14. Civil War years (the 1640s): ‘Anabaptists, fanatics, robbers, and murderers’

THE MOST VOCIFEROUS champions of the circulation theory hailed from the fresh generation of anatomy students nurtured by Descartes’ ideas. It was only with the advent of the new mechanical intellectual horizon from the 1640s onwards that Harvey’s revolutionary concept came to be fully understood and accepted by natural philosophers. The Englishman’s arguments thereafter seemed to carry greater weight, and many of the traditional objections to the theory lost their force. The new generation of young anatomists, who often invoked Harvey as their exemplar and inspiration, investigated the body as though it were an elaborate machine, explicitly rejecting vitalist and Aristotelian principles.

It was the enthusiasm and growing influence of the anatomical vanguard, along with the broader cultural appeal of Harvey’s ideas, that ensured the success of the circulation theory. ‘With much adoe at last’, as one contemporary remarked, ‘in about 20 or 30 years [i.e. c.1650]’, the theory ‘was received in all the Universities in the world’. Harvey’s genius finally received recognition, and he became renowned as ‘the only man, perhaps, that ever lived to see his owne Doctrine established in his life-time’.

Yet many of the intellectual developments of these years made Harvey uneasy and, during the 1640s, he was compelled to pick up his pen. ‘This lower world’, he scribbled, in a hand that had deteriorated further with the onset of old age, ‘is so continuous with the superior realms, that all its motions and changes seem to take their origin from thence and be governed by them.’ Perhaps with Descartes in mind, Harvey used a mechanical clock to illustrate this statement, along with the corollary notion, that spiritual forces animate the world, suffusing even artificial devices. ‘Scarcely any elemental body’, he mused, ‘does not in its actions surpass its own powers … when our clocks do faithfully tell all the hours of the day and of the night, – do these not seem to partake of another body besides the elements, and of a body more divine? If by the dominion and rule of Art such excellent works are daily produced as do surpass the powers of the materials themselves, what then shall we think can be done by the precept and rule of Nature [which has been fashioned by] the hand of God?’

Harvey’s words were part of his vast treatise on the subject of generation (i.e. the propagation of living organisms), published as De Generatione Animalium in 1651 and translated in 1653 as Anatomical Exercitations, Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures. It was Descartes, as well as Aristotle and Fabricius (both of whom had written on the same theme), who called the Kentishman back to his writing table. Gratified as he was by his growing celebrity, and the increasing appeal of his circulation theory, Harvey despised the mechanical philosophy that had facilitated its success.

When he turned to the heart and the blood in animals in his new book, Harvey was at pains to distinguish his views from those of Descartes. The Frenchman had, he declared, not only misinterpreted the movements of the heart (arguing for an active diastole), but also the cause of its motion. The heart moved, Harvey averred, of its own accord, because of the ‘pulsative faculty’ or ‘power of soul’ within it. The organ was ‘an autonomous living thing’ rather than a clock or a mechanical pump – as Descartes claimed, and as he himself had previously implied.

The heart, Harvey went on, regenerated the ‘vital heat’ of the blood, which was also enlivened by an inherent ‘vital motion’. The liquid was full of ‘spirits’ too, which ‘move the whole mechanism of the body as they flow continuously from the arteries’. Because of this, blood could be described as:

the immediate instrument of the soul and its first abode … as it seems to participate in some other more divine body and is perfused with divine animal heat it is analogous to the element of the stars. In so far as it is spirit, it is the hearth, the goddess Vesta, the household deity, innate heat, the sun of the microcosm, Plato’s fire … it preserves and nourishes itself and grows by its wavering and perpetual motion. It also deserves the name of spirit as it dispenses [radical moisture] to all the rest the same substance … [just as] the Sun and the Moon impart life to the earth.

Sensing perhaps that such philosophical-poetical epiphanies had, in a world enthralled by Descartian and Baconian ideas, lost some of their power to convince, Harvey confronted the mechanical philosophers head-on. In ‘assigning only a material cause’, he thundered, and ‘deducing the cause of natural things from an involuntary and causal occurrence of the elements [they] do not reach that which is chiefly concerned in the operations of nature … namely the divine agent, and God in nature, whose operations are guided with the highest artifice, providence, and wisdom, and do all tend to some certain end, and are all produced for some certain good’.

Yet it was too late for such arguments. When Harvey came to the end of his gargantuan manuscript, we may imagine him putting down his pen more in sorrow than in anger, realizing that he could do little to stop the mechanical-empirical revolution. Descartes’ philosophy made redundant so much of what Harvey valued in natural philosophy, including the very principles that had inspired his circulation theory. Harvey’s theory had, against the author’s wishes, helped usher in the new dispensation, yet under that dispensation it could never have been born.

The concept of the body politic had, as we have seen, influenced Harvey’s thinking on the heart. In dedicating De motu cordis to Charles I, Harvey had explicitly promoted the idea that the king was as supremely necessary to society as the heart was to the body, or the sun to the universe.

Charles, who famously believed that ‘Kings are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone’, must have been gratified to be hailed as England’s sun-heart-king. Intellectual support was most welcome to a ruler who often felt beleaguered, especially by Parliament, which he had summarily dismissed in 1629. In 1640, after an eleven-year hiatus, Charles took the humiliating step of recalling Parliament in order to entreat the House to levy a tax on his people. Like his father before him