seminal image, which is the internal spiritual core and whose visible seed is merely the rind." ''As the artificer [fober] and director of generation, the Archeus is immediately clothed by a bodily envelope. With animate beings, indeed, it penetrates every byway, every corner of its seed, and begins to transform its matter according to the entelechy of its image. Here it places the heart, there it designs the brain." This "image of the Archeus," which derived from "the idea of the predecessor," in fact possessed the knowledge and powers necessary for the organization of the being. Moreover it was "the first organ of life and of sensation." 19 Such were the instruments of all generation, from that of stones and metals to that of living beings. The generation of living beings was thus merely a particular instance of a universal process. The ferments that intervened were not exactly the same as those that, spread out on the earth or in the air, were perpetually able to fulfill their office without changing place. Those of living beings passed from parents to offspring, and "only stir an already prepared matter." 20 The results were the same: seeds inhabited by an Archeus, which was "inactive and, as it were, asleep in it ... as long as it does not think of its propagation." 21 At the moment of conception, it received its "image," or "seal and stamp of resemblance": "The soul of the procreator, in the delight of coition, throws and spreads itself in some wise towards the body of the seed, and by surrounding it, draws and imprints the figure of its seal on a certain spiritual matter that is the cause of the fecundity of said seed." 22 Resemblance, and consequently all hereditary phenomena, could be produced only by the soul. Otherwise, "one

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would see that cripples would necessarily produce crippled infants, since the body of the begetter would not have been complete." 23 Provided in this manner with its principle of development and endowed with its hereditary characteristics, the seed now needed nothing more than favorable physical conditions. If vegetable in nature, it would find them in the earth. If animal, it would directly find them in the womb, and embryonic development begins straightaway: the Archeus "will produce an overripe ferment, or a mouldy smell and taste that alters the specific and proper taste of the seed: as a result of which the seed becomes disposed for its transmutation." This transmutation was conceived of materially as a chemical phenomenon analogous to putrefaction: "Gas, which freely arises from things that are rotting, is stimulated and originates from the seed. It immediately gives off sooty emanations from which kinds of moulds are formed." 24 The heat resulting from this sort of putrefaction allowed the Archeus to act freely -that is to say, to fashion the body that was to be born. Procreation was thus a chemical phenomenon, prepared by a ferment and directed by an Archeus. Spontaneous generation took place in the absence of a directing Archeus, since normally the latter came from the sire. There was initially a particular ferment that "possesses a certain vapor," which "resembles in a way a seminal spirit" (or Archeus) and "little by little creates itself a corporal dwelling-place" in propitious matter. 25 The directing Archeus was replaced by the spirit of the matter. In this way, the same kinds of matter always gave birth to the same animals. Lice and fleas were always born of human excrement: "It is enough that this spirit-not the human spirit but the spirit in the excrement-always produces insects of a same kind, through a fermental virtue of kinship that takes the place of seed." 26 Similarly, "if one squeezes a soiled shirt into the mouth of a vessel containing wheat, the ferment coming from the shirt is altered by the odor of the grains and transmutes the grain in its husk into mice." 27 The material foundation was the grain of wheat, the ferment was that of the soiled shirt, a ferment of human origin, and the spirit of this ferment organized the matter as would an Archeus. The generation in question was unusual but not incomprehensible. Thus the ferment prepared the seed and the Archeus built the body. Was that all? No. The essential ingredient was still lacking, namely, the "substantial form," which was the "light of life": The seed, then, is like the Architect [of the animal] who does the planning, but who does not make the form. It adopts the Archeus or directing spirit of the one who produces the animal, but neither the form nor the light of life through which the form

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shines forth: for at the start of the generation, this spirit is not yet luminous; it is rather a certain spiritual and airy matter upon which the form, life, or sensitive soul of him who has begotten the seed at some moment shines and casts light, until the begetter has adequately imprinted on it some shadow or some mark from its own glow, which matter remaining avid and desirous for the brightness that it has already felt in the begetter, from whom it has already conceived some impression, it does its utmost to organize its body in such a way as to render it fit for the reception of this light, and for the actions depending on it; and by means of this ardent desire, the spirit burns with ever-greater fire and aspires avidly to receive this light, which is to constitute its form and its life, but which it receives only from Him who is the way, the truth, and the vital light; whereto the Archeus having once arrived, and not being able to proceed any further, comes to a halt; nonetheless, it receives the form from the father of light after having properly acquitted itself of its duty. This is how Christian philosophy must teach us as regards animals and plants.2 8

In fact, Helmont could neither ignore the problem of the origin of forms nor accept the solutions ordinarily proposed for it. The immense chapter he devoted to the issue-one of the longest in his book-demonstrates the importance he gave it. Having forms come down from Heaven (i.e., from the heavenly bodies and their movements) was an absurdity fit for pagans. A Christian knew that the world received the gift of multiplication and procreation before the creation of the stars, and that the heavenly bodies had no influence on the earth.2 9 It was no less absurd to claim, like Saint Thomas, that forms could be born of the potentiality of matter, which was tantamount to saying that accidents could beget substantial forms. 30 Only one solution conformed to "Christian philosophy," and that was to believe that forms were created without mediation by God. That did not mean that natural beings had no part in their own generation, for God said to his creatures: "Be fruitful and multiply." Thus, seeds naturally possessed the image of the begetter, an Archeus specific to them, and all the elements required for reproduction. However, none of that would be of any use if God did not grant the nascent being a substantial form and the light of life. The problems with a system of thought lacking in neither gratuitous assertions nor contradictory tendencies are apparent. Helmont owed Paracelsus not only the notion of the Archeus; the ferments spread through the elements likewise recall the "Vulcan" that labors in the "wombs" to organize "brute matter." 31 Yet here there is a crucial difference: the forces at work in the universe of Paracelsus are direct emanations from God. In Helmont's thought, the ferments are created beings just like forms. Any hint of pantheism is thus set aside: God is outside of His creation. At the same time, however, nature is

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no longer endowed with only a limited autonomy. Brute matter, the element of water, is absolutely passive. It is no longer even a question of its having that "potentiality of matter" that Aristotle had spoken of. The ferments, formal and neutral beings created by God and scattered by Him throughout nature, are foreign to the matter upon which they work. The character of the Archeus is less clear, possibly because the notion comes from Paracelsus. In any case, its power is natural since it comes from the begetter. It is nonetheless odd to see Helmont reproach Aristotle for having assigned an external cause to generation but to propose at the same time the Archeus as the model of an internal cause. For the Archeus does reside in the seed without being part of it. It dwells and moves about therein like a tenant in his apartment. It possesses a material base, but it involves a "spiritual matter" and one that, in any case, is not part of the matter of the seed being transformed and organized. Finally, nature is incapable of attaining life through its own forces. God personally gives form and life to each new being. He is not a "prime mover," who leaves the secondary causes to act on their own. He is not bound by the laws of nature: "God, by his lone and free will, affects all things without necessity or obligation." 32 Nature is entirely subject to the divine free will, which ceaselessly intervenes in phenomena. There is permanence only in God's wisdom. Despite Paracelsus and perhaps despite himself, Helmont was not able to remain a vitalist. Just as nature was and continued to be created and organized by a God external to it and on whom it absolutely and fundamentally depended, so matter, passive and ready to undergo anything, was organized by potencies that remained foreign to it, even though they dwelt in its bosom. In attempting in this way to create a "Christian philosophy," Helmont bears faithful witness to the tendencies of his age. Nonetheless, he had not sought to simplifY or to unifY the immaterial agents whose intervention he invoked in explaining generation, no doubt because his idea of form prevented him from considering it the efficient cause of organization and required him to have recourse to lower agents. He could not accept the soul's being "the architect of its domicile," for that inevitably led to "making all seed animate in actuality, endowed with a life and a substantial form, along with the madman Thomas Feyens, doctor of Louvain." 33 Even if he transposed it into a Christian register, he could not free himself from Aristotelian logic. "madman Thomas Feyens" (Fienus), professor at Louvain, had not been afraid to free himself from Aristotelian logic, as witness the controversy that from r620 to r629 pitted him against Louis Dugardin, titu-

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lar professor at the University of Douai, and against the renowned Santacruz, professor at Vallodolid and protomedicus generalis to the king of Spain. It was a question of knowing both when the rational soul was suffused into the embryo and what its role was in the embryo's formation. Feyens, who believed that the soul was suffused on the third day, attributed embryonic development in its entirety to it. His essential argument was that development was ultimately a matter of nourishment, and this nourishment went on through the whole of man's life, thanks to the rational soul. Thus, well before Georg Ernst Stahl's animism, the human soul, whose nature was rational and spiritual, came to be considered the organizer of the body's life. Feyens did not deny the existence of a vegetative soul in plants or a sensitive soul in animals. On the one hand, however, he thought that these souls did not originally exist within the seed but were introduced into it. 34 (Those who, like Feyens, believed in the existence of a female seed had difficulties with the concept of the union of two souls issuing from the two parents.) On the other hand, Feyens rejected the traditional division of the human soul. It was God who created the soul directly, 35 and man could not successively be plant and animal before becoming man, which was what would be happening if he possessed first the lone vegetative soul, then the sensitive soul, and finally the spiritual soul, as the School would have it. For matter animated by a vegetative soul was a true plant and, animated by a sensitive soul, a true animal, since in both cases there were matter and form, the two elements of a perfect being. For Feyens, the seed animated in actuality was already a man, and, as such, took nourishment. This, however, was precisely what Helmont would not accept. Against Feyens, Dugardin set out to defend the traditional concept of three souls acting successively in the human embryo and the notion of the formative faculty functioning through spirits. 36 According to Feyens, however, there could be no faculty without soul, and it was perfectly ridiculous to imagine spirits as "the vehicles of the faculties." 37 Dugardin replied by citing Fernel, 38 but Feyens had warned him that he had no interest in authorities. 39 This he proved by the casual manner in which he replied to the nobleman Santacruz, who had lectured him with the dogmatic gravity suitable to an Aristotelian. "He does a lot of talking," Feyens said, "but he proves nothing, and he insists on assuming what is being questioned." 40 Besides, to tum est folsum [it is all false], and the arguments of the protomedicus generalis were frivolous and silly. This statement greatly scandalized Dugardin, who was more respectful of authority. It is, incidentally, not without significance that Feyens, who was willing to argue with a Galenist, merely shrugged off an Aristotelian, whom

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he quotes at length, with an air of saying: This is all so ridiculous that no answer is possible. Still, Dugardin, like Feyens, aimed at defending the nobility of the human soul. The one would have it totally idle, the other would have it totally in charge. This was what led Dugardin to insist on the role of the spirits as the only possible cause of phenomena like the quivering of corpses 41 (an argument that would be brought forth once more against Stahl). As for Feyens, he was seeking to free the human soul from all the ambiguities inherited from the ancients. But he did not wish to step outside the scientific terrain: "I am a physician and a philosopher," he writes, "and as such, I have proved everything I have said in my book through arguments drawn from those two branches of knowledge." 42 Dugardin, he claimed, had made a mess of everyrhing by transferring onto theological ground questions concerning uterine growths, which could in no way be animated with a rational soul, and the baptism of miscarried embryos. After thirteen pages of quotations drawn from Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Ezekiel, the Digest [the Pandects: a compilation of excerpts on Roman law assembled under Justinian], Mosaic law, Canon law, Exodus, and the decisions of Pope Sixtus V, he concluded: "Quid darius?" ["What could be clearer?"].43 Every man had his profession, Feyens replied. The Fathers knew nothing about such matters, and the theologians simply followed the opinion of the doctors. In his insistence on separating domains and competencies, as in his independence of mind and the clarity of his arguments, Feyens seems clearly more "modern" than his adversary. It is all the more interesting, then, to see him put forward, out of concern for a coherent and clear philosophy, an animism that, in the last analysis, makes the formation of each man dependent upon a specific intervention by God. It is hard to see what remains of the "natural" in Feyens's version of procreation. For him, still more clearly than for Helmont, the action of the parents was no longer anything more than an "occasional" cause, an appeal for divine action. The phenomena of heredity were explained by the force of the paternal or maternal imagination,44 to which, in any case, he pays only slight attention. For him the individual was not a link in a natural chain, but the isolated result of a particular act by God. This does not seem to have harmed the success of his ideas. As early as r637 at Theophraste Renaudot's Academy, two doctors out of four maintained that the rational soul was suffused into the embryo at the very moment of conception, the first saying that this soul renders nugatory the action of the two others, the second specifYing that it was "itself the architect of its domi-

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cile." 45 The formula was that of Themistius and Scaliger, but the authority of Feyens may have contributed to its diffusion. What is certain, however, is that Feyens is quoted and discussed in the writings of Daniel Sennert. A renowned physician and professor at Wittenberg for 35 years, Sennert was at the same time a philosopher. Like his contemporary Helmont, he knew and admired Paracelsus and the iatrochemists, but did not reject Galen and Aristotle.46 He was, however, more than a mere eclectic. His Hypomnemata physica, which contains his final opinions on certain fundamental problems and was published in 1636, a year before his death,47 displays both a highly complex mind and a free and original spirit, which drew on whatever sources it came across, without indenturing itself to anyone. Among the fundamental questions mentioned, the most important was that of procreation, to which Sennert devotes three-quarters of his book. The problem was all the more thorny in that he did nothing to make it easier to resolve. He did not entertain for a moment the notion that the formation of a living being might be a purely material phenomenon. An atomist, he considered that living beings, like other beings, were formed of atoms. 48 But he does not seem to have imagined that atoms might take form all alone. It was necessary, therefore, that the seed be ensouled. More precisely, it is necessary that it be ensouled in actutzlity, that it contain a formal element. 49 It could not be an instrument of the parents' souls. "To assert that a principal agent [here, the parents' souls] transmits its action by means of a virtue derived from them [i.e., contained in the seed] is to say something that, in physics, holds no truth." 50 An instrument ceased acting when the force moving it stops. (Sennert was obviously unaware of inertia and could not explain the continuing movement of projectiles after the propulsion had ended.) 51 The seed must therefore contain the force that allowed it to become organizedits soul or, what comes down to the same thing, its form. The problem that arose, then, was still: Where did the forms come from? One thing was certain: they were not created directly by God, as Helmont and Feyens believed. "God, since he finished Creation, no longer creates anything, unless through miracle." 52 He was the First Cause, but He allowed the secondary causes to act on their own, all the while participating in their action, but in a purely metaphysical fashion. Sennert emphasizes this idea and returns to it in connection with the formation of the embryo: "God is not a physical cause but a primary and universal cause, which preserves and sustains all things, not through a physical movement but in an exalted and inef-

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fable manner, through His presence." 53 That God is not the proximate cause of the embryo's formation is evidenced by the fact that there are teratisms: for the causes put forward in explanation of this phenomenon-a defect in matter, the unfitness of the site of development, the mother's imaginationwould not hold good against the divine will. 54 Thus the emphasis is placed at the same time on God's omnipotence and on the fact that this omnipotence does not intrude into natural phenomena. The study of nature, then, remained insulated from all religious considerations. This was just as well for everyone, and Sennert mischievously recalled the stories of the antipodes, the bishop Virgilius, and Pope Zacharias. 55 All the same, he would make sure that "all discussion of nature is to the honor and glory of the Most-Good and Most-Great God." 56 But it was not He who created souls (meaning in this instance the souls of plants and animals), since He no longer created anything. Moreover, if God created souls without mediation, there would only be "spontaneous" generations, and the resemblance of children to parents would be incomprehensible. In truth, there would no longer be any procreation at all, for the true birth was the formation and animation of the seed. 57 On this point, Sennert shared the opinion of Fortunio Liceti and Parisanus (Emilio Parisano), whom we shall consider later. There remained, then, the two traditional solutions, having the forms come from the heavens or from the potentiality of matter. Sennert rejected both. The first, if one took it in Fernel's sense, amounted to substituting creation for generation. The same held true for Avicenna's Colcodea. Then, too, if by "heavens" was meant the stars, it was not clear how forms could descend from them: "Man is not less noble than the heavens." 58 As for the famous eductio e potentia materiae [emergence from the potentiality of matter], which Liceti had just defended once again, it seemed an illusion to anyone who examined the astonishing qualities of form. 59 There were people whose minds were "so immersed in the elements that they know nothing above them." 60 So where, then, did forms come from? Prudently and methodically, Sennert begins by speaking of plants. The plant produced a seed, and enclosed in this seed was a vegetant soul, which could not be other than an emanation of the soul of the parent plant.61 It was in this that true generation consisted. The soul perpetuated itself from the plant to the seed, "like a light struck by a light," 62 an image that recalls Helmont, for whom, however, all light came from the "Father of light." Nonetheless, the seed was not a plant, for it did not have the latter's parts, even if it took nourishment. 63 On this essential point, Sennert gave priority

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to material constitution over formal definition and escaped from Aristotelian logic. From plants, he turned to animals. Each seed, male and female, contained a sensitive soul, which emanated from the soul of the father or the mother, exactly as did the vegetant soul of the seed. The two souls were united at the moment of conception with the same ease with which they had been propagated and, despite its double origin, the soul of the embryo would be single: ''A fire that burns with diverse flames is not composite." 64 Animals had no vegetative soul. It was the sensitive soul "that immediately forms the instruments necessary for nourishment ... then, later on, the instruments of sensitivity and movement." 65 Within such a theory, spontaneous generation became difficult to explain. Indeed, Sennert judged that there was no true spontaneous generation. Animals born "spontaneously" were not ignoble or imperfect. They were "always engendered according to the same principles and in the same fashion," and not haphazardly, "for chance and fortune have no place in the things of nature." 66 They must therefore be organized by a soul hidden in matter. As a soul could be born only from another soul (since God no longer created them and matter could not produce them), there could be spontaneous generation only on the basis of living or dead matter, be it excrement or cadaver, "which contains in it some principle of life." 67 In this way, we are brought back to the general rule. Now it was necessary to proceed to man, and here, obviously, lay the heart of the matter. Inasmuch as it was absurd to claim that the fetus was nourished by one soul before its birth and by another afterwards, it could be postulated right away that it was the human soul (the rational soul) that formed the embryo.68 Here Sennert followed Feyens's reasoning,69 arriving at the same conclusion: "There is in man only one soul, namely, the rational, which is nevertheless equipped with the virtues of all the inferior souls, and endowed with the vegetative and sensitive faculties." 70 Still, where did this soul come from? Was it, like the others, an emanation from the parents' souls, or was it rather created directly by God and suffused into the body when the latter had taken shape, as was the general opinion? Everything said so far mandated the first opinion. Feyens had seen clearly that the human embryo was formed by the rational soul, but he had made the mistake of believing that this soul was suffused into it on the third day. The reason was that he had only studied man, "an inadequate subject." 71 If he had started by studying plants and then animals, according to Sennert's method, he would have arrived at

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the same conclusions as the latter: that each seed was animated by a rational soul, which emanated from the soul of the begetter, and the two souls unite at the moment of the meeting of the seeds to form the unique and single rational soul that would organize the embryo and then regulate the physical, intellectual, and moral life of the child and the adult. Only thus could we understand the words of the Creator, set down in Genesis: "Be fruitful and multiply." For, "since man is a body and a soul, if the soul did not emanate from the parents, a man would not beget a man." 72 "I am aware," adds Sennert," of the prerogatives enjoyed by the human soul. I know that God granted to it alone the immortality that is denied animals, and that it alone is to participate in eternal beatitude. But I doubt that propagation through the seed takes anything away from the prerogatives of the human soul." 7 3 Nonetheless, he took the precaution of quoting Tertullian and Gregory of Nyssa and of requesting that others debate his opinion with none but physical arguments, just as he had done. In fact, he was to be attacked immediately, with extreme violence, by a professor of philosophy at Groningen, Johann Freytag, who denounced him "before all the academies of Christendom," 74 not so much for his slander as for his way of conceiving of the soul of animals. Indeed, according to Freytag, Sennert had maintained that animals' souls were spiritual and immortal like men's. In reality, Sennert had made it clear that each animated being had only one soul, which was specifically its form, even if this soul possessed several faculties. The vegetative and sensitive souls spoken of by the School were creations of the mind. They did not exist in nature, they were neither forms nor essences but simply faculties of the soul, isolated for purposes of argument. "The nature of a plant is not defined by the sole vegetative faculty; rather, each plant has a specific form, endowed no doubt with the vegetative faculty, but also with other faculties." 75 Each plant had its soul, which caused it to grow and be nourished, but which also caused it to be this plant and not another, a rosebush and not a poplar76 All the more so for animals: each animal had its specific form, its personal soul, which fulfilled all the functions of animal life, but that above all defined each animal in particular and caused it unreasoningly to do astonishing things7 7 If it seemed impossible to Sennert for the animal soul to have come forth from elements, it was because it was manifestly capable of intelligence. Sennert expanded on the intelligence of dogs, horses, elephants, as well as on that of insects, bees, ants, and spiders, recounting not extraordinary anecdotes, but facts from current observation, which were all the more remarkable because they are commonplace.78

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Freytag's noisy worrying should be easy to understand at this point. Supposedly, the souls of plants and animals had the same origin and the same function as the human soul. Like the human soul, plant and animal souls were created by God ex nihilo at the beginning of the world; they propagated themselves from generation to generation; they organized, animated, and defined each being individually. They were by nature as foreign to matter and had as much power over matter as the human soul. Could one not conclude from this that they, too, were spiritual and immortal? Sennert did not attempt to defend himself as to the spiritual nature of animal's souls. He simply denied the deduction made concerning their immortality? 9 But it is precisely this spiritual nature of the souls of plants and animals that concerns us here. Feyens had excluded the "natural" souls from man. Sennert excluded them from nature. There now remained, face to face, an inert matter, composed of atoms, and spiritual souls, which informed matter and gave it life. Sennen had nothing in him of the visionary or the mystic. His was a clear and methodical mind, informed as to the requirements of science, persuaded of the universality of the laws of nature- "even the atoms have their laws," 80 and, indeed, a partisan of a determinism that excluded any intervention by chance, any infraction of natural laws, any intrusion by God that was not strictly miraculous. But he did not see how matter could live without a soul, and he could not conceive of a soul as other than spiritual. Helmont, Feyens, and Sennert had in common that they were spiritualist and Christian thinkers. The first consequence of their effort was the establishment of the absolute passivity of matter. With Helmont, the element of water had no active function and was ready to receive any form whatever. For Feyens, it was "obvious" -manifestum-that the seed began to vegetate the moment it received a soul, and that it remained inert until then. 81 Sennert expected nothing of either atoms or elements. Not even Descartes asserted the passivity of nature more strongly than these three physicians. Nonetheless, the manner in which they progressively eliminated "natural forces" is still remarkable. For Helmont, the ferments were "formal and neutral beings," and the Archei had a still less determinate status. For Feyens, the spiritual soul replaced the natural souls in man. For Sennert, finally, all forms were spiritual beings. He was no doubt satisfied to show that they had nothing material in them, and that one might see in them, if one wished, "formal and neutral beings" like Belmont's ferments. This interpretation would, however, be quite debatable, for the only prerogative that Sennett accorded the human soul to distinguish it from the others was immortality. In any case, the im-

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mediate attack by Freytag, along with Sennert's awkward reply, should suffice to prove that in 1636, in their professional milieu, any being that was not material necessarily became spiritual. The time of intermediate beings was past. In their fashion, the spiritualist physicians participated in and contributed to this evolution. 82

II William Harvey's Aristotelianism As we have seen, the seventeenth-century Aristotelians were content to close themselves off in the logic of their philosophy, when they did not allow themselves to be unknowingly corrupted by other influences. We have also seen that in the last bastion of the Stagirite's defenders, the combatants were not very reliable. We shall find others, but none deserves more attentive study than William Harvey, as much for the importance of his scientific personality as for the originality of his intellectual behavior. Perhaps still better than the problem of the circulation of the blood, in which methodical observations allowed him to arrive at precise and decisive conclusions, the problem of animal procreation, to which he was to find no solution that satisfied him, throws the special character of Harvey's thought into relief. It is worth noting that the Exercitationes de generatione animalium, published in 1651, was the result of lengthy, albeit imperfect, research, for Harvey was significantly hindered in his work by the English political crisis.83 Harvey was an Aristotelian and made no bones about it. 84 He was a disciple of another Aristotelian, Fabrizio d'Acquapendente. It was to Aristotle that Harvey owed his breadth of view, his gaze embracing all of nature, his search for an explanation that would hold as well for insects and fish as it would for man. He reproached the doctors of his time precisely for their tendency to concern themselves only with man and to extrapolate carelessly from man to animals.85 Although Harvey derived many facts, ideas, and arguments from Aristotle, he was in no way in bondage to his teachers, and on important points he disagreed with Aristotle and Fabrizio.86 Specifically, he broke away from them whenever his observations belied their assertions. Harvey not only took a certain style of logical reflection from Aristotle, but also the habit of verifYing theories in the light of fact, and was perhaps more faithful to Aristotle in this respect than his colleagues. The Exercitationes de generatione animalium comprise two collections

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of observations, the first bearing on the embryonic development of the chicken,87 and the second on the conception and embryology of mammals, particularly the does of the standard and fallow deer that Charles I allowed him to dissect. 88 What is noteworthy is the role that Harvey grants these observations, not the amount of space they occupy in the work (about So pages out of 300). He explains his method briefly at the end of his preface in four pages entitled "On the Method to Follow in the Study of Generation." 89 There he reproaches Fabrizio for making insubstantial assertions with no basis in factual observation: "When he asserts that the bones are formed before the muscles, the heart, the liver, the lungs, and the viscera, and he claims that all the internal parts must exist before the external, he relies on probable reasons rather than on autopsy or on the judgment of the senses derived from dissections; he has recourse to feeble reasonings [ratiunculae] borrowed from the mechanists: which is hardly worthy [minime decuit] of a great anatomist." 90 As for himself, he would seek the truth per dissectiones anatomicas ac experimenta [through dissections and anatomical experiments], well aware that he was following "a new and unusual path" in this respect. 91 This determination to draw everything from systematic observation would itself suffice to distinguish Harvey from most of the biologists of his time and would align him with the physicists and all those who were then preaching recourse to experience. Still more remarkable, however, is the fact that Harvey was not at all interested in destroying the intellectual framework of traditional biology. If he wanted to set forth the operations of nature in detail, it was "to have a definite knowledge of the faculty of the formative and vegetative souls, based upon a study of nature's works; and to gain some certainty of understanding about the nature of the soul, based upon a study of the members and the organs, as well as their functions." 92 Harvey did not reject any of the Aristotelian or Galenic entities. He argued at length on the soul of the chicken's egg in order to know if it were the same as the soul of the mother or the father. He admitted, like Fabrizio, the "immutative, concoctorial, formative, and auctorial faculties," as "efficient causes" of the chicken.93 But then, in order to understand the nature and functioning of these faculties and souls, he had to see them at work and learn how they behaved. "In our search for the efficient cause of the chicken, we need, in order to emerge with certainty from the labyrinth of multiple and interrelated causes, an Ariadne's thread, carefully spun from observations on nearly all animals." 94 Besides, it was well understood that the causes in question were purely

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natural and physical. The definition of the egg given by Harvey leaves no doubt in this regard: The egg is a natural body, endowed with an animal virtue, that is to say, with a principle of movement, transformation, rest, and preservation; its nature is such that, if one withdraws all obstacles, it will take the form of an animal. And the tendency of all heavy objects to fall, if one takes away that which keeps them from doing so, or of light bodies to rise, is no more natural than the tendency given by nature that impels a seed or an egg to become a plant or an animal. 95 Just as natural a fact was the position of the Sun in the zodiac, cited by Harvey, along with the heat of incubation and the ambient temperature, among the external causes of the embryo's development. 96 The natural character of the facts did not, however, keep Harvey from admiring the formarion of a living body, regulated "with foresight, with inimitable art, and in an incomprehensible manner." 97 For this foresight and this art, we had to give homage to God, "all-powerful artificer and preserver of so great a product, which deserves to be adorned with the name microcosm." 98 But what the scientist had to determine was "whence comes into the egg, and when and where, this divine element analogous to the element of the stars, allied with art and intelligence, and the vicar of all-powerful God." 99 We remained within nature and it was her laws alone that we had to seek, without allowing ourselves to be disturbed by concerns alien to the subject. 100 Harvey seems never to have doubted for an instant that the phenomena he had observed were constant. From his observations on the chicken, the rabbit, and the deer, Harvey drew the conclusion that the Galenic theory-the doctors' theory-was doubly false. On the one hand, indeed, there was no feminine seed. Neither viviparous females nor hens produced it. 101 As for the fluid secreted by women, it did not have the composition of semen, and it flowed out. Moreover, its existence was bound neither to conception nor even to pleasure.102 The grand argument drawn from the female genital apparatus was no more reliable. The so-called "female testicles" were simply kinds of lymphatic ganglia. They had no role in generation, as was demonstrated by the fact that no observable change occurred in them either at the moment of union or after. "But I am greatly astonished," adds Harvey, "that [the doctors] believe that so elaborate, cooked, and vital a seed could come from such imperfect and obscure parts." 103 Harvey's error on this point was obviously considerable; it would be fair to suspect an Aristotelian bias. On the other hand, it had to be admitted, with Fabrizio, that the male

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seed did not penetrate into the uterus. It obviously did not penetrate into the egg, and besides, a single coupling sufficed to fertilize not only eggs already formed but those to be formed for several months thereafter. Now, despite his investigations, Harvey could not find in the hen a cavity where the cock's seed could be kept in reserve. Nor had he found male seed in the uterus of the standard and fallow does that he dissected after their coupling. Therefore, Fabrizio was right, and by the same token we had to believe with Aristotle that the male seed added nothing to the matter of the embryo but acted merely through its spirit. Here, then, Harvey found himself up against one of the more obscure points in Aristotelian doctrine. It was a matter of knowing how the male seed acted physically, even though non materia/iter [not materially]. Harvey invoked a sort of contagion, analogous to that found in illnesses, which could work through simple contact: Just as doctors observe that contagious maladies -like leprosy, venereal disease, the plague, and consumption- progress (to the sorrow of mortals) and give birth to similar infections in other bodies, through simple external contact.... In like fashion the same fact occurs, no doubt, in the generation of animals. Indeed, fish eggs, which, spontaneously and without intervention by the male seed, acquire their growth from outside-and it is certain that they live without the intervention of this male seedbeget little fish when they have been showered, and merely touched from outside, by the fertilizing milt of the male. The male's seed does not, therefore, penetrate into each egg to play the role of craftsman there, in order to fabricate bodies or to introduce a soul; the eggs, rather, are merely fertilized by a sort of contagion.' 04

But Harvey was not a man to content himself with words, whatever their currency, if their meaning was not clear. And it was all the less clear when the fertilizing contagion generally worked at a distance- the case of fish, in which fertilization occurred through contact outside the female's body, being an exceptional one. Among oviparous animals, eggs were fertilized in the uterus, where the male seed did not penetrate. It was therefore necessary to assume an action at a distance, without contact-citra tactum. Certainly, Harvey was not unaware of all those discussions on "the attraction of the compass and of amber, on sympathy and antipathy, on the poisonous and contagious nature of pestilential maladies, on alexipharmics and the medications that heal or harm through an occult-or rather unknown-property: all of them effects that seem to work without contact." 105 Still, none of this succeeded in convincing him, and the inability of this Aristotelian to conceive of an action without contact, one of the essential attitudes of mechanistic thought,

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is worth noting. Harvey therefore invoked the action of a "fermentary element," as in the transmission of illnesses, even though there as well the explanation did not seem to him entirely satis£Ying. 106 In the last analysis, Harvey modestly asked that a place be given his theory of conception among all the hypotheses on contagion, "until such time as we know something for sure about the fact itself." 107 Still, this action of the male seed was not performed directly on the egg. It was the uterus that was fertilized, and it was through its mediation that the "contagion" reached the egg. 108 In this way, it was possible to understand how eggs could be fertilized long after a coupling. It remained to be seen what role the male seed played. Among egg-layers, it was very clear: the role was to fertilize wind eggs-eggs that had not yet been fertilized. Harvey emphasized that wind eggs already possessed a vegetative soul, 109 "for we see that an egg of this nature takes nourishment, preserves its being, grows, and vegetates: which constitute the surest signs of this soul's presence." 110 The vegetative soul was a property of the egg and was independent of the mother's soul-obviously a deduction from the fact that the egg was free within the uterus.lll "What are we to say of the tiny animals that are born inside our bodies, that no one doubts to be governed and directed in their growth by their own souls? Such are intestinal worms, threadworms, lice, fleas, nits, mites, moths, etc." 112 Neither the mother's soul nor the uterus, then, intervened in the development of the egg. Nonetheless, the egg, endowed solely with a vegetative soul, could not produce an animal and remained infertile. Fertilization would be, precisely, the communication of the sensitive soul through the male seed. Thus, contrary to what Aristotle had thought, both parents were equally efficient causes of the chick. All of the creative power was not on the male side. In this way, without having to force the issue, Harvey was able to resolve all the problems of resemblance (which arose with particular clarity in species where the male was as different from the female as the cock from the hen),m the problem of hybridization (here Harvey cites only the crossing of a barnyard hen with a pheasant), 114 and, naturally, the problem of sterile hybrids. Heredity occurred exclusively through the souls. Thus, regarding hereditary illnesses, "it is not right to say that this comes from a defect in matter: for the illnesses of the male, that is, the father, are transmitted to the chicks: now, no matter passes from the father to the egg." 115 But the problem of what viviparous females contributed to generation remained. It was already known that they lacked semen. But neither did they contribute to the formation of the embryo by way of the menstrual blood.

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On this point, Harvey formally refuted Aristotle: in his observations, he never found blood in the female generative organs at the moment of couplingY 6 In short, then, Harvey formulated the following view of viviparous generation: the male seminal fluid fertilized the uterus, and the fertilized uterus produced an egg immediately endowed with a vegetative soul and a sensitive soul, thus allowing development to begin. Along with the faculty of growth and nutrition, the vegetative soul came from the mother, ensuring resemblance to her. Along with the faculty of organ formation, the sensitive soul came from the father, ensuring resemblance to him. 117 Now we can see more clearly the sense of Harvey's famous formulation on the frontispiece of the Exercitationes: "Ex ovo omnia." He sets it forth as follows: Where the procreation of the fetus is concerned, all animals are begotten in the same way, starting with a first oviform element; I say "oviform," not because this element must have the shape of an egg, bur because it possesses the egg's composition and nature .... And in all animals there is this first element, be it an egg, be it oviform matter that assuredly possesses the nature and composition of an egg.U 8 The uterus of a viviparous female produces an egg, exactly like a hen's ovary. The only difference is that the ovary produces the egg spontaneously and before it has been fertilized, while the uterus produces an egg only after fertilization and under its influence. The thought of Harvey here is not to be confused with that of Riolan fils, who had compared at length the conceptus of viviparous animals, the initial mixture of the rwo seeds, with an egg, specifying that the uterus corresponded to the shell, the common matter of the seeds to the white and the yoke, and their "most noble portion" to the chalaza, the latter being, for Riolan as for Fabrizio, the germ of the chick. 119 Unlike Riolan, Harvey established, not a figurative analogy, but an identity in formation, if not in origin. 120 In this way, he contributed more than anyone before Regnier de Graaf to the acceptance of the notion that viviparous procreation was merely a particular instance of procreation by means of eggs, which thus became the unique mode of animal reproduction. Harvey was led to this conclusion, no doubt, at least as strongly by analogy as by his anatomical observations. Birds and fish reproduced through eggs, including the selachians, those fish mentioned by Aristotle that were viviparous in appearance and oviparous in reality. Many insects reproduced in the same fashion, and Harvey thought that a great number of those believed to be born by spontaneous generation were also born from eggs. 121 In this regard, he opened the way to the investigations of Francesco Redi, which, in their turn, and conversely, were

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to contribute to the success of the ovist theory-a success that would owe something to the same reasoning by analogy that had guided Harvey. The development of the embryo in the egg or the uterus raised fewer theoretical difficulties. Here, it was above all a question of facts, and Harvey does not much bother with them aside from giving detailed descriptions. For example, on the order of the formation of the organs, he had observed that the heart was the first to be formed, and any further discussion thus became idle. But then he insisted that the formation of the embryo was a true progressive formation starting with undifferentiated matter, an epigenesis: With certain animals, the parts are formed one after another, and then they are nourished, grow, and take shape from the same matter; these animals therefore have parts that are formed earlier, and others that are formed later, and at the same time the animals grow and are formed. Their formation begins with a part that is, as it were, their origin; and with the help of that part, they receive all their other members; and we say that such a generation is carried out by epigenesis, which is to say, gradually, part by part; and it is this generation, rather than any other, that deserves the name. 122 This idea had nothing original to it at the time, and Harvey was perhaps led to formulate it so clearly because he already knew of the opposing theory, the "preformation of germs," which was finding support. 123 Nonetheless, it is not as a defender of epigenesis or as a precursor of ovism that Harvey is most deserving of our attention here. It is rather as a representative of a particular scientific mentality, which would come to assert itself only much later. Harvey no doubt did not remain indifferent to the progress being made in the physical sciences. When he chose the fall of weighty objects as an example of a natural phenomenon, he was alluding, to be sure, to Aristotelian physics. But still, he chose precisely one of the grand problems in the physics of his time, and it seems hard to imagine that he did not know as much. His great investigation into the circulation of blood gives us one of the best examples of the kind of physiology where everything happens according to the laws of mechanics and hydraulics. The heart behaved in this regard exactly like a pump drawing in and pressing out. It is quite obvious that his concern for rigorous observation aligned Harvey with the most modern scientists of his time. Nonetheless, Harvey was not a mechanistic physiologist. He openly mistrusted the "petty reasonings borrowed from the mechanists." In the circuit of the blood, the heart acts like a pump, but it is acting rhus under the effect of a vis pulsijica, a force whose nature Harvey did not know, but whose effects he clearly established. 124 In order to get rid of this "occult quality," intoler-

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able within his unbending mechanism, Descartes would have recourse to his well-known "fire without light," and would be obliged to confuse the systole and the diastole. It might have been better to preserve the vis pulsijica until all the facts were in. Similarly, Harvey did not dismiss the idea of souls or faculties at work in generation: they were something whose operations he observed. Unlike his colleagues, he did not believe it sufficient to reason about them in order to know them. But he did not judge them to be either absurd or ridiculous. He recognized the complexity of the facts and was not tempted to simplifY them abusively, even in order to force some clarity into them. He did not, of course, see living matter as we do; but he knew well that it was only through observations that we would get to know the mechanism of the faculties. He knew that an "occult quality" was merely a property whose causes we did not know, yet he did not for all that believe we must despair of ever knowing them or that we should give up studying at least their effects. Attraction was also to be considered an occult quality, and Newton's mentality would be exactly the same as Harvey's. We hardly need point out that this scientific frame of mind had no chance of success in 1651. We can just barely cite the Aristotelian Anton Everaerts, who sensed the importance of Harvey's work and took the trouble of imitating him, moreover with some success and with some corrections of his own. 125 Outside of his ill-founded ovism, destined to have an illustrious future, Harvey's views on generation had only a very modest success. He was considered merely one Aristotelian among many, attempting to keep alive an outmoded dogma; and his theory of fertilization through "contagion" was seen merely as a new version of Aristotle's all-too-familiar doctrine. At the end of the century, Drelincourt would refuse to discuss it, condemning it as "an old fable, already entirely refuted and overturned long ago by Galen, and recently again by men of discernment: Plempius, Fabri, Orchamus, Diemembrockius, Bartholin, etc." 126 The strength of the anatomical or physiological observations was not even mentioned. As for Harvey's effort to confer a new scientific spirit on biology, it passed completely unnoticed, smothered at birth by the mechanistic spirit of the century.

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III The "Neoterics" and the Rebirth ofAtomism Although, as noted, the triumph of AristotelianJGalenist physiology had virtually eclipsed all the ancient doctrines that drew upon matter alone in explaining the phenomena of life, those doctrines were not forgotten. Democritean atomism was magnificently represented by the work of Lucretius.127 The biological theories of the pre-Socratic philosophers were set forth often and discussed at length in Aristotle's writings, as were those of Erasistratus in Galen's. Above all, we must not forget that the prodigious erudition of the Renaissance scholars had brought back into circulation a considerable number of facts and ideas drawn from the countless historians, compilers, and doxographers. Hence there would surface unexpectedly, in the midst of more classical doctrines, an opinion coming from Democritus or Empedocles, even Hippo of Samos or Alcmeon of Crotona.l2 8 Above all, however, the work of Hippocrates was in everyone's hands. And if it is easy, in this composite corpus, to find texts expressing a physiology of souls easily adaptable to Galenist thought, it is also clear that several works present the example of a physiology without metaphysics, more concerned with describing the facts than with getting at inaccessible causes. Now, it just happens that precisely the two great Hippocratic texts that deal with procreation, De genitura and De natura pueri, belong to that part of the overall work attributed to Hippocrates. 129 In this way, our doctors were able constantly to have before their eyes theories invested with a spirit entirely different from that of AristotelianJGalenist physiology. The doctors would have been all the more obliged to know these theories because traditional physiology had to give space to them. On the origin and animation of the seed or seeds, on the ensoulment of the embryo, and on the order of formation of the organs, practically everything came from Aristotle or Galen. But as soon as it was a question of establishing the moment when the fetus was formed or discussing the duration of pregnancy, Hippocrates regained all his authority. Concerning twins, heredity, and the determination of sex, the ideas of Empedocles, Democritus, or Hippocrates were preferred to those of Aristotle, and matter, already decreed incapable of autonomous organization, suddenly found itself vested with extensive powers. All this was not without problems, as we have seen in connection with resemblance. On the other hand, the prestige of Aristotelianism was declining and the

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double-seed theory was gaining ever more partisans. Now, in a physiology of souls, this theory, as we have seen, gives rise to insoluble problems. The Galenists of strict obedience did not linger over these difficulties: they were firm enough believers not to quibble over a detail of dogma. But the more rigorous minds harbored questions. Besides, spontaneous generation scandalized spiritualist physiology, and the chance souls that had needs to be invoked were not very edifYing to the mind. A physiology exempt from these embarrassing questions would certainly be welcome. The Democritean tradition, resting here on the great authority of Hippocrates, might indeed provide this sought-after physiology. The seventeenth-century doctors turned, then, to the ancient tradition for weapons against the dominant teachings. Very probably, Aristotle and Galen would have had more difficulty in finding modern-day questioners if antiquity had not already been divided against itself in similar fashion. The questioners were modest enough and, after all, eschewed the role of revolutionaries. They were most often content to modifY the reigning physiology on certain points, and they do not seem to have thought of themselves-at least at the outset-as precursors or interpreters of a new scientific mentality. These people who went back to the ancient sources were often called "Neoterics" -that is, moderns, in contrast to the old doctors (veteres medici), who swore by Galen alone, and the faithful Aristotelians. The term was vague, had for some time been applied to the Arabs, and seems now to have been applied to all those who, without succumbing to the abominable chemical medicine, were still not unqualified members of the Aristotelian or Galenic sects. The Neoterics did not constitute a school, which makes the underlying unity of their thought and the clarity of their evolution all the more remarkable to contemplate. The meaning of this evolution appears still more clearly with more modern thinkers who, while not to be labeled Neoterics themselves, were no less their successors and the heirs to their efforts. From Parisanus to Gassendi, there flows a current of thought whose progress is continuous and that we shall now examine. Let us begin with the silhouette of anonymous Neoterics whose arguments Mundinius exposed and refuted in 1609.130 Partisans of the double-seed theory like Mundinius himself, these Neoterics found themselves troubled, as were all Galenists, by the encounter between the two seeds, at the same time active and passive, and they could not understand why, in these circumstances, each sex did not procreate separately. So they cut through the Gordian knot by withdrawing the active virtue entirely from both seeds. In

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this way, they no longer had to wonder if the form were acting on its own matter, 131 or if the seed were animated potentia vel actu, 132 with all the logical subtleties that such a notion assumed. Still, they had to answer the eternal question: What force is it that forms the embryo? For these Neoterics, it was the heat of the uterus, as well as the heat "distributed inside the fetus with a certain force, coming from the internal principles of the mother, through the mediation of the veins and arteries of the uterus." 133 With oviparous animals, it would be "the heat of the brooding mother." 134 And on this point, the Neoterics pointed out that if the egg contained an active principle, there would be no need for incubation. 135 Thus the female alone possesses the efficient force. But what was the nature of this "heat"? It was not a simple physical heat, for it "heats, forms, and vivifies." 136 It was thanks to it and it alone that the animal was what it wasa dog, a horse, a man. For this to be the case, the heat had to be "granted" to the species; otherwise, any kind of animal would be born of any other kind. In that case, however, how was ir that a hen could hatch out a duckling? It was because, among the ovipara, the female's heat was "granted" to the genus. 137 But, notes Mundinius, there were males that brooded! Moreover, this entire theory rested upon a confusion between the three causes of the formation of the chick, which were, as everyone knew, the principle cause (formative virtue), the adjutant cause (the innate heat in the egg), and the sine qua non cause (the heat of the brooding animal).U 8 Finally, Mundinius could not allow that heat alone might suffice for so astonishing a process. The Neoterics simplified phenomena outrageously. It was not possible to compare the membranes surrounding the fetus with the skin that formed on the surface of gruel. 139 And to attribute resemblance to matter was quite simply incomprehensible and devoid of sense.140 Mundinius's reaction to the Neoterics was nothing new: it had been Galen's to Erasistratus and was to be that of the Galenists (and many others) to Cartesian embryology. Doctrines of this sort, for Mundinius, overlooked the complexity of facts (this reaction by Mundinius makes clear for us the meaning of the undertaking he was condemning: it was in fact an effort at liberation from the hindrances that the action of souls, faculties, and forms, along with this action's awesome logical requirements, had set in the way of biology). The recourse to Hippocrates is all too evident: it was he who had explained that the seed took animal form thanks to a breath, and that it possessed this breath because it was in a warm place. 141 It was he as well who had compared the membrane surrounding the embryo to the "thin, membranous

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surface" that spread out over boiled bread.142 It was he who had improperly simplified the facts, so improperly, indeed, that our Neoterics did not dare to follow him in every detail, attributing to their own heat capacities that a simple physical heat could not possibly claim. In fact, they were closer to Ferne! who, in order to avoid the same dilemma, had maintained that each seed contained not a soul but "a certain virtue that prepares the seed to receive a soul," 143 and that this soul was given by the uterus, itself endowed with a specific "innate force." As Mundinius saw them, the Neoterics were still stuck in the physiology of faculties. In many respects, Fortunio Liceti was still less an innovator. He called himself an Aristotelian. 144 He lectured with learning on the coextension and attributes of natural souls,145 and he knew how to enumerate the four active faculties at work in the seed. 146 But this Aristotelian deemed females to have a seed different from the menstrual blood, and, what is more, he thought this to be Aristotle's opinion as well. 147 Above all, his ideas on the origin of the male seed were totally unorthodox. According to him, it had a double origin and a double nature. It was composed of a thick part that came from all the members 148 - clearly a reappearance of Hippocratic thought. This part of the seed was passive, yet in the members it had nonetheless acquired the generic form of the parts. In effect, it was composed of what remained of the nourishing fluid when the members had been fully nourished. Now, in order to be assimilated, this fluid had been through a third coction, which had made it resemble the parts that it was to nourish. 149 The idea is ingenious and explains, in a totally physical fashion, how this fraction of the seed acquired and kept its resemblance to the body it came from. The other portion of the seed came from the testicles, and it was this which possessed the "temperament" of the male parent, as well as the vegetative and sensitive souls and the four active faculties. 150 The souls of the seed were an emanation from the souls of the father, but afterwards they alone acted in the formation of the embryo.151 The female seed was absolutely identical to the male, with the same double origin and the same animation. 152 But in order to explain how it was that each seed did not begin to develop spontaneously and independently, it was necessary to attribute an essential role to the uterus, as Ferne! had. Thus, the uterus drew the seeds to itself and united them; it was also the uterus that gave rise to menstruation and made a single body out of the three elements in question. Above all, it was the uterus that stimulated the virtue of the seeds and summoned the nourishing blood. Finally, the uterus would bring on delivery. 153

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Liceti got rid of all the problems raised by the encounter of the seeds by specifying that what occurred was not a mixing but a union. The two vegetative souls and the two sensitive souls united so completely that the embryo had only one soul of each kind/ 54 a soul that was its own and that defined it, since it resulted from the mixing of the souls of the parents. But for Liceti, the real conception did not consist in the mixing of the seeds. Rather, the real generation was the production and animation of the seed in each of the parents. 155 Liceti's thought was not original. Not only did it have trailing behind it tatters of Aristotelian doctrine, but we should also recall that Jean Riolan pere had already distinguished two parts in the male seed, one of which came From the entire body. 156 Like Liceti, he had been led to this belief through the necessity of explaining inherited diseases and infirmities, as well as simple resemblance. Without going back to Hippocrates, then, this idea probably came from Fernel, who had attributed the formation of "seminal spirits" to three "members," the brain, the heart, and the liver. Fernel believed that these "spirits" were rendered fertile in the testicles, and he thought in saying all this that he was being faithful to Aristotle. 157 But Liceti made a shift in the relative importance of the issues, studying the original material of seed at greater length than its animation, which as far as he was concerned no longer raised any difficulties. Liceti's misinterpretation of Aristotle's thought is also very significant. Above all, however, Liceti gave new currency to ideas that would enjoy great success: the origin of the seed in a surplus of nourishing fluid, stamped with a resemblance to the parts from which it came; and the animation of the seed through an emanation from the souls of the parents, an animation considered to be the true conception. Liceti did not begin to draw all the necessary conclusions from these theories, and he may not even have seen where they would lead. Yet they were to lead far, as we shall soon see. A contemporary of Fortunio Liceti's, Emilio Parisano, adopted analogous positions, but in a more decisive fashion. Like Liceti, he believed the seed had a dual origin/ 58 but the two parts did not have the same respective importance for him. The seed prepared in the testicles was not animate. 159 Its role was exceedingly modest, reduced to the nourishment of the true seed, which Parisanus called the organic seed-semen organicum-and to which he devoted all of book 2 in his work. This organic seed was derived from the entire body. It was prepared in each of the parts, but it was also animated in them/ 60 and it was this production and animation that constituted true generation.161 For the parent, the seed was an alter ego, and this was why animals loved their

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young. 162 The seed was alive before ejaculation, just as grain was alive before being planted,l 63 and here we see coming clearly to the fore the comparison of semen to the seed of a plant, which had remained implicit with Liceti. Parisanus's arguments were not new-the violent effect of pleasure on the entire body, the inheritance of mutilations (one-armed parents produced onearmed children), and the resemblance of children to parents. 164 These were the arguments of Democritus and his disciples. But what particularly interested Parisanus were the problems of resemblance-we would say heredityto which he devoted his third book in its entirety. He rejected all the current theories, recalling in connection with the determination of sex that the uterus had only one cavity, and maintaining that the right side of the body was no warmer than the left. 165 The child would be of the sex whose semen had been predominant-the theory of Democritus. As for "resemblance of image," it was contained in the seed, for each of the particles composing this seed preserved a resemblance to the part of the parental body from which it had come and in which it had been animated. This resemblance was not visible, nor very clear, but just "lightly traced and sketched." 166 As for the encounter of the seeds and their souls, it did not create any difficulties: the souls united, as Hippocrates had stated in the first book of De diaeta, forming the single soul of the embryo. 167 Even more than in Liceti's account, the traditional problems had disappeared here, and the perspectives had changed. The seed was no longer homogeneous matter, the mere foundation for the souls and the faculties. It was already the complex product of an entire elaboration. As Mundinius said, it was "begotten, not begetting." With a seed such as this, there was no longer a serious problem with the development of the embryo. Although the notion of preexistent germs had not yet arisen, the idea of their preformation was already present. Parisanus came up with a very telling argument in this regard. If the seed's matter was homogeneous and ready to take on any sort of form, how could one explain a two-headed monster in terms of a simple superabundance of this undifferentiated matter? Nature could just as well have created a larger embryo. If a teratism had two heads, it was because the material of the superfluous head could not be used for anything else- its role was predetermined; in a nutshell, the material already contained this head. And to this Mundinius did not quite know how to reply. 168 It is interesting, moreover, to see how the imagery of the seed encapsulating the plant superimposes itself here, foreshadowing the imagery of the germ, which would be generally accepted by the end of the century, bespeaking a

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totally different way of seeing phenomena. As for the resemblance-bearing particles-so small as to be invisible, but nonetheless primary elements of the seed and the embryo- they were not yet atoms or aggregates of atoms, but they did evoke the idea of atoms, all the more powerfully because of frequent references to the name and thought of Democritus. As a faithful guardian of traditional Galenism, Mundinius attempted to refute Parisanus and Liceti; 169 dialogue was no longer possible, however. It was not hard to throw in Parisanus's face the silly things he had said about flsh, but that did not lead anywhere. Parisanus had been imprudent enough TO say that it was a false seed, the one coming from the testicles, that formed the fetal envelopes. Now, this false seed was not animate. What, therefore, was the source of the blood vessels contained in these envelopes? But these were trifles. As a last resort, Mundinius was reduced to reproaching Liceti and Parisanus-and with some reason-for having distorted Aristotle. And it is fair to say that Parisanus's response to this was rather weak. 170 The critique offered by the Paduan physician Giovanni Girolamo Bronzerio was more trenchant and to the point. 171 Although a Galenist, Bronzerio was more familiar with modern thought than Mundinius and was able to cite Ferne! and Lucretius. He saw no serious problem in deriving the material (corpulentia) of the seed from the whole body.l72 Indeed, he was close to sympathizing with Liceti's opinions. But he could not conceive how the seed's particles were able to preserve the image of the parts from which they came. To say, like Ferne!, that it was thanks to the spirits resolved nothing. For how were the spirits "able, through contact with these parts, to take on their plan or their composition, and then preserve it?" 173 To speak of an "imprint" (sigillatio) was simply to indulge in a laughable metaphor. To say that the image of the parts was received by the spirits as visual images was not to be serious, for it was the soul that saw, not spirits. Besides, the spirits could not "take on images of fingernails, or skin, or the convex parts of members, or the inside of the bones." 174 "I can accept that the spirit has amazing faculties; but I cannot accept that, relying simply on one's imagination, it should be granted unreasonable powers beyond its capabilities." J?S This major argument was not Bronzerio's only one, 176 but it was his most important. It was the objection always encountered by theories deriving the seed from the entire body, and thereby claiming to explain resemblance. In due course, Maupertuis would have to deal with it again, and Bronzerio's clearheadedness does him honor. His critique, however, was to have no effect on the success of the new theory. It was perhaps the publication of Parisanus's De subtilitate that impelled

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another Italian physician, Giuseppe degli Aromatari, to publish a pamphlet in 1625 setting forth his ideas on the generation of plants in the form of seventeen assertions. 177 He had been working on the question for many years, but, he tells us, the host of noble patients who had been placing themselves under his care had not allowed him time to write books. Without appending proofs, he asserted, then, that true generation lay in the formation of the seeds of plants, in which spirits mixed with matter in such manner that the germ formed a parvissima planta [tiny plant] perfectly constituted and alive. 178 Everything that seemed insoluble about the animation of the seed thus vanished. As a final touch, the author extended his theory from seed to egg: "We believe that the chick is designed in the egg before being incubated by the hen." Still, incubation furnished not only heat but also a nutritive material. Viviparous animals were formed in the same way, "as we shall tell, God willing, in a book De generatione." 179 Since this book never appeared, we have no way of knowing whether the author's thought was original, or if he was content to use ideas already in circulation. Whatever the case, this little pamphlet might well have passed unnoticed had Harvey not met degli Aromatari in Venice, and had he not spoken of this meeting in his De generatione animalium.' 80 In 1674, Juste Schrader reprinted Harvey's observations, with a preface in which he gave a brief account of writings on the question. As a partisan of preformation, he named degli Aromatari and Marcello Malpighi as authorities. 181 Subsequently, degli Aromatari was often cited, and he is known even today as the inventor, or at least the seventeenth-century reviver, of the theory of preformation, if not of the germ theory-a reputation that seems disproportionate to the actual importance of his work. Nonetheless, from Liceti to Parisanus, the notion was developing that the seed was composed of particles originating in every part of the parents' bodies. No doubt Hippocrates was the ultimate source of this idea, but all indications are that it encountered peculiarly favorable conditions in the contemporary development of atomist thought. Traditional physiology had unquestioningly considered the seed a liquid, continuous, and homogeneous matter. The scientists to be considered next-including even Descartes, who was so hostile to Epicurus-no longer imagined the seed except as composed of solid particles, moving freely in a liquid milieu, now serving merely as its container. As noted, Sennert, although far from a believer in preformation of the germ, nonetheless asserted that living beings, just like inanimate bodies, were formed of atoms. These two points of view were equally unfounded and equally unjustified by any microscopical technique. Atoms, particles, and cor-

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pusdes were objects of the mind as abstract and a priori as forms and faculties-even more arbitrary, inasmuch as the notion of faculties did not lead to prejudgment of the physical conformation of matter, and because their workings were at least seen with the naked eye. And yet, where Galen and all his disciples saw faculties at work in a homogeneous matter, Descartes and his contemporaries were now to see, with as certain and immediate a vision, particles subjected to the laws of movement. (How admirable and dangerous a power is thought!) Nonetheless, it was not easy to identify the atoms and particles of semen, for atoms could in no way change form, and one was hard put to explain how they could receive the imprint of the parts of the parental bodies. This may be why there were so few physicians among the atomist and corpuscularist philosophers shortly to be discussed. Amateur biologists and philosopher-biologists, these innovators, including Descartes and Gassendi, would find it easier to overturn inherited science: they would be hampered by neither their own prejudices nor their prior knowledge. The first among them was characteristic in this regard: an admiral and courtier as much as a philosopher, Sir Kenelm Digby had in him nothing of the medical practitioner or academic. Like Sennert, however, and perhaps more strongly, Digby was influenced by the philosophy of the chemists. He may be classed, like Sennert, among the spiritualist thinkers, and his personality, like that of Sennert or Descartes, helps us understand how spiritualism contributed to the dissemination and acceptance of a strictly materialist vision of vital phenomena. For Digby, who devoted some long treatises to the immortality of the human soul, understood life to be nothing but matter and motion. He was as absolute on this point as his friend Descartes. In broaching his study of procreation in the treatise Of Bodies (published in 1644), Digby started out by examining the theory that derived semen from all the parts of the body. This theory seemed to him the most widely accepted, and he attributed it collectively to his "teachers." He regarded it as plausible, and even cites some facts confirming it: a tomcat whose tail had been cut off sired kittens half of which were mutilated and the other half whole. This would seem to prove that in half of the cases, the seed of the female was not able to compensate for the insufficiency in the male seed. Another fact was still more interesting: Digby had seen in his travels a woman with two thumbs on her left hand. Upon inquiry, he found out that the mother and grandmother had shown the same peculiarity, which appeared as well in her daughters and her one granddaughter, whereas her sons were exempt from

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it. 182 We have here a type of observation that Maupertuis would indulge in and would explain by means of an analogous theory. Digby did not, however, see things in the same way. He did not understand how particles could be recruited from part of the body nor, above all, how they could find in the seed a place corresponding to the one they had occupied in the body. It was always the same problem. Digby preferred to accept that the seed was formed from the surplus of nourishing blood, after it had passed through the whole body. 183 This seed would not contain a more or less formed animal.I 84 1t might be said to contain the animal in potential, if that Aristotelian expression were not incompatible with Digby's thinking. Digby himself says that the seed has a "specific virtue," but he immediately makes it clear that it is not a question here of an occult quality, as with those philosophers "who know neither what they are saying nor what they are thinking." This meant that the seed preserved the degree and number of both the rarefied and solid parts of the body, a notion that Digby explains by way of chemical considerations. 185 His thinking is not exactly clear, but the mechanistic intention is evident nonetheless. Regarding the development of the seed, Digby is even more categorical: this development came about uniquely and necessarily through the play of external circumstances, among which heat played an essential role. 186 The study of plant life proved it: under the action of heat and humidity, the seed could not fail to swell, burst open, and then put out a root and a stem. The stem could not do other than grow, and so on. By studying in very close succession the stages of growth of vegetable life, Digby worked to convey to his reader a comfortable sense that this growth gave no sign of internal predetermination. As to animals, however, Digby was more prudent. He had studied the development of the chick in the egg, and on this point he refers the reader to his compatriot Harvey, whom he seems to have known personally, since he alludes to studies as yet unpublished. 187 In his study of the development of the chick, Digby had used an artificial incubator, which his friend Sir John Heydon had taught him how to build. 188 It is clear that the heat of which Digby speaks is purely physical and has no connection with the esoteric heat of Mundinius's Neoterics. The intervention of human meansthe artificial incubator-deserves special note: it indicates a profound unsettling of the relationship between man and nature. Digby certainly deserved to be one of Descartes's friends. Still, he was perfectly happy to bring in the "specific virtue" of the seed to assist in the embryo's development. This was the virtue that quickly took up residence in the heart, the first organ to be formed, which participated in "the nature of fire." Thus one finds an odd

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mixture of the opinions of Harvey and Descartes, not to mention Aristotle, in a man who had elsewhere wisely judged the operations of the heart. Finally, the problems of resemblance were explained by means of the animal spirits that the blood has gathered in the body of the parent and brought together in the seed. If the explanation was admittedly a bit weak, it was because the phenomenon remained a nettlesome one. It is easy to see how Digby followed in the wake of Liceti, Parisanus, and Sennert. Nonetheless, he went further than all of them and ended up closest to Descartes, whose personal influence he may have felt. Like Descartes, Digby wished to recognize only matter and motion. But if in the background of his thought there was an atomistic, or at least corpuscularistic, conception of living matter, Digby refrained from giving detailed descriptions of the action of corpuscles as though he had observed it. In this way, he sidestepped a point of possible ridicule that Descartes was not always able to avoid. Still, his assertions are often arbitrary, his description of vegetable growth is not very convincing, and the role he attributes to external conditions seems excessive. It is precisely on these grounds that the English physician Nathaniel Highmore was to criticize him. Highmore could not accept the notion that heat and cold were enough to account for the formation of animals and vegetables. 189 An explanation of this kind would be far too simplistic. Still, there was no question of returning to outmoded doctrines. Highmore was decidedly an atomist, and his entire interpretation of phenomena was atomistic and materialistic. For him, the souls of plants and of animals were material, composed of subtle atoms. On the question of the human soul, naturally, Highmore made no pronouncement! He merely wondered- and the question seems traditional by this time, demonstrating the influence of Sennert-whether the human soul had its origin in a direct and particular creation or if it was an emanation of the parental souls. As one might imagine, like Sennert, he chose the second solution, but it is immediately evident that in this materialist framework of thought- materialist in the full sense of the word this time-the human soul itself stood in great danger of being composed of atoms. For Highmore, the seed was obviously composed of atoms that come from all parts of the body, 190 drained out by the blood and brought together in the testicles. In the reproduction of egg-layers, the two seeds gathered in the cicatricula, and for the development of the embryo, Highmore referred his reader to Fabrizio's observations, perhaps for lack of knowledge of Harvey's, which appeared during the same year as his own book. 191 In viviparous animals, the

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atoms gathered in the uterus, took their places, and the embryo developed under the action of a heat analogous to that released in fermentation. 192 The determination of sex occurred through the predominance of one seed over the other, and resemblance obviously posed no problem. As for spontaneous generation, it required nothing more than a gathering of atoms and the heat of the Sun. Nonetheless, for Highmore as for Sennert, the atoms had their own laws: spontaneous generation did not occur in a random fashion; rather, a given material always produced the same animals. 193 Still, it was not necessary, as it had been for Sennert, that this matter be or have been animate, since the souls of animals were composed of atoms. Highmore's thought, then, displays no originality. It may owe something to the example of Bacon, who had picked up Hippocrates's theory in a very general way, attributing the formation of the embryo to an apparently material "spirit," brought into existence in the seeds by the heat of the uterus. 194 Above all, however, Highmore recapitulated and perpetuated the entire lineage of scientists just reviewed. His interest lies precisely in his having carried atomistic biology to its logical conclusion. Everything was made of atoms, even the soul, or at least the soul of animals. Everything was to be explained through atoms; that is, through their encounter, their motion, their assemblage, and their separation. Highmore's atomist faith was such that he did not raise the simplest objections to his own thought. In this regard, he constituted a terminus beyond which it was scarcely possible to proceed, and this section might be concluded here were it not for the need to speak of Pierre Gassendi, whose work, although published after Highmore's, was written before it. Indeed, although less daring than Highmore, Gassendi may have gone further. Gassendi's thought on the generation of animals, as it is expressed in the Syntagma philosophicum/ 95 resembles in many respects material we already have seen. Gassendi was, of course, a partisan of the dual-seed theory. 196 Along with Epicurus and the Stoics, but also Liceti, Parisanus, and Highmore, he believed that the seed derived from the entire body, and he upbraids Aristotle at length for having judged otherwise. 197 For him, too, true generation was not the formation of the members starting from the seed but the formation of the seed itself. He joined with Parisanus in illustrating his thought with a vegetable image, that of the grain of wheat. 198 But Gassendi did not seek to minimize the complexity of the facts, or the extraordinary triumph represented by the formation of a living being: "There must be in it [the seed] perfect knowledge and highly refined craftsmanship, for both are manifestly required for the work; but this knowledge and this craftsmanship go so far

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beyond the ingenuity of our minds and the skill of our hands that we cannot conceive of them with the power of our understanding." 199 It was at this point that the problem of souls arose. Gassendi had warned of his refusal to label the principle that caused plants to grow a "soul," 200 and of his conception of the soul of animals as "a certain very rarefied substance and, so to speak, the cream of matter." 201 In other words, the soul of the animal was composed of atoms, distributed throughout the entire body. The soul was thus "a summation of the whole body," 202 and the soul of the seed, having emanated from the soul of the begetterspeaking here of animals-could represent the begetter's body. This material soul could not, however, possess the knowledge and craftsmanship required tor the formation of the embryo, and the "representation" of the parent body could not be effected by either an inconceivable image or an impossible deformation of the atoms. With Epicurus, Gassendi called upon a concatenation of movements that passed from the begetter to the seed and then to the embryo. This motion involved aggregates of atoms, and at the moment of conception, the corresponding atoms coming from the two seeds gathered together by virtue of the attraction of like to like, of which Hippocrates had given an entirely physical description. 203 In this way, it was possible to say that all the organs were formed together from the outset,204 but as yet "confused, dispersed, and imperfect." For "it is evident that the seed is heterogeneous, and composed of the same parts from which the organic parts themselves become constituted gradually and through a continuous concatenation." 205 The human soul raised a special problem. It was not a question here of its nature, an issue Gassendi does not raise in these pages, and consideration of which would go far beyond the limits of this study. Accepting as a given the proposition that the soul was present in the body from the very moment the latter was formed, Gassendi begins by noting that the date of completion of this formation is very uncertain. He then notes that the soul could well be present from the onset of the formation, since the organs already existed, even if in an imperfect state. For a nascent soul could be content with imperfect organs-a somewhat curious argument. At the same time, the human soul was created directly by God, even though Tertullian and other Fathers had derived it from the soul of the parents, at a time when it was licit to sustain this opinion. As for the date of the suffusion of the soul, since it was a matter depending upon the free choice of God, we could know nothing about it without Revelation. Gassendi leaned towards the moment of birth. But once again, "God alone knows so far" [Deus solus hactenus novit]. 206 This entire

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argument is conducted in an odd way, and one may wonder whether Gassendi was not tempted by the theory of emanation, which would permit the human soul to be present in the seed and, at the same time, would better fit both with his system and with the thought of the authors whose opinions he shared. On determination of sex, Gassendi contributed nothing new. He construed it as the victory of one seed over the other, without being able to say if this victory was achieved through quantity, heat, the predominance of particles representing the organs of one sex over the other, or in some other manner.207 On the other hand, his ideas about resemblance are quite remarkable. He criticizes the theory based upon the strength of imagination, for it did not account for resemblance that skipped a generation. But a theory based upon the transmission of the movement of atoms was open to the same criticism, since it was not possible to see how the movement could be interrupted and then start up again. Gassendi supposed, therefore, that in the seed, there were systems of atoms, "molecules," that preserved-possibly through an internal movement?-characteristics of the parent. These molecules could withhold their atoms in the embryo being formed and save themselves in this way until a later generation, for which, reentering the general movement of the atoms, they reproduced the characteristics that they had preserved. Or, in the generation they did participate in, these molecules might be able to beget molecules like themselves capable of producing in the following generation effects they themselves had somehow not previously produced.2° 8 Gassendi presents this idea only as a hypothesis about a very difficult question, but this assigning of a material basis to a hereditary characteristic deserves note. It is on the subject of spontaneous generation that Gassendi's thought shows itself especially fruitful. Based on his own order of exposition, I should have started with this issue, which seems indeed to have particularly interested him. 209 He begins by displaying everything repellent to reason in this notion: after all, stones and plants could not be born without seed; how, then, could animals? But spontaneous generation above all raised very embarrassing problems. It could not be assigned to chance, only to an intelligent cause. Still, no "seminal power" could be found functioning there. Must we then have recourse to God, along with certain "grave doctors"? No doubt God was the "remote cause" of everything, but to suppose that He would intervene directly in this instance was to admit either that His creation was imperfect- "in natura condenda ... sua industria defecerit" -or that animals born through spontaneous generation were supernatural! 210 A natural cause there certainly was, but we did not know it. Could we say, with Liceti,211 that ani-

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mals of this nature could be born only from living or dead matter in which a soul subsisted? But how were we to believe "that there is a form in matter without its informing matter?" 212 (Here Gassendi wears his Aristotelian hat!) Did we, then, have to fall back on an action of the Heavens, acting through the ministry of light and heat? But light had nothing to do with the case, and if heat was necessary, it was not sufficient. Under these circumstances, we were absolutely obliged to fall back on a seed, or "a little soul [animula] contained in this seed and set up for this role." 213 This little soul is "like a tiny flame [jlammula]," but it is a special little flame-sui generis-, which, nourished by a particular kind of humidity, spreads throughout the seminal matter. "In attempting to find development through innumerable and imperceptible little meanderings [maeandrufi] it is modified by them in different ways," and this was how it could animate the seed. ''And as the internal composition of all the seeds is not of a same type ... the architecture of all the animals is not the same." 21 4 Still, even if we accepted that this flammula could vivifY the seed, the problem of the formation of animals remained unsolved. They had a certain form because that form was already sketched in the seed. Where did the seed come from? Gassendi's answer was utterly remarkable for its time: "One may say that the seeds of animals are formed in the present, either from atoms or upon other principles that God created at the outset, and that He chose to endow with forms and movements in such wise that, gathering together, mixing with one another, holding and attaching themselves to one another in a certain way and a certain order, they form certain seeds, and certain animals. But may one not also plausibly propose that the seeds of this kind were created at the beginning of the world by the Supreme Creator of things, and scattered pell-mell throughout Earth and Water?" Thus, "it seems that this fecundity should not be understood by way of first principles of which the seeds are composed, but rather by way of the seeds themselves, which God Himself composed." And this, in the case of spontaneous generations, would explain the extraordinary competence of the animula. Gassendi did not limit this explanation to spontaneous generation alone. Without amplification, he wondered if one might not extend it to all modes of generation: "Since God can have created at the outset the seeds of all things, and since one may thus say that all things have been produced since the beginning through that primal generation of which we have just spoken."215 In the case of certain animals, these "primal seeds," which were "extremely small or, if you will, utterly imperceptible," gathered into a per-

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ceptible mass. With other animals, they could gather in smaller number and remain invisible.Z 16 Thus Gassendi found himself obliged to fall back on the preexistence of germs, through the impossibility of satisfactorily explaining the spontaneous generation of whole animals. Moreover, the way towards this theory had been prepared, no doubt, by the idea of the preformation of the seed, brought back into currency from Hippocrates and slowly refined, as we have seen, in close relationship with the progress of atomism. This time, however, the line had been crossed: it was no longer a matter of believing that the seed was preformed prior to its development through the constitutive process in the parent body; it was a matter of accepting that it had been created directly by God at the beginning of time. To be sure, Gassendi seems to have proposed this hypothesis formally only in the case of spontaneous generation. If he attempted to apply it to standard generations, he set forth the already current theory of the formation of seed by means of a dejluxus of panicles. Nonetheless, this explanation of spontaneous generation should be seen specifically as the triumph of an atomist and materialist theory of reproduction. This is quite clear with Highmore. Gassendi, while not a biologist, was at least aware from the literature of the difficulties raised in traditional physiology by spontaneous generation. He had been able to see how attentive the old doctors had been to the original character of vital phenomena, and it may have been through contact with them that he had become sensitive to the weaknesses in mechanistic biology, to the point of being able to find only in God a satisfactory explanation of the spontaneous generation of a living being. And as it was well known that God no longer intruded upon Creation, except in rare and miraculous occurrences, there was no other recourse than to push back this action by the Creator to the very moment of Creation. Gassendi was able to believe, moreover, that he was remaining faithful to Epicurus, all the while Christianizing him. For Lucretius had spoken more than once of the primordia rerum that develop on earth but that possibly come from heaven. 217 Gassendi's scruples and his resistance to the blandishments of mechanistic thought are nonetheless remarkable. We shall find no such thing with Descartes.

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IV Descartes Following a strictly chronological order of presentation, Descartes should have been dealt with immediately after Digby, just as Gassendi should have been discussed before Highmore. I wished, however, to show how Gassendi, sensing the limits of mechanism, went further than Highmore; and I believe that by virtue of the clarity of his mechanistic ideal and the decisiveness of his failure, Descartes deserves special study quite apart from the importance of his name and his thought. The universal science that Descartes dreamed of fashioning included a biology as well as a physics. In part 5 of the Discours de Ia methode, in which he unveils to the public the Traite du monde that "certain considerations" had kept him from publishing, Descartes dwells at even greater length on physiological issues than on those involving "inanimate bodies." He recognized, however, that he had not been able to apply to living beings the method he had adopted for physics and that would be that of the Principia: describing the origin of the universe in order better to understand its nature. For the nature of things was "far easier to conceive when one sees them gradually coming into existence ... than when one considers them completely finished." 218 Clearly, such a method flows necessarily from the very nature of Cartesian science, and the (at least putative) history of nature reproduces the process of deductive reasoning, starting with first definitions. For Descartes, this method was as much to be desired for use in biology as in physics.219 And if it is true that Descartes attacked the study of living beings in 1629,220 and that he was forced by 1632 temporarily to give up trying to explain procreation/21 the subject must have attracted his attention since the beginning of his research. The I632 failure, formally recognized in the Discours de Ia methode, 222 had certainly been painful for him. "I had almost lost hope of finding the causes of the formation [of animals]," he subsequently wrote. 223 Despite this, hereturned to the problem on several occasions,2 24 for the compelling reason that embryology might ultimately constitute the touchstone of Cartesian science. Giving up final causes, no longer considering anything but matter and motion in this area, meant, as we have seen, taking on a powerful adversary. It meant overturning the order of causes and effects traditionally accepted since Aristotle (save by the materialist thinkers discussed above), an order that set

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up the perfected individual as the true cause of embryonic phenomena. With the loss of this cause in the shipwreck of Aristotelian thought, another cause would have to be found. While by no means easy, the enterprise remained nonetheless indispensable, for a failure here would compromise the entire method. Thus it was that Descartes let out a true cry of victory when he thought he had discovered the secret of animal reproduction. He was still speaking about it prudently in January 1648,225 but shortly thereafter he had no qualms about writing: "In meditating on this, I have discovered so much new territory that I have almost no doubt of being able to complete my physics as I wish, provided I have the leisure and the facilities to perform some experiments." 226 With this in mind, it may be affirmed that in Descartes's own eyes, the entire success of Cartesian "physics" depended entirely on the solution it was able to offer to the problems of generation. Moreover, there is reason to believe that Descartes thought he had found the answer, and that he did not publish it only because death snatched from him "the leisure and facilities to perform some experiments" and not because he mistrusted his discoveries. Still, Descartes's ideas on animal generation have come down to us only through posthumous works whose date of composition cannot always be reliably determined. It has been established that the treatise De fa formation de /'animal, published in r664 by Claude Clerselier under the title De fa formation du foetus as a sequel to the Traite de l'homme, was the work on which Descartes had been working in 1647-48, and thus represents his latest thought. 227 We also, however, possess a collection of notes, published in 1701 in the Opera posthuma, under the title of Primae cogitationes circa generationem animalium, and another collection of notes, taken by Leibniz from manuscripts of Descartes's, then published in the mid nineteenth century by Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil under the title of Excerpta anatomica. 228 These texts are far from negligible in importance; unfortunately, they also present several difficulties. The notes taken by Leibniz are undeniably authentic, but among the ones of interest to us, only a few are dated, from November and December of 1637. As for the Primae cogitationes, they are extremely composite in nature. A lone fragment bears a date, February 1648, which places it in the period of the treatise De fa formation de !'animal. Other notes are certainly very much earlier in date. There is much repetition, and often even contradiction, from one note to another. A fragment alluding to the "sympathy" between fetus and mother reminds us that Descartes had used this notion in his Compendium musicae of about 1619.229 Another important fragment has the lungs and

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liver of the embryo appear before the heart and the brain. One of the notes taken by Leibniz, dated December 1637, preserves this order, whereas the treatise De La formation de I 'animal considers the heart as first to be formed. Now, this idea appears at the end of the Excerpta after the fragments dated 1637 and following systematic observations on the embryonic development of the chick. From all this we can conclude, at least as a hypothesis, that the more theoretical Primae cogitationes were partly anterior to and partly contemporary with the Excerpta anatomica, which are above all a collection of observations, and that these two collections of notes, which seem to be set up in an approximately chronological order, lead the reader from Descartes's initial reflections to the definitive ideas in the treatise De formation de !'animal. As fcJC the authenticity of the Primae cogitationes, I see no serious reason to question it, despite the authority of Victor Cousin and of Dr. Guillaume-Scipion Bertrand de Saint-Germain. 23 ° Certain passages in the Primae cogitationes are found verbatim in Leibniz's notes, and the rigor, daring, and inadequacies of this collection are unmistakably familiar from Descartes's other writings. I thus have no qualms about using this text. Descartes's clearly expressed ideal was a mathematical embryology: "If we knew all the parts of the seed of some particular animal, man for example, we could deduce from that alone, on the basis of entirely mathematical and certain reasons, the entire shape and conformation of each of its members." 231 This would be true science, the science that followed the movement from cause to effect. However, lacking so full a knowledge of the seed, we could follow the path backward: "Knowing several particularities of this conformation, we can deduce the seed from them." 2 ·12 In any case, Descartes did not claim to have figured it all out. Many experiments remained to be done, and the treatise De La formation de !'animal contains only general and indisputable ideas. 233 The importance Descartes accorded experimentation deserves passing attention. As proven by the Excerpta anatomica, he had made many embryological observations. 234 Like Harvey (but probably without realizing it) and following the example of Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, he had set up a chronological account of the formation of the chick, on the basis of more than thirty observations made on embryos of different ages,Z 35 and it was in this enterprise that he first noted, apparently, that the first organ to be formed was the heart.2 36 One cannot thus accuse him of having worked purely in the abstract. Still, here as elsewhere, Descartes experimented only to verify the correctness of the deductions he had made from his principles. At best, he conceded ex-

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perimentation a few secondary points: for example, reasoning indicated that the seed quickly produced the essential organs of the embryo, but in how much time? "Perhaps in a day or two, perhaps in an hour: for this is a matter of fact, which cannot be specified by reasoning." 237 For him, true science was a matter of deductive demonstration, 238 and experimentation had nothing to contribute to principles. It was through a purely methodological, or rather, metaphysical, a priori that Descartes had chosen to find in vital phenomena only matter and movement. When it came to justifYing this decision, he applied himself primarily to demolishing any other possible explanation. The preface to the Description du corps humain demonstrates the impossibility of explaining the vital functions and the movements of the body through the action of the soul. 239 In the Primae cogitationes, we are reminded that the play of particles, however fortuitous its cause may seem, is nonetheless an expression of the "eternal laws of Nature." And Descartes adds: "Would we have everything carried out by some spirit? But which one? Or, indeed, directly by God? Why, then, are there occasional monsters? Or rather by that eminently wise nature, who draws her wisdom only from the folly of human thought?" 240 On the level of principles, the mechanistic explanation was therefore necessary. On the level of facts, it could at times be unsatisfYing. In this regard, it is not without interest to note that Descartes felt the need to recall his great principles precisely when rather feebly concluding a clumsy explanation of how the embryo's sex was determined, and when it seemed urgent to disarm a possible censor "with raised eyebrow." Nonetheless, this justification of mechanism by way of negative arguments was insufficient; it remained for Descartes to "explain to us the mechanism of our body so fully" as to dispel all doubt. Let us follow him in his explanations. The Primae cogitationes begins with a brief exposition on spontaneous generation, and it may be noted in passing that Descartes follows the same order as Gassendi and Highmore. Little was needed for life to appear. Heat acting on a body in putrefaction brought into action the rarefied parts, which would be the vital spirits, and other thicker parts, which would become the blood. The encounter between these parts gave birth to life in a spot that would become the heart of the animal, since the heart was the place "where a perpetual combat is going on between the blood and the animal spirit," this combat being life itself. "Since, therefore, so little is needed to make an animal, it is surely not surprising that so many animals, so many worms and insects, are spontaneously formed under our eyes in all putrefYing matter." 241 The birth of life was thus as easy to conceive for Descartes as for Highmore,

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and we find nothing here like Gassendi's misgivings. Nonetheless, Descartes was concerned, more than Highmore, to give a vital character to his primal combination of particles. The principle of standard generations is just as simple. Descartes was naturally a supporter of the dual-seed theory: when the male seed was alone in the uterus, it flowed out "through the same pathway by which it has entered: tor there is nothing to keep it there." 242 True conception required the mixture of the two seeds, 243 which came from the parents' entire bodies and were the ultimate product of nourishment. Thus they were composed of particles having exactly the same forms as those of the nourishing liquid and as those of the parts of the body. 244 Among these particles, some were more rarefied and dissociated themselves more easily from the mass. Others were coarser. 245 Nonetheless, it was not absolutely possible to say that the seed contained the already formed animal. A plant seed "may have its parts arranged and situated in a certain fashion, which cannot be changed without its making them useless; but ... it is not the same with that of animals, which, being highly fluid ... seems to be nothing other than the indistinct mixture of two liquids." 246 Descartes was an unbending partisan of epigenesis: he did nothing to lessen the difficulty. Once the two seeds had blended together, there occurred a rarefaction provoked by the heat of the womb and then a fermentation. The two seeds, "serving as a leaven for each other, heat up so that some of their particles, acquiring the same agitation as fire, expand, and press against the others and by this means arrange them little by little in the fashion required in order to form the members. And these two liquids do not at all need to be very different in order to do that. For, as one sees that an old dough can make the new one rise, and that the foam produced by beer suffices to serve as leaven for another beer, so is it easy to believe that the seeds of the two sexes, mixing together, serve as leaven for each other." 247 From this heat and fermentation -which one might compare as well to that of hay or of new wine-was born the movement of the panicles, which would allow the formation of the organs. In the Primae cogitationes, the most rarefied parts of the two seeds gathered and blended at the closed end of the uterus, where they formed the brain. The thicker parts had stayed instead near the entrance to the uterus, where they would form the abdomen, the legs, and the feet. Meanwhile, as the rarefied particles coming back down from the brain towards the center formed in passing the lungs, which were "the root of the venous artery," the coarse particles, or at least most of them, returning upwards towards the center, formed

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the liver, which was "the root of the cavous vein." From the lungs and the liver, the rarefied and coarse particles sought each other out and, having met, formed the heart. And as the rarefied particles were animated by a livelier and more rapid movement, they proceeded further, and that was why the heart pointed downward. As the rarefied particles were the animal spirits, and the coarse particles the blood, they joined together in the heart and there began "that perpetual struggle in which animal life consists." 248 This order of the formation of organs was already no longer accepted by Descartes in a text also drawn from the Primae cogitationes, distinguishing three stages in the embryo's life: the first stage presided over the formation of the lungs, the liver, and the heart; in the second stage were formed the brain, the bones, membranes, flesh, and skin. With the third stage, nourishment through the umbilicus began. 249 The text is not dated, but a note in the Excerpta anatomica of December 1637 assigns the same order to the formation of the organs? 50 This note is followed by others, in which Descartes sets down the result of his observations on the formation of the chick-and these observations proved that the heart appeared on the second day, while the liver was visible only on the tenth. 251 Descartes was therefore conceiving the system that he was to expound in the treatise De la formation de !'animal: the primal movement of the particles produced by fermentation induced the association of some of them, forming the heart.Z 52 "As soon as the heart begins to be formed in t11is way, the rarefied blood that comes from it takes its course directly towards the place it is freest to go, and that is the place where the brain is then formed." 253 Having arrived at this end point of the embryo, the blood flowed directly back towards the other end point, forming, as it went, the spinal column. Flowing back again, it returned to the heart.254 Thus was set up a kind of vital swirl, 255 which formed the essential organs as well as the vessels that linked them, entirely through strict application of the laws of mechanics.256 All these parts were formed directly from the matter of the seeds, and Descartes took his investigation no further. 257 In his embryology as in his cosmology, however, Descartes was forced to bring in particles of diverse forms in order to explain the phenomena. Some were rarefied and some were coarse, as we have seen. But this initial distinction was not good enough. Among the rarefied particles, there were "those that are extremely rarefied, and at the same time extremely solid and extremely active": these were the spirits. And there were also those that, "without being extremely active or extremely solid, possess nonetheless their movement, each individually": these were the airy particles, those that formed the

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lungs. 258 Among the particles composing the blood, it was necessary to distinguish "four principal kinds of parts; those that are rarefied and light, like the spirit of wine; those that are rarefied and ramified, like oil; those that are thick and light, like waters and salts; those that are thick and ramified, like earth and ashes." 259 Thus it was possible to conceive that the blood could run through the body forming, thanks to the ramified particles, the tissue of the arteries and the veins. For the rarefaction of the blood in the heart, which separated certain particles, brought others together "by pressing and rubbing against them in such way that there come to exist around them several little branches that easily attach to one another." These particles "serve precisely to constitute and nourish the solid parts." They could only do so by disjoining themselves, which occurred easily: "in passing time and again through the heart, their branches are gradually broken, and in the end they are separated through the same action that had joined them together. Then, because they find themselves less fit to move than the other particles of the blood, and because they still ordinarily retain some branches, they come to rest against the surface of the conduits through which the blood passes, and thus they begin to constitute their skin." 260 A text such as this requires no comment, and it would be all too easy to snicker at the notion of these "branchy" particles that lose enough of their branches to separate, all the while preserving enough to attach themselves to the nascent walls of the blood vessels. Note, however, the extraordinary self-assurance of Descartes, who specifies that "there ordinarily remain some branches" on these particles, and who gives these flabbergasting details as if he has seen everything with his own eyes. This debased mechanism has nothing to grudge the most puerile atomism. There is, however, a problem in which the failure of Cartesian biology is still more evident-so evident, indeed, that Descartes was forced to notice it: the problem of the determination of the embryo's sex. Descartes took up this question at least three times. The first attempt, no doubt an early one, evoked a "sympathy of movement" between the embryo and the mother. The embryo's penis developed as if it were going from the mother's back towards her navel. If, then, the embryo had the front of its body directed towards the front of the maternal body, the penis would develop outwards. If, conversely, the front of the embryo's body was directed towards the mother's back, the penis, always directed towards her navel, would develop towards the inside of the embryo, and the child would be female. This theory allowed Descartes to explain why males were more robust-their spinal column was nourished near to that of the mother-and why females had posteriores partes ampliores

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[fuller buttocks]: these parts were developed on the side of the maternal belly, which offered less resistance. A note in the 1701 edition indicates that Descartes deleted this paragraph from the Primae cogitationes.161 It was perhaps because he had found something else. We know that, according to traditional physiology, the embryo was nourished by the maternal blood and had evacuations. If the embryo was strong, it produced more liquid evacuations than solid ones. Thus, the penis would open first, it would grow, and the child would be male. If, on the contrary, the embryonic organism evacuated more solid excretions and retained the aqueous humors, it was of a softer nature, and the fundament would open first. The solid excrement escaped from the body, bur, kept in by the fetal envelopes, it pressed up against the sexual parts, kept them from developing externally, and instead pushed them inside. In this case, the child would be female. "If, finally, the constitution is balanced in such a way that the two perforations occur at the same time, which rarely happens, a hermaphrodite will result." 262 After an explanation of this sort, one understands why Descartes feared critical intrusion and felt the need to take refuge behind grand principles. This text would, moreover, be suppressed like the preceding one. 263 In a note from the Excerpta anatomica dated November 1637, which is certainly later than the texts of the Primae cogitationes that we have just looked at, Descartes still accounts for the determination of sex by way of pressures exercised by a "humor." But he no longer asserts, he merely "suspects." 264 Finally, he would not raise the question of the determination of sex at all in the treatise De Ia formation de /'animal. One has to conclude that, on this point at least, Descartes was not satisfied with his findings. He had wanted to create an embryology in line with his cosmogony. In his fashion, he conceived of the microcosm in the image of the macrocosm, seeking to reconstruct man out of particles and motion. The result, as Boerhaave was to remark later on, 265 was "man according to Monsieur Descartes," not a living man. This result seems inevitable. Without knowing any of the texts drawn upon here, the physician Antoine Men jot, a Galenist and a friend of Gassendi's, judged that if he wished not to appear ridiculous, Descartes would do well to avoid taking on either physiology or medicine. 266 As much as Highmore and far more than Gassendi, Descartes fell under the force of the criticisms that Everaerts addressed to those who admitted only the soul to be rational and claimed that "everything that happens in bodies comes from a certain movement of very small particles." They did not take into account,

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said Everaerts, that "to attribute to seminal spirits the movement that arranges, orders, and shapes diversely the parts of the body is to attribute to the body an intelligence proper to the spirit alone." 267 Descartes could have defended himself with aplomb, for, setting aside any final cause, he eliminated the notion of an intelligence located in particles or elsewhere, with the exception of the Supreme Intelligence that had once and for all established the laws of motion in such a way that everything happened in bodies exactly as Descartes said it did, or at least according to an analogous process. Descartes did not claim that the "man" he described was real; rather, man resembled the image Descartes had created. Unfortunately, he too often lost sight of the restriction that he had so wisely made regarding his world, and ended up describing imaginary phenomena as if he had observed them. We do not believe, then, that Descartes's mistake lay in his not "subjecting his thought to the discipline of facts" or in his having used anatomy "to verifY deductions already made rather than to see in it the point of departure for new deductions." 268 The facts, such as he could have observed them, would not have taught him much or in any case much more than they had been able to teach Harvey. On the level of phenomena, where Descartes wanted to place his explanations, modern science with all its means of observation could scarcely answer today the questions that Descartes should have been asking of nature. At issue here, in my opinion, is a certain way of seeing living matter rather than a question of scientific method. Descartes wanted to apply to vital phenomena a physicist's or geometrician's imagination-still more to the point, a mechanic's imagination. He played with particles as one might with gears. And no doubt he thought that man would one day be able to intervene in these minute gear wheels; indeed, man might one day construct a machine just as admirable and, in the last analysis, just as simple. The image of the clock and the image of the automaton might only be images. But in approaching biology with such images in mind, Descartes could not but arrive at the groundless explanations that he tried to defend. He could not but simplifY the facts arbitrarily, as he did in imagining an almost perfect symmetry between the male and female genitalia (a notion that Riolan fils had already abandoned); 269 in explaining, with disconcerting ease, the spontaneous generation that perplexed everyone; and in remaining blind, in a way, to the extraordinary complexity of vital phenomena and to the special character of life. He could believe and state that everything occurred through matter and motion, but he should have had the prudence to leave to the Cre-

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ator the task of figuring out the incredible interaction of causes and effects. If Descartes suffered from boundless ambition, it manifested itself in the foolhardiness of a man who wished to see nature through God's eyes. In this regard, Descartes went peculiarly beyond the ambitions of his century. We have seen in this chapter the disappearance of natural souls, whose departure left the spiritual soul and brute matter face to face. But those who believed in a spiritual soul had it acting on matter as a way of explaining the formation of living beings. We have seen the spread of an atomistic conception of matter. But those who accepted it and who did not believe in an intervention by the spiritual soul remained, like Highmore, within the space of prudent generalizations concerning the play of particles or, instead like Gassendi, entrusted to the Creator the knowledge of the necessary motions or even the creation of purely and simply preexisting organisms. Descartes alone dared to pursue the game of mechanistic thought to the end; and there was no way he could win. Nonetheless, his failure deserves respect, for his reckless ambition was the ambition necessary for all human knowledge. And in fact, no one dared follow him. His disciples did no more than publish his works. Jacques Rohault avoided speaking of animal reproduction. As of r67o, the work of Steno (Niels Stensen) and of Regnier de Graaf made irrelevant any theory based upon the mixing of the two seeds. And as early as 1646, and without the help of any new observation, Regius (Henri Du Roy) had shown that it was too difficult to be a Cartesian where embryology was concerned. It is to be assumed that he knew the essentials of Descartes's ideas. In any case, the Principia philosophiae allowed him to know the spirit of Cartesian science perfectly, even if he had not completely assimilated it in his conversations with the master. 270 "He follows blindly what he thinks are my opinions in everything regarding physics and medicine, even if he does not understand them," Descartes had written. 271 Regarding animal reproduction, it would appear that Regius had understood perfectly but did not follow blindly. Indeed, the definition that he gives of an animal's generation perfectly follows the spirit of Descartes: it occurred through the displacement and adjustment of invisible particles. An animal was constructed like a house or a clock. 272 His explanation of spontaneous generation reproduced that of Descartes: terrestrial particles agitated by heat gathered together to form a vein, then a heart, then an artery, and the body constituted itself around this first sketch of a circulatory system. 273 Regius's description is as precise and detailed as that of Descartes. It is hence all the more striking to see him abandon his master where standard forms of generation were concerned, in order

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to return to the system of preformation: the seed came from the blood and contained "the engendered rudiment of the animal to be engendered," 274 according to Regius. "This rudiment consists in particles of the seed that have received in the parental bodies a conformation such that, when they are received and mixed in the uterus and stimulated by its heat, they form a germ or a sketch [rudem delineationem] of a like animal, on the basis of which the rest is carried out." 275 This assemblage of particles was inevitable because of their conformation, as with particles of crystal. Naturally enough, there was no need to assume rhe intervention of any sort of soul.2 76 Regius thus remained a mechanist; but, as a physician, he could not fully entrust the formation of living beings to the general laws of motion. In this, he was unfaithful to Cartesian embryology. And his work is truly remarkable in that it defines exactly, in 1646, the mechanist theory of preformation, in the form in which it was to be defended in the final quarter of the century by the opponents of the theory of preexistent germs, who would claim to be the true heirs of Descartes. His infidelity and his future success denoted the failure of Cartesian embryology even before the philosopher's death. In 1664, the theory of animal reproduction accompanying the Traite de f'homme had no chance of success. It was contemporary with the works of Digby and Highmore. The investigations of anatomists at the end of the century would quickly make of it an anachronistic witness to an age gone by. But the example of Regius proves that, in any case, Cartesian embryology had no constituency. Nicolas Malebranche, who had been converted to Cartesianism precisely by his reading of the Traite de l'homme, observed that one could see "how the laws of movement suffice to explain the gradual growth of the parts of an animal's body, but no one will ever be able to demonstrate how these laws can create them or bind them all together. Apparently Monsieur Descartes himself realized this quite well, for he did not carry his ingenious conjectures very far." 277 The unfinished state of the treatise was taken as firm evidence of its failure, and if embryology was indeed the keystone of the Cartesian system, as has been proposed above, this failure was an extremely serious one-suggesting, moreover, that at the very moment when it was conquering the scientific world, Cartesianism was already no longer faithful to the spirit of Descartes.

Conclusion to Part I

6 6 4, a watershed year, both Descartes's treatise De la formation du foetus and Niels Stensen's De musculis et glandulis observationum specimen, in I N

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which he opened the way to anatomical research leading to the discovery of eggs in female viviparous animals, made their appearance. Biology was girding itself for a new destiny, and we can usefully take our bearings here and draw some conclusions about the period just coming to an end. As has been observed, this period was merely the end of the Renaissance with respect to the problems of concern to us, inasmuch as both the decline of the old physiology and the rebirth of atomism were already manifest in the sixteenth century, and most scientists still clung to intellectual habits inherited from the preceding age. What was finally dying in the first half of the seventeenth century was the old medieval tradition, which the Renaissance had in some ways sustained, although it elsewhere helped erode it. The medieval physician was a cleric and an academic. Whatever the value of his science, he was an intellectual and a scholar, whose practice was not his essential concern. By freeing the doctors from ecclesiastical celibacy, Cardinal d'Estouteville set in motion an evolution the clear result of which was to be seventeenth-century medicine. While the University of Paris was slowly losing the privileges that had made it a great independent institution, above ordinary law, and the brain and the conscience of the realm, the Faculty of Medicine was gradually forgetting its mission of research and teaching. During a large part of the sixteenth century, this evolution was masked and slowed by the invincible intellectual energy of the Renaissance. But once this enthusiasm had waned, once the age of people like Gonthier d'Andernach, Vesalius, and Ferne! had passed, the degeneration of medical faculties ap-

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peared with brutal suddenness. Where the fervor of chemical medicine did not sustain a certain intellectual life, one finds almost nothing but professors without powerful convictions, dispensing with boredom and for meager rewards a science whose progress was of little concern to them. The students lost privileges whose meaning they no longer understood, and that no longer had a place in the newly emerging state. The privileges of the faculty became a guild monopoly, as is clearly denoted by the creation of medical colleges, in which a faculty in the old sense no longer existed. The doctors became a body of bourgeois who made a living from medicine. This change is not perhaps to be condemned in itself. Some such evolution was indeed necessary if the number of doctors were to grow and the sick were to be able to obtain treatment everywhere. What was serious was that this state of mind invaded teaching and turned professors away from research. The faculties of medicine, for the most part, expired slowly, until the Revolution finally abolished them. And in the first half of the seventeenth century, at a time when no one could make up for the dereliction of the cause of advancing biology by the professor-physicians, the evolution of the medical profession could not fail to have repercussions on science itself. For with the wreck of the old universities, a whole intellectual universe collapsed in ruins, a universe that had rested almost entirely on Aristotelianism. Thus it is not surprising that Aristotelian thought survived, more or less, in lands where the university tradition was maintained the longest: Germany and Italy. These anachronistic survivals could not, however, mask the general undermining of the proud scholastic edifice. As the lofty gateway to knowledge, the source of all science, a gaze penetrating the universe beyond the appearances that commanded the attention of ordinary men, and a language of initiates whose knowledge placed them above the common herd, Aristotelianism had been embodied in the majesty of the university. The hidden ailment that was sapping the university's strength was not about to spare its sustaining philosophy. Moreover, the same intellectual fervor that had been able to slow down, or partially veil, the decline of the universities in the sixteenth century, simultaneously sped up the decline of Aristotelianism and hid it from view. It is not my intention to study the specifically philosophical misfortunes visited upon Aristotelianism by the sixteenth century. Staying with biology, it is clear that the doctors who thought themselves most faithful to Aristotle were betraying him without realizing it. Thus it was with Ferne! and, following him, with Fabrizio d'Acquapendente and Riolan pere, not to speak of Fortunio Liceti or

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Parisano, closely akin though they, too, were to the spirit of the Renaissance. At issue was the relationship between form and matter, an essential question, insofar as it was the permanence of forms that guaranteed the rationality of the Aristotelian universe. Now, the notion of form, assuredly very abstract and difficult to grasp, underwent a strange debasement among our authors. For most of the physicians, "form" was confused more or less with the collection of Galenic "faculties," whose functioning was thus deprived of all its rational rigor. The biological teleology of Aristotle was replaced with psychological or moral conveniences. Nature "loved" or "abhorred," yet there was no way of determining the precise limits to its desires or hatreds. While more rigorous in its metaphysical reflections, Neoplatonic thought introduced no more clarity into knowledge. With it the "faculties" became "occult qualities," granted by God to such and such a natural being independently of its constitution and its physical properties. The notions of potentiality and actuality became unintelligible, and "form" became a divine creation, unrelated to the matter that it was supposed to inform. The rationality of the world was henceforth to reside in God alone, and one can see the proliferation of those "mediating intelligences" that the mechanists of the seventeenth century were to reject with such violence. Thus, the very rationality of the universe had disappeared, or had departed from the universe, leaving nothing to guarantee the permanence of beings against the errors of the formative faculty, the whims of nature, or interventions by God. Of Aristotle there remained only words and fragments of an anachronistic logic. Once Renaissance enthusiasm had fallen off, however, this unfaithful Aristotelianism no longer had the power to sway the doctors of the early seventeenth century. Still, neither any particular discovery nor the temporary success of Galenism can explain this decline. The circulation of the blood was established by an Aristotelian who made no claim to be in revolt against his master. Besides, it was more ruinous to Galen than to Aristotle. It is the hesitations greeting iatrochemical and spiritualist thought that allow us to understand somewhat better the decline of Aristotle, for this thought, claiming to guarantee its triumph on the ruins of pagan thought, was in fact very close to Aristotelianism. Like the latter, it aimed at providing a unified view of the universe. It put itself forward as a vast intellectual synthesis, an initiation into the magnum opus of nature, into the secret designs of the Creator, the knowledge of which raised one above the ordinary man. Now it was precisely this deep metaphysics that the bourgeois doctors rejected. Lofty intellectual

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speculations seemed to them gratuitous adventures, irrelevant to the medical reality in the midst of which they thrashed about daily. Their plodding good sense blinded them to the grandeur of these undertakings, in which they chose to see only the practical uselessness. Placing on the same level, and, so to speak, in the same bag, the systems of Aristotle, the daydreams of chemistry, and even the disinterested investigations of the anatomists, they were content to ask of traditional physiology an approximate justification for a simplified therapeutics. Galenism responded to these exigencies, since it was respectful enough of vital phenomena not to seem like a caricature of reality and simple enough not to impose an abstract metaphysics. It is easy to understand why highly traditionalist doctors had a liking for the thought of Gassendi, whose prudence pleased them, while they remained mistrustful or satirical towards Descartes's daring positions. They were rejecting metaphysics rather than any particular system. Nonetheless, Galenist physiology was to have only an ephemeral triumph. All the new conditions forming the spirit of the seventeenth century conspired to ruin it: the desire for clarity, first of all, which led to the faculties being charged with obscurantism; the wish to strip matter of all spontaneity, a wish so generalized as to appear in Helmont as well as Mersenne and Descartes; the prestige of mechanistic thought, which quickly led the most logical thinkers to liken vital phenomena to simple clockwork mechanisms. In the latter respect, no one would go further than Descartes. Indeed, he went so far in this mechanization of life that his contemporaries, still too close to traditional physiology, hesitated to follow him. Still, the great movement of thought underlying the whole evolution of ideas from 1550 to 1650, from the debasement and decline of Aristotelianism up until the triumph of mechanistic thought, was the irresistible rebirth of atomism. From the standpoint of Hippocratic physiology, atomism is to be found in the elder Riolan, Fortunio Liceti, and Parisano. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, it asserted itself proudly as the general conception of matter, and this among scientists as different as Sennert, Gassendi, Digby, Highmore, and Boyle. Descartes himself, entirely persuaded that matter was infinitely divisible, employed in his physics as in his biology only particles that in practice would be irreducible and that played the role of prime elements. What, then, was this "corpuscular physics" that practically everyone had adopted by r66o? It was not, strictly speaking, a scientific fact-no experiment had proven that matter was composed of atoms. Nor

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was it a philosophy- Boyle the pious skeptic and Descartes the rationalist were as "corpuscularist" as the Epicurean Gassendi. Atomism was, in effect, a mere scientific hypothesis quickly transformed into a certainty and a general vision of the physical universe. In this sense, to be a "corpuscularist" in no way implied adherence to the moral system of Epicurus nor to his atheism; nor even, in the strict sense of the word, to his materialism, his rejection of the spiritual and immortal human soul. It was nonetheless impossible to adopt corpuscularist physics without being, in some way, a "materialist." It was by the sole interplay of material atoms that corpuscularist physics explained all the biological phenomena that heretofore had required the intervention of "souls." Gassendi, too timid or still too close to the past, preserved these souls, all the while conceiving them as material, as the "cream of matter." Descartes, more radical, suppressed them, and with admirable daring conferred upon the universal laws of motion the task of organizing the corpuscles that were to form the living being. The chemists, not wishing to remain on the sidelines, would suppose an interplay of particles of saltpeter or sulphur. Not even odd phenomena such as sympathy and telepathy would be exempt from corpuscularist interpretation. Now, corpuscles were bare matter. They had neither form, nor faculty, nor soul. To make of them the elements of living matter was sooner or later to doom Aristotelian as well as Galcnist biology. If one did not believe that matter was capable of organizing itself unaided, if one believed that the laws of motion were too general to explain the formation of a living being, if one judged, finally, that a soul was necessary in order to account for vital phenomena, one had to conceive of this soul as radically foreign to matter, as made from a substance other than matter; for there would henceforth no longer be a place for forms in materia immersae. And this distinction between the two substances, loudly proclaimed by Cartesian philosophy, was to make an animist interpretation of life exceedingly difficult. Those who could not understand how the spiritual soul could direct living matter had to place their trust in the laws of motion; they had to accept that these general and universal laws regulated with rigorous precision the organization of the corpuscles in the embryo being formed. This was a true act of faith, which raised many serious difficulties, a fact cruelly highlighted by the failure of Cartesian embryology. The only remaining recourse was to God and to an unmediated creation of all living beings. This solution, in turn, was rigorously contrary to the scientific spirit; it was a solution of despair and a true admission of impotence.

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It is true, in any case, that God was henceforth directly implicated in his Creation. If He was not the direct Creator of all living beings, He was at least the supreme determiner of the laws of motion, rigorous laws that were not capable of acting against the intentions of the All-Powerful. Bare matter stripped of all spontaneity was merely an inert and passive object, and there was no more Natura naturans. God alone was the cause of everything, which meant as well that God alone was responsible for everything. Henceforth, there would be no scientific problem that would not involve a certain conception of Providence. Such was the end point of an evolution that had lasted at least two centuries. The rationality of the universe, which Aristotle had situated in the universe itself, and that had been driven out of it, was now again found in God. Matter associated with form had become pure passivity in the hands of the Creator. All the problems henceforth to be encountered in this study derived from the major assertions of the mechanistic philosophy of I6)o. Nonetheless, the services that philosophy rendered science were not all bad. Philosophy brought back into things a rationality that alone could guarantee the reliability of the laws of nature, a reliability indispensable for judging the plausibility of a fact. It was primarily in the name of reason that a critique of tradition could be carried out, and that the site could be cleared for the construction of new foundations. Moreover, at the very time when Descartes, in the name of reason, was nearly causing science to lose contact with the facts, the prudent skepticism of Gassendi was inspiring the founders of the Royal Society with a conception of science wholly concerned with experience and capable of giving up the illusion of absolute certainty. Philosophy had rhus furnished science, as if through contradictory forces, with a rational framework and an experimental method. It had constructed what the eighteenth century was scornfully to label "fictions of physics" and had shown why these systems were fictive. Without philosophy, without the vigorous stimulus that it gave to disinterested research, without the requirement for truth that it imparted to the minds of the time, while at the same time providing critical rules needed to satisfY this requirement, biology would have remained groping about in the dark and stuck with the disorganized empiricism with which it had been all too easily satisfied. Still lacking in 1650 for the new philosophy to be able to revivifY biological investigation were men with sufficient background in modern thought to be able to throw themselves with enthusiasm and rigor into the discovery of the living world and at the same time close enough to the reality of facts to be

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able to avoid falling into reckless speculation. After r66o, these men would appear everywhere in Europe. Coming from medicine, they would dissociate themselves from their colleagues and join together in mutual recognition. They would be biologists, the first biologists in the modern world.

PART

The Scientists' Philosophy (r670-1745)

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The New Scientific Mentality

o F T H I s B o o K revealed the birth among a few powerful minds of a conception of science quite in contrast to the traditional ideas handed down from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But even after 1650, only a ~andful of scientists were sensing the need for something new. What characterized the beginning of another age, around 1670, was the broad and rapid diffusion of the new intellectual values. Rejection of the authority of the ancients, scorn for book-learning, and the search for evidence in reasoning and in the certainty of facts: these were the cardinal virtues indispensable to modern scientists, not only in the eyes of the scientists themselves but in those as well of an ever-broader public newly enthralled by the young science of its time. Everyone recalls the preponderant role of Cartesianism in this regard, both because of its definition of the rules of knowledge and because of its conversion of the fashionable public to this new social game. But Cartesian philosophy was not alone in representing the modern mentality. Gassendist thought also played an extremely important role,' and after 1670 it would be possible to be a supporter of mechanism and of empiricism without being an official member of any of the new philosophic sects. This was rather new. The most generally accepted dogmas in the science of r68o- the need for an empirical approach, the conception of a purely passive matter composed of corpuscles subject only to the "laws of motion"had been imposed as fundamental ideas by philosophers in the first half of the century. Mter 1670, they would be taken over by the scientists, and it would be possible to be a "mechanist" and "corpuscularist" at the same time as a Cartesian along with Jacques Rohault, a Gassendist with Guillaume Lamy, a chemist with Daniel Duncan, or an animist with Claude Perrault. Nor did PART

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this mean, either, that science had set itself up as an autonomous power, and that scientists would soon be found engaged in philosophic disputes. Rather, beyond the disputes, or serving as their foundation, one finds these essential convictions everywhere. And just as traditional thought may be said to have been dominated by problems involving matter and form, the new thought would be similarly dominated by problems of empiricism and mechanism, at least where the life sciences were concerned. For if mechanism could boast several undeniable victories in physics, it is clear that in the biology of the seventeenth century, it remained purely a mental perspective. It was innocuous enough to say that the heart was a sucking and expelling pump or that the members functioned as levers. But when it became a matter of explaining the beating of the heart or muscular contraction, one had to take refuge in mere hypotheses, calling upon "spirits" whose existence had no more experimental certainty than Galenic faculties. Born of an urgent need for clarity, and very satisfying to minds that saw things from above, a mechanistic conception of life was destined to confront observable facts it could not explain. Proceeding from mechanistic convictions and experimental ambitions, the period from 1670 to 1745 would see experience and observation progressively undermine mechanism-at least, a certain brand of mechanism identified with Descartes and the geometricians. This chapter traces the broad lines of this evolution and of its essential results; subsequent chapters look at the way in which the problems raised by animal generation were able to contribute to this evolution or came to feel its effects. But the scientific mentality, like others, is always embodied in individuals and often in institutions. Thus, before dealing with doctrines, let us glance rapidly at the transformation of the scientific world around 1670, a transformation responsible to a large degree for the dissemination of the new ideas. For men rarely change their way of seeing things, and nor, for that matter, are organized social collectivities much more willing to do so.

I The New Scientific World The official triumph of antimony in r666 and the death of Guy Patin in r672 mark the end of an era in the history of the Paris Faculn~ de medecine. Little by little, the circulation of the blood, the existence of the chyliferous vessels, and the use of cinchona ceased to encounter opposition. A dean could

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be found saying that he was proud not to have "limited himself blindly to the work and experiments of the ancients-those of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen; but to have followed step by step those of the moderns." 2 In the path it finally took, the Paris Faculte de medecine had been preceded by other faculties, such as Montpellier and Reims. But at least the physician-professors were no longer uninterested in modern science, and the subjects of theses reflect the change. In 1670, Pierre Yvelin was still debating whether semen was an excrementum or a defluvium, a highly traditional question. However, the ovist doctrine was examined by the faculty as of 1677, only five years after having been established by Regnier de Graaf.3 True enough, it was rejected; but it was to be the subject of eight more defenses by 1743. 4 The discovery of spermatic animalculae, made by Leeuwenhoek in 1677, would have to wait until 1704 to be debated officially by the doctors, with the thesis of the bachelier Claude Du Cerf: "An hominis primordia vermis? Aff." [Is a Worm the Origin of Man? Affirmative"]. But we shall see that the doctors were almost ahead of official French science here, and this thesis, written as was customary by the professor presiding over the defense- in this instance Etienne Geoffroywas at the same time a scientific and a worldly event. What was involved on the level of science will be seen below. On the worldly level, Bernard Le Bovyer de Fontenelle tells us that the thesis "so excited the curiosity of the ladies, and of ladies of the highest rank, that it had to be translated into French, in order to initiate them into mysteries whose theory they did not possess." 5 The most ardent defender of the "worm doctrine" in France in 1700 was one of the most famous physician-professors of the Paris Faculte de medecine, the future dean Nicolas Andry, and it was in fact he who translated Geoffroy's thesis into French. The faculty were not uniformly "animalculist," as is seen in the thesis by Sauveur Cluscard, defended in 1705.6 It appears, however, that they made it a point of honor to defend Leeuwenhoek against the official ovism of the Academie des sciences: on June 12, 1706, by order of the chancellor, the premier licencie, Jean-Baptiste Procope, victoriously rebutted the arguments of Sauveur Cluscard? Other topical scientific subjects were the preexistence of germs, debated in 1723,8 and the cause of teratisms, taken up in 1743,9 at the height of the dispute between Lemery and Winslow. Even organic molecules would be the subject of a defense in 1750, a year after the publication of Buffon's Histoire naturelle.10 And the noisy discussions of panspermia 11 and animalculism 12 in the Faculte de medecine at Caen shows that the provinces were not lagging behind Paris in this regard. Nonetheless, the theses just mentioned were exceptional. At the same time

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when they were discussing panspermia, the doctors in Caen were, as we have seen, sustaining highly traditional doctrines on the duration of pregnancy. 13 In Reims, the bachelier J.-P. de Lespierre was still wondering in 1675 whether demons could reproduce. 14 In Paris, Louis-Joseph Le Thieullier was to be found debating, in 1724, whether "woman is the work of a mistaken and languishing nature," and Charles Sallin investigating in 1762 whether "the jollity coming from wine contributes to health and favors generation." 15 Even when the thesis subjects became more modern, the style scarcely changed: citation and reasoning remained their approach. The only difference was that the facts put forward were most often borrowed from modern authorities. Moreover, one should not forget the many doctors-among them Christian Friedrich Garmann, Charles Drelincourt, Theodor Jansson van Almeloveen, and Joubert- who, being unable to abolish the new discoveries, strove to preserve the prestige of the ancients by maintaining that they had already known about the circulation of blood, for example, or about the eggs of viviparous animals. 16 This mentality would still be sufficiently current in 1722 to infuriate the shorttempered Antonio Vallisneri. 17 And this is without taking into account all those, such as Guillaume de Houppeville and Paul Portal, who misconstrued the modern doctrines/ 8 and all those- numerous among the practitionerswho quite simply rejected them, if we are to judge by the treatises published by obstetricians as well known as Fran(_fois Mauriceau, Philippe Peu, and Guillaume Mauquest de La Motte/ 9 or by provincial doctors like La Chaume 20 and Nicolas VenetteY It is legitimate to conclude, then, that the physicians themselves and the various faculties barely participated, at least in France,22 in the progress occurring in the life sciences. If in the best of instances they followed the new developments, they made no contribution to them. In any case, it is rather easy to understand why the heirs of Guy Patin could not look kindly on the new science, which was attempting to build its edifice on the wreckage of their traditions. Insofar as this science was Cartesian, it was suspect. In 1695, Jean Bernier gave a list of the enemies of medicine, which included Moliere, of course, but also Descartes, who "aimed to destroy its principles." 23 Above all, the doctors remained skeptical with respect to the practical utility of all this wonderful new science. Pierre Rainssaint, a professor of the Faculte de medecine in Reims, deemed it essential that "naturalists and doctors remain in agreement that life consists in the union of natural heat with radical moisture." Thereafter, "whether one expounds one's thought according to the sentiments of Descartes, follows the doctrine of Gassendi, or stays with that of Aristotle, at bottom the truth will always be the same." 24 In

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1715, Johann Conrad Barchusen defended symptomatic medicine against the

"rational" doctors? 5 The renowned Giorgio Baglivi judged medicine "in danger of perishing from the speculations and hypotheses weighing it down," saying it was urgent to "flee the glitter of opinions and return to Hippocrates." 26 A few years later, Hunauld, physician-professor of the Faculte de medecine in Angers, energetically denounced the "vain and ambitious curiosity that philosophy has introduced into the practice of medicine." "They have wanted to turn this science away from the explanation of illnesses," which was an error. "The philosophers, by custom overly swayed by their curiosity, lose sight of the very aim of medicine." Even if one arrived at a knowledge of "the mechanics of anatomy," it was "obvious that the human body considered as such would be known only by way of the mysteries that medicine has the least interest in penetrating." 27 Fortunately, medical practice remained untouched by these vagaries. 28 Pierre Bayle noted, in like manner, that the practice of the Cartesian doctors differed not at all from that of their colleagues? 9 It is understandable that Leibniz should have reproached these Cartesian doctors with leaning "on intellectual principles too far removed from the practice of their art." 30 But it is less understandable that Fontenelle, at least early on, seems to have reduced anatomy to a mere source of "pleasing knowledge" and that he did not hesitate to assert that "as far as usefulness is concerned, I believe that the discovery of a new duct in the human body or the discovery of a new star in the heavens is all the same thing." 31 This attitude, which can be explained only in terms of a profound skepticism regarding the ambitions of Descartes, 32 tempts one to suspect that the stance of the doctors vis-a-vis the new science was based on more than merely professional motives. It was also vigorously contested by modern spirits like Leibniz and the anatomists Marcello Malpighi and Pierre Dionis;B One may say, then, that the physicians of the late seventeenth century, and even of the early eighteenth, remained largely faithful to the traditions of their predecessors. These were, for the most part, traditions of routine and failure to comprehend the need for research, but also of prudence regarding philosophical speculations. Thus it was not the physicians who would do the new science. In 1670, this was of little concern, for science could now be done outside of the faculties of medicine. It would still be done out by doctors: all the scientists I shall have occasion to cite were doctors of medicine, or at least surgeons,34 who had received the standard medical education. (The case of an autodidact like Leeuwenhoek is quite exceptional.) These doctors had, however, broken with the traditional preoccupations of their field. They did not

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in general have to be concerned with establishing a practice, and they did not feel ashamed to sit next to a surgeon or a doctor from a supposedly inferior faculty. 35 They had devoted themselves entirely to research and had become true biologists. They were scarcely physicians any more. Whether members of an official learned society, as in France or England, or teachers in faculties of medicine, as in Italy or the Lowlands, they were concerned far more with anatomy, physiology, chemistry, or the natural sciences than with medicine proper. As a result, medicine was to make little progress during this period. For Hunauld and Baglivi had not been altogether wrong: no immediate medical revolution could be expected from the progress of "physics," nor even from anatomical discoveries. Hermann Boerhaave could indeed, with eloquence and from the height of his chair, reconcile mechanism with chemicalism; Georg Ernst Stahl and Friedrich Hoffmann could indeed discourse learnedly in their books on the role of the spiritual potencies: they would nonetheless practice at bedside a prudent watch-and-wait therapeutics, which would earn them Leibniz's reproach of "hiding their inaction by use of various remedies that the French would call miton-mitaine [harmless]." 36 Surgery alone would benefit from the progress in anatomy. 37 Medicine had not yet found its own modes of development and would have to wait until the mid, if not the late, eighteenth century to arrive at that point. Let us therefore leave medicine and its history at this point, then, and henceforth concern ourselves only with the new biology (without, of course, forgetting about the physicians). One of the best-known manifestations of the new scientific mentality in the seventeenth century was the appearance, throughout Europe, of learned societies modeled on the Italian academies. There is no point in rehearsing here the history of these assemblages: the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1602, the Accademia del Cimento, meeting in Florence from 1648 to 1667, the Academy Leopoldino-Caroline for Students of Nature, founded in Erfurt in 1652, and, finally, the Philosophical Society, founded by Boyle at Oxford in 1662, which, joined with the Invisible College created in London in 1645, became the celebrated Royal Society. For the moment, however, we shall stick with France's Academie royale des sciences. 38 There are known to have been several learned or scholarly societies in Paris in 1665 that met at private residences and had no official existence.39 Among the circles devoted more particularly to the examination of scientific questions, special mention must be given to the Academie Bourdelot and the group that met at the home of Melchisedec Thevenot, after having long held

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its sessions at the home of Habert de Montmor. Jean-Baptiste Denis, a doctor from Montpellier who was a protege of Colbert's,* also held public lectures at his home from 1664 on. There is general agreement that it was Thevenot's society that became, thanks to Colbert, the Academie royale des sciences in 1666. This choice can be explained by the personal relations between Colbert and the Perrault brothers, who were active members of Thevenot's group. But it is certain as well that Claude Perrault's religious piety offered Colbert moral and political guarantees that he would not have found, for example, at the home of the disquieting physician of the Grand Conde.t Bourdelot very likely resented this exclusion deeply. In any case, however, the various learned societies were not completely separate, and among the new academicians, many attended the meetings of Bourdelot and Denis as well as those of Thevenot, and continued to do so after 1666. Supported intelligently by Colbert, who wanted at one point to house it in the Observatoire (honored by a royal visit in 1681), the new Academie flourished initially. The death in 1683 of Colbert, who was unfortunately replaced by the marquis de Louvois, the deaths of the astronomer Jean Picard in 1682 and of Claude Perrault in 1688, as well as the forced exile of Christian Huygens and Olaus Roemer, both of them Protestants, ushered in a period of lethargy for the society, from which it emerged only in 1699, when it was expanded and reorganized by the Pontchartrain,+ according to the ideas of the abbe Jean-Paul Bignon. From then on, its history rolled on smoothly until the Revolution. The life sciences were rather poorly represented in the 1666 Academie. As opposed to seven geometricians and three astronomers, there were only two anatomists: Jean Pecquet, covered with glory but advanced in age, and Louis Gayant, a rather obscure surgeon who never published a word. 40 Only the "physicists" Abbe Edme Mariotte and Claude Perrault were concerned with biology. The arrival ofJoseph Guichard Duverney in 1674, Jean Mery in 1684, Daniel Tauvry in 1698, and Alexis Littre in 1699 finally gave anatomy the rank it deserved. Tauvry died before his time in 1701, although not without having sustained a vigorous polemic against Mery on the circulation of the blood in the fetus. Duverney, Mery, and Lime were exemplary academicians. While *Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83), whom Louis XIV appointed comptroller-general of finance in r665. -Ed. t Louis II de Bourbon, prince de Conde (r62r-86), a notable French general and patron of the arrs.Ed. *Louis Phelypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, comptroller-general of finance and secretary of state.-

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a polished professor, somewhat the courtier and somewhat the fashionable lecturer, Duverney was nonetheless a careful and dedicated anatomist. His greatest joy was to do "demonstrations" before an attentive public, and he did them everywhere-at the homes of Bourdelot and Jean-Baptiste Denis, at the Academie, before the Grand Dauphin* with Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Gerard de Cordemoi in his entourage and, starting in r68o, in the Jardin du Roi, where he attracted a large public, among whom were many foreign students. He taught with eloquence and intensity: "He would have been incapable of announcing with indifference the discovery of a Vessel, or a new use for a part of the body; his eyes shone with joy, and his entire person came alive." 41 In order to devote more time to research and teaching, he had given up the practice of medicine entirely. An extremely pious man, he feared losing his soul because he stole from God the moments and the thoughts that he devoted to anatomy. He was still possessed by his passion for anatomy on the eve of his death at more than 8o years of age. Mery was no less burning in his devotion. As taciturn as Duverney was eloquent, he lived apart from men. By his family, "he was seen only at mealtimes, and he held no useless conversation." 42 Head surgeon of the H6telDieu, he scrupulously fulfilled the duties of his position and then divided the rest of his time between the Academie and his dissections. "He had dealings only with the dead, in a far more literal sense than is usually the case in speaking of scientists." 43 Previously, when studying at the H6tel-Dieu, "he cleverly took possession of a dead body whenever he could, carried it to his bed, and spent the night dissecting it in the utmost secrecy." 44 Mery could have had a fine career as a fashionable surgeon, since he enjoyed the protection of the marquis de Louvois and of Louis XIV's doctor, Guy-Crescent Fagan. But he gave up everything, including his practice and even his teaching, to dedicate himself to his research. Although perhaps not so great an anatomist, Lime was every bit as filled with passion for his field. He maintained a modest practice, but unwillingly, seeking instruction more than wealth. His bedside manner left something to be desired: "His not very consoling taciturnity was not made up for by either his face or his manners." 45 In a word, he was a bear, like Mery. A sullen bachelor, he saw no one and never went out: "There is no recollection of his ever having enjoyed himself." 46 He dissected more than two hundred cadavers "during the winter of r684, which was fortunately very long and very cold." 47 *Louis (r66I-qn), son of Louis XIV.-Ed.

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He dissected to the point of having problems with the police, who pursued him into the Temple itself, where he had taken refuge under the protection of the Grand Prior ofVendome, and snatched from him "the treasure that he was keeping hidden in this place of asylum: a cadaver that concerned him at the moment." 48 This was a rebirth of the unquenchable fervor of Vesalius: the consuming passion to know. The spirit of the Academic encouraged and even required this passion for research. Even before r699, all the academicians received an annuity on some pretext or other. 49 In return, they were obligated to do research assiduously. The 1666 Academic even practiced teamwork, but had to give it up, and the charter of 1699 gave each member the freedom to work on his own. The Academic might have suffered from the sponsorship and maintenance it received from the government. Conceivably, Colbert in creating it may have wanted to introduce some order into the anarchy of the scientific world, in which the "republicanism" of the Paris Faculte de medecine and the heterodoxy of certain important personalities, such as the abbe Bourdelot, may have seemed to him a bit dangerous. He was, however, skillful enough to respect the independence of his proteges. Louvois was more heavy-handed and already in 1684 made it known that he wanted "the Academic to apply itself principally to projects of clear and quick usefulness, and that would contribute to the king's glory." 50 This summons was not successful, and in 1699 Pontchartrain virtually handed over to the academicians total freedom to direct their work and in the recruitment of their colleagues. For the most part, then, the Academic was independent of the government. Nevertheless, it quickly came to represent official science, with the advantages and dangers attendant thereon. No doubt each academician remained free in his scientific opinions, and at times some very lively controversies took place within the group, like those that pitted Mery against Duverney, Tauvry, and Lime. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of conscience, and a reading of Fontenelle clearly shows that Littre, a protege of the Grand Prior ofVendome, was not an exemplary Christian. But there was a certain academic tone and spirit that it was preferable to respect. The charter of 1699 envisioned that scholarly discussion would remain courteous, which was all to the good. But it envisioned as well that no academician would take advantage of his title in publishing a work if the project had not been approved in advance by the entire group, which constituted a singular restriction on everyone's freedom. Whimsy, pleasantry, and lack of intellectual restraint seemed to be strictly excluded. (It is hard to imagine Guillaume Lamy as an academician.) In addition, it was to be understood that nature

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sang the glory of its Creator, and there was to be no place in the Academy for an "out-and-our Epicurean." 51 There was no place either for certain scientists or for certain doctrines. Who, in reading the Histoire or the Memoires of the Academie, would guess the importance of Leeuwenhoek's discoveries or of the animalculist doctrine? 52 Still, we know that certain academicians repeated the experiments of Leeuwenhoek, and that Wilhelm Homberg even intended to publish a brief on spermatic worms. 53 Why did he not do so? Are we to assume the reason for the refusal to have been purely scientific, or rather someone's spite at having seen Leeuwenhoek send his discoveries to London rather than Paris? In any case, this silence is quite surprising, especially at a point when animalculism was causing a stir in the Paris Faculte de medecine. There is no doubt that the Academie had a high opinion of its own merits, 54 and that it liked to consider itself the supreme tribunal in matters pertaining to science. This mentality is very apparent in the perfect academician, Reaumur, as Buffon- too independent for his own good- was to discover to his cost. Nonetheless, the Academie des sciences rapidly became-especially after 1699 -an essential part of scientific progress in France. The seriousness of its projects gave it considerable authority. Its task was made easier by the pensions, privileges, and subsidies that it enjoyed, 55 which guaranteed it an easy triumph over the private societies, which although they continued to meet, disappeared one after another. A highly picturesque individual, Nicolas de Blegny, a surgeon, charlatan, and adventurer, founded an Academie des nouvelles decouvertes de medecine, which was sponsored by Antoine Daquin, physician to Louis XIV, but had only an ephemeral existence, its founderdirector having been arrested in 1693. Bourdelot had died in 1685. A whole independent scientific world gradually vanished, and it is fair to say that at the dawning of the eighteenth century, the Academie des sciences represented virtually the entirety of French science. In the same manner, English science was embodied in London's Royal Society. In Germany, the Lowlands, and Italy, research remained much more individual. If the College de France, where medical teaching was in the hands of the Parisian physician-professors, contributed little to the progress of the new science, the Jardin du Roi conversely played an important role, especially after 1672, when the surgeon Pierre Dionis was named anatomy demonstrator. The course, which was public and free as of 1673, had considerable success, always bringing together 400 to 500 persons, and it provoked fiery petitions on the part of the faculty, petitions that were rejected with a personal declaration by the king. 56 One of the innovations Dionis introduced was to base all his

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teaching on the circulation of the blood. Duverney the elder, who succeeded him in 168o, 57 had no less success. Students crowded into his course, "and it counted in one year as many as 140 foreigners, among whom many became masters." 58 Duverney did a complete demonstration of the human body in three months: "He used for this purpose at least twenty cadavers, taken from the gallows, the hospitals, or the Chatelet, where people drop off unknown victims found assassinated in the streets, which is far from rare in Paris." 59 In this way, the Jardin du Roi became one of the bastions of the modern spirit.60 In any case, throughout almost the entire eighteenth century, the steward of the Jardin was a member of the Academie, 61 as were several of its professors, in particular, Antoine de Jussieu, Bernard de Jussieu, Jacques-Benigne Winslow, and Paul Portal. Thus it was that the new scientific mentality was served by a new scientific personnel devoted almost exclusively to research and teaching, which spontaneously constituted itself after 1650. Marked neither by a particular professional allegiance nor by origin in a specific social class or a university milieu, this band of researchers was an important manifestation of the new spirit. It would, however, be unfair to downplay the importance of the official support that modern scientists received from 1670 on, a support that was certainly more helpful than constraining. The potential danger of this government protection was, however, the nationalization of science. The risk was particularly great at a time when the modern frame of mind was driving scientists to abandon Latin, an international language, in favor of their own languages. The decline in Latin, already very noticeable in 1670, would only become steeper. From 1670 on, the English and the French both wrote more often in their mother tongues. 62 The Italians gave up Latin only at the beginning of the eighteenth century, while the Germans remained generally faithful to it until the end of the century. The case of the Dutch is particularly thorny. Regnier de Graaf wrote in Latin and then was translated into French and Dutch. Jan Swammerdam wrote at times in Latin, at times in Dutch, and was translated in both directions. Theodor Kerckring wrote in Latin and was translated into French and English. But Leeuwenhoek wrote only in Dutch, and his writings were to reach an international public only through English and then Latin translations. All this complicated matters and endowed the journals with considerable importance. It was Jean-Baptiste Denis's Recueil des Memoires that translated Kerckring into French; Philosophical Transactions translated him into English, as it would Leeuwenhoek. If such translations were rare in the journals, de-

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tailed reviews were common. In r666, the journal des Savants devoted ten pages to Robert Hooke's Micrographia because of the novelty of the book but also because "it is written in a language that few people understand"that is, English. 63 The importance of Jean LeClerc's periodicals stemmed to a large extent, moreover, from the fact that, knowing English, he was able to inform French readers, or those who read only French, of new developments in Britain. Besides language, international politics could divide scientific communities. In particular, the War of the League of Augsburg cut off French scientists from their English and Dutch colleagues from 1688 to r697. In 1698, Martin Lister commented that in Paris "the wars had made the scientists of this country entirely unaware of what was happening in England," 64 and the marquis de l'Hopital expressed his burning desire to have English books.65 The deprivation was all the more painful because English science was highly regarded in France. The printer of the journal des Savants noted that the new material "coming from England is particularly well received in Paris." 66 Not only did the wars stop the flow of books, but they also risked creating a politics of chauvinism, and the noticeable change in the journal des Savants in r688 may be attributable to a hardening of this nature, reinforced by government intervention: scientific reviews gave way to polemics against the Protestants in Holland, and the extracts from foreign journals were dropped. In the eighteenth century, however, these linguistic and political problems were on the wane. Translations become abundant, scientists learned the living languages, and French became a broadly international language, although without, however, succeeding in wholly replacing Latin. There were still wars between France and England, and scientists deplored them, but without feeling obliged to take part in them, even morally. During the War of the Austrian Succession, Martin Folkes, the secretary of the Royal Society, and Reaumur, once-and-future director of the Academie royale des sciences, affirmed their unshakable mutual attachment through Abraham Trembley.67 Folkes proposed sending the abbe Claude Sallier English books he might want for the Bibliotheque du Roi, 68 and Reaumur sent French books to Folkes.69 Unfortunately, privateers cared little about the progress of science, and, despite an ingenious double-address system,7° exotic curiosities that naturalists sent about Europe ran the danger of being seized. Thanks to Trembley's intervention and the kindness of Henry Fox, a member of the British cabinet, Reaumur succeeded, however, in getting back some naturalized birds, as well as plants, insects, and even a young elephant that, having left Senegal alive, managed to

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arrive in Paris only stuffed.71 The republic of letters thus knew no frontiers, and the governments themselves seemed to recognize this privilege. 72 As of r665, the scientific community had a new means of information at its disposal, however-the periodical press. The first issue of the journal des Savants appeared on Monday, January 5, r665. On March 6 of the same year, the first issue of Philosophical Transactions appeared. There then followed, naming only the most important periodicals, the Giornale dei Letterati, published in Rome as of r668, and the Acta Eruditorum, which started to appear in Leipzig in r682. Reviews of recent works provided the core of these publications, and the editors vowed themselves to the strictest neutrality, merely giving summaries of the books and abstaining from all commentary. Such at least was the ideal, which the writer did not always attain. Bibliographies of new books, news items from the scientific world, and at times letters to the editor-which were articles of a sort- began to appear in these periodicals. The overall effect was somewhat austere. The journals in question aimed at a public of scholars and scientists. Anatomy, the natural sciences, and medicine rubbed elbows with numismatics, philosophy, and ecclesiastical history. The advantage of this eclecticism was that it allowed each discipline to be placed within reach of a large number of readers, thus fostering an increase in the number of educated amateurs. Because of the public's interest in scientific questions, even the leastspecialized journals did not ignore them. Pierre Bayle published a letter to Leeuwenhoek in Larin, however, in order to spare the modesty of the ladies.73 The amount of space to be given to the sciences in journals of this sort posed problems, moreover. Certain readers cared little "for the quantity of comments of a chemical, anatomical, astronomical, geometrical, etc., nature, or for the description of monsters and unusual ailments." Others were sorry to note the absence of "this sort of oddity." 74 The journalist would take care of this by following the current wave. Jean Le Clerc's Bibliotheque universelle et historique, for example, at first gave much space to the life sciences, but in 1690 the editor noted that this subject was no longer in fashion: "Nothing is more discussed today than tolerance and the principles of civil society." 75 And biology was thus exiled until the demise of the journal in 1693. The existence of scientific journals naturally favored the diffusion of new theories enormously. Ovism, for example, was able to gain ground so rapidly only thanks to Jean-Baptiste Denis's Recueil des Memoires, the journal des Savants, and Philosophical Transactions, which speedily disseminated knowledge of the work done by Steno, Johann van Horne, and Regnier de Graaf every-

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where, and published translations or long reviews ofTheodor Kerckring's Anthropogeniae ichnographia. Nonetheless, it was not among the scientists that progress in the dissemination of knowledge was most perceptible. Rather, it was above all amateurs, those living in isolation, in the provinces, who profited from information previously unavailable to them. And this information, coming from the most active sector of the scientific world, contributed to the rapid diffusion of the modern mentality, but also to a more pronounced centralization of scientific activity. The evolution of the journal des Savants is highly characteristic in this regard. As the needs of the new science refined and imposed themselves, one notes the disappearance of letters from provincial readers- physicians or surgeons- and of the observations, at times useful but often whimsical, that had contributed a picturesque, lively element to an otherwise austere publication. Ultimately, there would be only one scientific truth, the official truth established in Paris by the gentlemen of the Academie des sciences, and in London by the gentlemen of the Royal Society, a truth that the journals became responsible for transmitting to the most distant provinces. Regional academies, which multiplied in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, also aided in the unification of the scientific community and only rarely give evidence of an independent intellectual life. The history of Parisian journals offers an unusual testimony to this unification of science. While the journal des Savants, sponsored by Colbert, was tending to become an official journal that followed the paths indicated by the Academie des sciences, other journals were appearing that clearly represented an unofficial sector of the scientific world. In 1679, Nicolas de Blegny, the founder and director of the Academie des nouvelles Decouvertes de medecine, launched a journal that over three years appeared under three different titles?6 In light of Blegny's rather dubious personality,77 it is surprising to see the protection given him, his academy, and his journal by a man as important as Bourdelot.78 Things become clearer when one sees the journal opposing opinions put forward at the Academie des sciences, defending the spirit of Cartesian and Gassendist mechanism (interpreted, moreover, in a more Gassendist than Cartesian fashion), and presenting a grand eulogy of Guillaume Lamy? 9 Clearly, Blegny represented a segment of scientific opinion that resented the authority and mentality of the gentlemen of the Academie. A similar interpretation applies to the journalistic efforts of Claude Brunet from 1686 to 1709.80 Brunet was more docile than Blegny towards the teachings of modern science, but he too remained faithful to pure Cartesian mechanism, set himself up violently against final causes, and sang the praises of Democ-

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ritus, Epicurus, and Descartes.81 All of these were positions contrary to the official spirit. In addition, Brunet found an admirably Voltairean tone for telling a dubious anecdote, while attributing it-gratuitously, it would seemto a "quietist abbe," 82 and it is clear that we have here an unorthodox scientific spirit not disposed to suffer the new scientific conformism gladly. Undertakings such as this had no future. Bolstered by its official organization and its press, but also by the impressiveness of its discoveries, the new scientific spirit was destined to smother these survivors from an older tradition. Blegny and the members of the Academie des nouvelles decouvertes, Brunet, Bourdelot, and Guillaume Lamy, lacked the stature to compete with the king's academicians. The philosophical freedom that they may have represented was doomed to disappear temporarily, at least from the realm of the sciences. The situation would be even clearer when in 1703 the Histoire and the Memoires de l'Academie royale des sciences, which for France at least would be the Bible of the new scientific age, began to appear. 83 Henceforth, there would be only one adversary to confront, and this an unexpected but conS;lderable one: the Memoires de Trevoux, published by the Jesuits, starting in I70I. 84 Almost from the onset of its public manifestations, the new scientific spirit had enjoyed a valuable ally-fashion. This had begun to be the case at least as early as 1658, with Rohault's famous "Wednesdays," which attracted a crowd of "persons of every age, sex, and profession." 85 The main subject of discussion was physics, and the lectures were enlivened with experiments dealing with the weight of air, the rainbow, or the compass.86 Then fashion shifted from physics to anatomy. If we are to believe Fomenelle, the person responsible for this new passion of polite society was J.-G. Duverney, who "for about a year was the courtiers' anatomist," 87 after having been the Grand Dauohin's. As always, vanity and the collector's mania got involved. "I remember," adds Fontenelle, "having seen people from that social sector carrying about with them dried-up parts of bodies prepared by him, especially those pans that had belonged to the most interesting individuals, to have the pleasure of displaying them in company." 88 Reproductive organs were not forgotten in this passion for anatomy. The learned lady satirized by Boileau-probably Mme de La Sabliere-went to Duverney's home to witness the dissection of "a woman who had died along with her embryo." Then there were the organs of a woman who had died from an ectopic pregnancy, presented by Dionis to the queen and the dauphine, as well as to "several other ladies of the highest rank," before Messrs. Fagon and

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Daquin on June 19, 1681. The queen was so interested that she asked Dionis that afternoon "to come show her that part again" -which the surgeon hastened to do, noting that "Her Majesty did not have the same repugnance that all other women have towards anatomical demonstrations," and making clear that he had "quite often had the honor of doing demonstrations before her on different parts of animals." 89 The worldly success of Etienne Geoffroy in 1704, to which we have seen Fontenelle allude, 90 shows that these questions still interested the broad public. In the eighteenth century, however, fashion turned away from anatomy to settle on the observation of insects. After the pages that Daniel Mornet has devoted to it,91 there is no point in my rehashing the worldly taste for this new "spectacle of nature." But the evolution of the public's taste corresponded to an evolution among the scientists themselves. Anatomy had certainly never been so widely cultivated as between 1675 and qoo. 92 Certainly, too, insects demanded the attention of the scientific world starting with the final years of the seventeenth century. There would otherwise be no way for us to understand how a mathematician like Reaumur, a chemist like Hom berg, or a physicist like Hansoeker abandoned, either for good or for a certain period of time, their calculations, burners, or machines in order to observe the tiniest of animals through a microscope or a magnifYing-glass. This curiosity about insects, whose consequences would be of such great importance in the evolution of the scientific spirit, was a truly general phenomenon. There is a perfectly natural explanation: the unexpected and wondrous discoveries made possible by a new observational tool, the microscope. The construction of the first microscopes, on the model of astronomical glasses, dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century.93 But the technical difficulties remained great and the results were rather paltry. Hence, for a long time microscopes remained exceedingly rare. I have already mentioned the amazement of Nicholas Fabri de Peiresc in 1622.94 No less great was the excitement of the journal des Savants about Robert Hooke's discoveries in r666. 95 Use of the instrument spread little by little, but the astonishment did not abate: Jean-Baptiste Duhamel, an interpreter for the Academie des sciences, deemed Leeuwenhoek's discoveries in 1678 stupefYing: stupenda. 96 A whole new world was being revealed to the dazzled observer. "We lose a very great part of the beauties of nature by not having eyes proper for seeing such little objects," Jean LeClerc sadly observed in 1710 when he discovered the admirable spectacle offered by the eye of an insect. 97 The instrument itself, however, was no less admirable. Le Clerc was persuaded that there were "bodies

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sixteen million times larger in the microscope than they are in actuality." 98 Although certainly better informed, Leeuwenhoek was no less enthusiastic. He did not tire of contemplating "so pleasing a spectacle," 99 of penetrating "the arcana of nature." 100 Each time he experienced the same stupor-obstupescimus101-over the extraordinarily complex and delicate structure of the least of beings. The imagination of the researcher, moreover, outstripped what he was seeing and spontaneously rediscovered the paths trodden by Pascal. For these microscopic animals, for example, the spermatic worms, so small that thousands of them would be required to attain the size of a grain of sand, so numerous that certain fish contained quantities equal to thirty times the human population of the Earth, 102 these invisible animalculi possessed organs of locomotion. If we reflected upon it, "we cannot but be seized with awe, for we are incapable of conceiving the extreme smallness of the parts from which these animals are composed; so that we can finally do no more than exclaim: Oh, unfathomable depth of the supreme wisdom!" 103 It is no exaggeration to say that the microscope changed the face of nature for scientists, as the telescope had done a hundred years earlier, but this time in an entirely different way. The instrument enjoyed an extraordinary vogue, favored by the innate taste for the wondrous. It would seem, however, that its success was greater in England than in France. At least, the Academie was to observe the same silence regarding both rhe microscope and Leeuwenhoek. The microscopical observations made by academicians were mentioned only incidentally. 104 This reserve, which may have been a manifestation of the "wise Pyrrhonism" adopted by the group, was in any case to disappear in the end. However, insects had become an object of general interest. People saw them everywhere and had turned to them in particular to explain epidemics and contagious maladies. This idea, set forth as early as 1677 in Philosophical Transactions, 105 was adopted by Hartsoeker, Vallisneri, Reaumur, and many others. 106 A physician even came along in 1717 to explain that demons could use insects to make their way into organisms, act upon the fibers, on the spirits, and on "degenerate ferments, particularly those of the spleen and of the seminal glands." 107 After all, had not Eve been tempted by an insect,108 and did "Beelzebub" not signifY "Lord of the Flies"? 109 Men felt themselves surrounded by invisible beings, and they might have been seized with dread had admiration not carried the day. In any case, their vision of the world and of humankind was near to being overturned. Served by a new personnel devoted entirely to it, organized and sustained by the government, endowed with rapid means of intellectual communica-

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tion, armed with an instrument that revealed to it new fields of observation, biological science was going to be able to make important progress. But it could make this progress only thanks to a new scientific mentality, which we must now look at. As Fontenelle said, the moderns owed their discoveries, not only to the microscope, but also to "a certain exactness in their research, which is almost as specific to them as the microscope." 110

II The New Requirements ofScience

It is hardly necessary to say that for the new scientists, all knowledge required empirical grounding. With Descartes and Gassendi as models, and following the example of the English scientists, every philosopher, man of science, professor, and journal correspondent affirmed the necessity of consulting or relying upon empirical data.m The only argument worthy of the name was argument from fact. "Where nature study is concerned, empirical observations, even of recent date, always carry more weight than the false conjectures of antiquity," Jean-Baptiste Denis wrote in 1762. 112 Even at this late date, it was clearly still important to reject the authority of the ancients. Now, "empirical investigation refutes many maxims ordinarily taken for granted." 113 Soon protection would be necessary as well from the imagination of the moderns, all too fertile in "systems." Here, too, empiricism would fill the bill. It had all the advantages on its side. To the amateur scientist, it provided a pleasant pastime, which Jacques Rohault in the seventeenth century or the abbe Jean-Antoine Noller in the eighteenth would succeed in using to delight the ladies and the intellectuals. And then it would furnish serious science with the only source of certainty. Sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury scientists had not, however, awaited the arrival of Descartes in order to assert the rights of the empirical method. Indeed, they accepted the unlikeliest tales under the rubric of "experience" or "the facts." Rather than remaining content merely with a statement of principle, I shall devote some time to unearthing evidence of what between 1670 and 1745 did, in fact, constitute this empiricism to which scientists unanimously declared their fealty. The first step-quickly taken-was to reject en masse the whole body of "facts" handed down from antiquity. Scorn for mere book-learning, a distinguishing feature of the new spirit, immediately allows us to identify those who truly belong to the new science, as opposed to those who might have adopted

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new ideas without dissociating themselves from traditional modes of thought. In the closing years of the seventeenth century, there were still physicians who thought it proper to bolster observations by Regnier de Graaf or Leeuwenhoek with stories taken from Hippocrates and Albertus Magnus. 114 This breed belonged to the past. Nonetheless, general opinion of the accounts provided by the ancients was not very favorable. Describing a case of tubal pregnancy, Dionis took great care to note that since the facts "date from our own time, and since they were witnessed by a large number of people, I do not think that one has leave to call them into question as one might those of times past." 115 In 1684, reporting a recent case of multiple births, and recalling a celebrated Dutch countess said to have produced 362 offspring in a single pregnancy, the journal des Savants remarked that the fact of her multiple births was "not quite so well documented" as the present one.U 6 In an analogous context, Fontenelle notes "that the story of the famous Dutch countess would be far more remarkable, but on the other hand it does not seem to be history" (by which we are to understand "true history"). 117 As for Vallisneri, he was not the least amused, deeming this tale "the most extravagant of Schenckius's extravagancies," 118 and railing against the authors who still used it in support of the animalculist theory. Whether ironical or direct, the rejection of all these old tales was, in anv case, the hallmark of the new scientific mentality. The task that remained was to substitute true facts for worn-out legends. Everyone worked at it, and publications were filled with their efforts. In particular, the journal des Savants provided its readers with an abundant harvest, culled from the best authors or from correspondence. Admittedly some of these "facts" were a bit surprising. In r6y8, for example, we had a young lady who mewed, leaped about, and ran after mice, a consequence of having drunk some warm eat's blood. 119 In 1679, it was a little girl who projected pebbles from her eyes. 120 In r68r, we had an extraordinary egg marked with stars, 121 then another egg bearing "the image of a little human head." Decidedly, it was "the year of monsters." 122 In r684, "they write from England that a large rat coupled with a female cat, which has produced offspring resembling both cat and rat," 123 an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of hybrids! In r685, a German peasant swallowed a live mouse, kept it down for nine months, and then dies a week after having ejected it, still alive. 124 Meanwhile, the journal d'Angleterre- "Today, enlightenment comes from the North" -announced the birth of two children with transparent heads. 125 Finally, let us note the disturbing case, again in 1685, of the old man in The Hague, aged 120, who two years earlier had been astonished to find I

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all his teeth growing back in. Understandably, he had worried- but felt reassured upon meeting an Englishman older than himself who had also had the same good fortune at age u8. 126 Might this not be the effect of some asyet-unknown law of nature? The editorial policy change at the journal des Savants in r687 put an end to these rarities by eliminating extracts from foreign periodicals and reducing the space given to readers' correspondence. The case of the journal des Savants was far from isolated. Philosophical Transactions displayed the same taste for monsters but generally with more discernment: there, even monsters were English, which is to say, proper. On the other hand, the Academie des curieux de Ia nature published implausible stories in the purest manner of Albertus Magnus. The most widely accepted marvels were those involving the power of the maternal imagination. Hens' eggs produced kites, 127 a child looked like a cow,128 a wolf, 129 or a monkey/ 30 and even "perfectly resembles a crucifix," 131 without any of this stretching credulity. The very serious Histoire de l'Academie royale des sciences tells gravely of the birth of an infant with a beef kidney in place of a head, all because its mother had not been able to satisfy her pregnant craving for kidney, 132 how a lamb was able to be born with a wolf's coat in place of fleece, 133 a child without eyes, 134 and a calf with crocodile scales, 135 all because of diverse frights suffered by their mothers. All this, as we shall see, could be explained very naturally. It was less easy to understand how a woman was able to give birth to "a small, well-formed bitch, without termination of pregnancy," even taking account of "the horrifying brutishness of her husband" ;u 6 or to explain the case of the child born with a single eye created out of the union of two eyes and with a man's penis on its forehead. For "one must assume that the pregnant woman imagined intensely and with surprise [!] such a penis hanging from her forehead, while striving to fix her two eyes on it by bringing them towards each other either during a dream, or possibly while playing with her husband or looking attentively at some representation of a Priapic feast." 137 The most extraordinary case, however, was the one reported in the journal des Savants by Doctor Pauthot, of Lyon, involving an Observantine monk suffering from a particularly tenacious tapeworm. Once having effected a cure, "I gathered information specifically on the lifestyle of this good Father, and on everything that he thought might have contributed to his surprising affliction," the doctor noted. "He confessed that he knew of no other [cause] than the horror he had felt at seeing a similar monster that one of the monks had produced, and that since then, he had not ceased evacuating worms like that one every ten months." "It is a singular wonder that the imagination

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could have produced so strange an effect in a strong and healthy man," Pauthot concluded, adding sensibly: "There must have been a strong disposition in the humors that served as a germ and seed for this monster." 138 It is easy to understand how the end of the seventeenth century, when the new science became aware of itself, offered all possible shadings between naive credulity and the most rigorous scientific prudence. In this regard, it is interesting to note some reactions elicited by an event that created a stir in 1697. A gentleman named Saint-Donat, who practiced surgery at Sisteron, informed the Academic of a case of male pregnancy that he had treated. It involved a young man to whom a lady had granted the final intimacy, without however allowing him to proceed to the end of his intentions. Nine months after this conjunction, the young man presented a swelling in the abdomen, on which the surgeon operated, finding the start of an embryo, in particular a skull. The Academic, taking its lead from Duverney, decided that if the fact was as stated, it involved a "polyp." 139 The following year, Dionis decided it was a sarcoma: "They must have found it composed of various materials of different colors, in which they must have thought they saw a skull and "he face of a child, as one often imagines one sees figures of men and animals in jaspered marble, even though there is no such thing." 14° Conversely, Claude Brunet threw out in advance the arguments of those who would see in this pregnancy nothing more than a "carnosity." He told the same story at length, pinning it on a quietist abbe who, carrying on an intimate relationship with a devout lady, lacked sufficient confidence in Providence-despite his quietism-to push through to the end in an undertaking whose fruits might well have cost him his ecclesiastical benefice. On the scientific level, Brunet proposed an ovist explanation of the phenomenon, assuming a rather complicated migration on the part of the egg. In any case, he recognized that this fact gave free rein to the "vermiculists," but he nonetheless rejected this doctrine as offensive to the "Sovereign Establisher of Order." 141 Three years later, Fontenelle referred to this "absurd rumor of a male pregnancy," this "fable." 142 Once more, official science had the upper hand over the belated freelancers. Ten years later, Vallisneri would classify the Sisteron pregnancy among his implausible stories,l 43 and thereafter it was spoken of no more. "Let us be sure of the fact before worrying about the cause," Fontenelle wrote in 1687.144 He was not the first and would not be the last to say it. "When one takes it upon oneself to inform the Public of extraordinary happenings in the world," the journal des Savants had opined in 1681, "one can never take too many precautions in verifying them." 145 And Claude Brunet,

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reporting some dubious fact in 1686, felt it "a propos to await confirmation through other, similar experiences before undertaking to explain them, since argumentations on things that one finds it hard to believe usually pass for fictions." 146 Practice, as we have seen, did not always accord with theory. Little by little, however, the new spirit penetrated the domain offacts, and spread to the farthest lands. Fontenelle, who told an amusing story about a gold tooth and waxed so satirical about the misadventures of a few convenient scientists, found the doctors of 1595 an easy target. But was he unaware that the same thing had happened in Vilnius in about I68o? "In order not to give rise to rumor or to popular error," the journal des Savants recorded, the bishop of Vilnius "immediately summoned physicians, surgeons, and the most skillful goldsmiths in the city to examine the tooth in question, and they, after a long discussion and several assays, concurred that it was a true golden tooth." The Jesuit Father Tilkowski undertook to explain the fact; he had been in the process of writing a book when he heard that the tooth was turning white. ''AI; he is a man of good faith" and was "curious to see the matter for himself," he found "that it was a real tooth of bone, and that thus, when people had taken it for solid gold, they were sadly misled, the tooth having simply been covered with a thin surface of gold ... which is far easier to believe than the transformation of bone into gold." And the narrator went on to clarifY: "We wanted to add all the circumstances of this story, in order to show those who take it into their heads to write how circumspect one must be about falling for miracles and about believing everything they hear." 147 Fontenelle could not have been unaware of all this, but he no doubt judged his advice about being sure of the facts still worth giving. And indeed it was; Vallisneri formulated it even more clearly in I710: before accepting a fact, "it is necessary to submit it to rigorous examination, and to see whether it lies within the boundaries of the plausible." 148 Reaumur was finally able to certifY in 1742 that to the honor of the age, "generally speaking people have succeeded in learning how to doubt." 149 It may be noted in passing that two attitudes are possible in the face of a surprising fact: to reject it as implausible or to attempt to reproduce it. The first attitude was the one defined by Vallisneri; 150 it is rational and Cartesian. 151 The second very quickly came to be that of the modern scientists; for "the true may sometimes not look like the truth,"* especially in biology. The old doctors had been all too aware of this; but after Descartes, it was a truth in need *Nicolas Boileau, Art poetique (1674).- Tr.

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of rediscovery. In practice, the two attitudes were generally tied together: it was because Leeuwenhoek's discoveries with the microscope were implausible that the Academie des sciences felt it was its duty to reproduce them: "The facts that Monsieur Leeuwenhoek has written from Holland to Monsieur Huygens would hardly be believable [vix fidem impetrarent] had they not been confirmed afterwards by additional observations," some of which were made at the Academie itself. 152 It was because the legend of the incombustible salamander seemed implausible to him that Maupertuis decided to test it. "Whatever shame a physicist may have in doing a silly experiment, this is the price he must pay in order to destroy opinions consecrated by the ancients' accounts." 153 Reaumur would echo him: "I must admit that I feel ashamed to say that I have sowed earthworm powder, with the precautions indicated by Kircher, and that I have planted in the earth as slips, so to speak, very dry pieces of worms, without a single earthworm having come into existence. I had to be fully authorized to say that these facts are false in order to respond with entire satisfaction to people who think that there is no evidence of any sort that can be set up against facts they hold to be true." 154 The "people" in question were the Jesuits of the journal de Trevoux, as friendly towards Father Kircher as they were hostile to Cartesian evidence. 155 But Reaumur, who had not thought it necessary to reproduce all of Kircher's experiments, so implausible did they seem to him, felt it necessary to verifY those of Trembley with the polyp, even though just as implausible. 156 He too knew, and had known for some time, how to distrust evidence. It seemed obvious that the common folk were wrong in believing that the crayfish's legs would grow back when pulled off. It was sufficient to argue from the complexity of living creatures in order to be persuaded of this error: "Nothing could seem truer than this argument." 157 Yet Reaumur performed the experiment, and the experiment proved that the common folk were right, and that what was obvious was wrong. One must mistrust everything but reject nothing lightly. 158 "Remember to mistrust" was the scientist's new motto. Even respectfully mistrust a member of the Academie. Littre had seen in a woman's ovary an egg containing a completely formed fetus. A remarkable observation, which definitively established ovism and preexistent germs. But Fontenelle still wondered "if the philosophers who are most indifferent to partisan feelings, and the most zealous for the truth, are not sometimes subject, in delicate observations, to seeing what they think is true." 159 All the more reason for mistrust with respect to the great purveyor of miracles, the microscope. The only way to verifY the extraordinary facts announced by the microscopists was to rep-

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licate the observations. That was what the Academie had done for Leeuwenhoek's animalculi; Philippe Verheyen did the same,l 60 estimating that the microscope permits unexpected discoveries and that one must bow before the facts but also that "one must not accept as certain just any observation." The public, however, could not make such verifications. In order to overcome its skepticism, the microscopist Louis de Puget "assures us not only that he has not reported any fact that is not exactly true, but that he is ready to wager two to one that he will show it to any takers, and that he will give his profit to the poor in the presence of the loser." 161 More simply, Leeuwenhoek cited official personages or scientists whom he had called upon to witness his discoveries.162 For he well knew that he was not believed: "Many contradict me, and claim that the discoveries I am presenting on animalculi are sheer inventions." 163 This did not surprise Le Clerc: "He might have stopped to think that, in these matters, no one can expect blind faith from his readers." The "most fair-minded" people would be content to consider his observations possible, "not to decide against him, and to suspend their judgment pending verification." "Without that, there always remains in the mind a small doubt, that the instruments used may not have been handled as they should be; or even that the imagination, which always adheres imperceptibly to vision, especially if we think we have found the reason for certain things we see, and if we become ever so slightly stubborn, might make us see, so to speak, what we do not see." 164 It is rather comical to see Le Clerc teaching Leeuwenhoek a lesson, but his attitude faithfully reflects the spirit of the time. At least Le Clerc remained respectful and prudent. Not everyone was so "fair-minded." For old Caspar Posner, Leeuwenhoek's animalculi were "surely an astonishing vision, not without resemblance to the vain phantoms of our sleep." 165 Vallisneri remained skeptical of Leeuwenhoek's and Hartsoeker's "truly miraculous microscopes." "I wonder, speaking with my customary frankness, if microscopes do not sometimes perform miracles instead of seeing them." 166 When Andry found a cock's "spermatic worms" in spots where Leeuwenhoek had not succeeded in discovering them, Vallisneri ironized: "French cocks are richer in worms than those of Holland; or perhaps Andry's microscopes are richer in miracles." 167 For his part, Francesco-Maria Nigrisoli wondered with what lenses Leeuwenhoek had been able to discover animalculi a million times smaller than a grain of sand. 168 Repeating Hartseeker's charges, Ango clumsily accused Leeuwenhoek of lying: "Go to his house, as [Hartsoeker] did in the past, to see all these fine things, which are as impossible as they are unbelievable, and he will tell you casually and rather

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comically that he shows them only to his wife; then he will usher you out in very discourteous fashion." 169 Certainly, Leeuwenhoek's microscopic technique was so perfect that his contemporaries often did not succeed in finding what he had seen. Certainly, too, Leeuwenhoek was a rather odd character. But what is also sure is that scientific prudence, which had only recently been born, got seriously in the way of the success of his discoveries, and the discretion as regards them of the Academie des sciences was perhaps inspired by a concern not to compromise itself in a doubtful venture. After all, the verification of data through duplication of experiments was not always easy. Science was in the process of discovering experimentation and of perceiving that it was not always sufficient simply to look in order to see. Descartes had already remarked that there were "few people capable" of carrying out experiments properly.ll0 The truth of this statement would be still better understood after 1670, when anatomists were expending prodigious skill and patience to create more readable and permanent anatomical preparations, when anatomical examination itself was becoming more attentive and minute, and when the anatomist was finally succeeding in "spying on nature in her operations." 171 And no one knew it better than the great investigators of the time. Leeuwenhoek had taught people in Leiden the art of polishing lenses for microscopes. But they did not know how to profit from their instruments, so rare were those capable of observation: "I hold it as certain that there is hardly one in a thousand with an aptitude for this study." 172 Reaumur makes a similar comment: "It is not sufficiently appreciated how few men are capable of seeing clearly in the areas of physics and natural history; to be able to give one's attention to all the circumstances of a fact that merit attention is not as common an endowment as one might imagine." 173 The statement is persuasive in the light of a reading of Reaumur's Memoires pour servir a l'histoire des insectes, which quite authoritatively displayed to eighteenth-century readers the attributes required by the observer's difficult art: tireless patience, unflagging attention, but also an ever-alert curiosity, always ready to seize on the unusual aspect of the phenomenon, not to mention manual dexterity, a delicate touch, and ingenious apparatus that would enable the investigator to see clearly the least visible facts. All these attributes, which made Reaumur one of the most extraordinary observers of all time, were also to be found in a few of his disciples, who were indebted to him for both their vocation and their methodological rigor. 174 Reaumur nonetheless remained in their eyes-and quite rightly so- "the Oracle," whose opinions were decisive. 175 As for the broad public, even its cultivated sector, it could

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only take things on trust. This was no doubt the best thing for it to do. Undertaking to verifY Trembley's finding on the polyp, a discovery greatly inconvenient to certain articles of his philosophy/ 76 Voltaire vainly examined "this natural process with all the attention [he] could muster," but nevertheless asserted "that this production called a polyp resembled an animal less than a carrot or an asparagus did." And he justified himself by invoking direct observation: "The witness of our eyes carried the day." 177 Perhaps Voltaire did not have "philosophical eyes," as Reaumur put it. 178 "But," said the dwarf, "I ran my hands over it carefully." "Ah," replied his interlocutor, "but you didn't feel it well." Voltaire would have done well to read his own Micromegas! Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, and despite the examples offered by Bonnet, Trembley, and Lyonet, scientific observation was no longer accessible to mere amateurs in I750. w H o E x p E R I M E N T s adds to knowledge; he who merely believes adds to error." Everyone in I670 would have accepted as a motto the Arab proverb that Francesco Redi used as an epigraph to his book on the generation of insects. 179 Gassendists or Cartesians, chemists or Galenists, everyone was asserting the primacy of experimentation. Nonetheless, everyone agreed as well that while experience provided the indispensable materials, it was reason that utilized these materials. Thus, it was generally a question of founding science on "facts and reasonings." 18 ° For Descartes, as we know, this amounted to proving the correctness of a line of reasoning by the agreement between its consequences and the facts. There was only rational certainty, in the style of mathematical certainties, and Galileo himself "had built without foundation" because, "without having considered the first causes of nature, he simply searched for the reasons of some particular effects." 181 Rohault, who regretted that physics was treated "too metaphysically" because of too exclusive a focus on overly general questions, 182 was already being a bit unfaithful to the spirit of his master. Nonetheless, he blamed those who "thought it necessary to reduce everything to experience, and not to reason about anything." This "extremism" was even "much more prejudicial" than the abuse of reasoning. "For, in the last analysis, this means ignoring reason entirely in order to grant everything to the senses, and to enclose our knowledge within very narrow bounds, since experiential data can allow us to know only coarse and tangible things." The ideal lay no doubt in the proper balance that Rohault thought he himself had achieved: "I did not feel sufficiently enamored of my

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reasoning to neglect experience, nor sufficiently attached to experience not to allow my reasoning to proceed beyond what experience uncovers." For reason went further than the senses and alone arrived at the truth. 183 For example, it was reason, based upon experience, but transcending it, that allowed us to choose among Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, and Copernicus. 184 If the physicist was intent upon preserving the role of reason in science, the doctor had to be still more so. The tradition of dogmatic medicine had taught him that therapeutics had to be based upon reasoning. It had also taught him to flee like the plague those whose sole allegiance was to experience, and who bore the prominent and despised name of empiricists. In 1675, Franre, sixth dialogue. 334· Voltaire, La Defense de mon oncle, ch. 20, rst diatribe. 335· Voltaire, Philosophie de l'histoire, §§ 2 and 8; La Defense demon oncle, ch. 18; Singularites de fa nature, ch. 36; Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.vv. "Homme," "Ignorance," "Population," § 4· 336. Voltaire, Philosophie de l'histoire, § 8. A traumatized imagination could, however, produce monsters. See id., Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.v. "Influence." 337· Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.v. "Bie," § r, in #529, r8: 7· 338. Voltaire, La Defense demon oncle, ch. 19; L'Homme aux 40 ecus, ch. 7; Singularites de Ia nature, ch. 20; Les colimarons . .. , "Dissertation du physicien .. .";Precis du siecle de Louis XV, ch. 43; Dialogues d'Evhemere, 9th dialogue. Voltaire's most violent attacks, however, were on Buffon's cosmogony and his theory of the earth. 339· Voltaire, L'Homme aux 40 ecus, ch. 6; Singularites de Ia nature, ch. r8; Les Colimarons ... , "Dissertation du physicien ..."; Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.v. "Dieu," § 4; Histoire des anguilles; Dialogues d'Evhemere, mh dialogue. 340. Voltaire, Les Colimarons . .. , "Dissertation du physicien ... ," in #529, 2y: 224. 34r. Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.v. ''Abeilles" (ch. 6 of Singularitis de Ia nature). Precis du siecle de Louis XV, ch. 43· 342. Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.v. "Polype," in #529, 20: 24r.

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343· Voltaire, Singularites de la nature, ch. 4; Les Colimarons ... ; Questions sur l'EncycLopedie, s.v. "Polype." 344· Voltaire, Singularites de La nature, Introduction, in #529, 27: 126-27. 345· Voltaire, L'Homme aux 40 ecus, ch. 7, "Mariage." 346. Voltaire, Singularites de La nature, introduction, in #529, 27: 127. 347· Voltaire, Questions sur l'EncycLopedie, § 4, "Pourquoi (Les)," s.vv. ''Anatomie," "Generation," "Ignorance," "Matiere monstres," "Mouvement," and "Philosophie." 348. Ibid., s.v. "Occultes (qualites occultes)," in #529, 20: 132. 349· Ibid., s.v. "Bacon (Franc,:ois)," in #529, 17: 523. 350. Voltaire, Remarques sur le bon sens (1775), §§ 23 and So, in #529, 31: 153, 160. 351. Voltaire, Dialogues d'Evhemere, 5th dialogue, in #529, 30: 487. 352. Voltaire, Questions sur l'EncycLopedie, s.v. "Nature," in #529, 20: n6-17. 353· Voltaire, Dialogues d'Evhemere, 3d dialogue, in #529, 30: 476. 354· Voltaire, Tout en Dieu, Resultat, in #529, 28: roo. 355· Ibid., epigraph, 91. 356. Voltaire, Les Colimarons . .. , "Reflexion de l'editeur," in #529, 27: 226. 357· Voltaire, Discours en vers sur l'homme, 6th discourse, in #529, 9: 419. 358. Voltaire, Precis du siecle de Louis XV, ch. 43· 359· Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, § 4, s.v. "Philosophie," in #529, 20: 213. 360. Voltaire, Dialogue de Pegase et du vieillard (1774), in #529, ro: 204. 361. Voltaire, Le Systeme vraisemblable, § in #529, 30: 165. 362. See Voltaire, Le Marseillais et le lion, and Questions sur l'EncycLopedie, § 2, s.vv. "Homme" and esp. "Ignorance." 363. Voltaire, Discours en vers sur l'homme, 6th discourse, in #529, 9: 417. 364. Voltaire, Le Philosophe ignorant, Ist quest., in #529, 26: 48. 365. Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, s.vv. "Calebasse," "Causes finales," "Hon1me," and "Providence." 366. Voltaire, Zadig, ch. 9, "La Femme battue." 367. "'What does it matter,' said the Dervish, 'whether there is evil or good? When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry about the comfort or discomfort of the rats in the ship?" (Voltaire, Candide [New York: Random House, 1929], !09). 368. Voltaire, Histoire de }enni, ch. 9· 369. Voltaire, review of Bonnet's Considerations sur les corps organises (1762). The idea was Bonnet's, but Voltaire clearly gave it his personal adherence. 370. See Voltaire, Traite de mitaphysique, ch. 2, in #529, 22: 195. 371. Denis Diderot, Le Reve de d'Alembert, #448. On Voltaire's finely nuanced attitude to Diderot, see Torrey, #86o.

Epilogue r. These pages were already written before I was able to read Georges Poulet's Les Metamorphoses du cercle (#813), so let me simply say that contrary Poulet's assertion

690

Note to Page 553

(p. 88), the example of Voltaire does not, in my opinion, permit us to believe that the eighteenth century saw in man "a coadjutor to the sun, since he knows how the world is governed." For Voltaire, man remained on the periphery. He was not at the center and possessed no "good conscience."

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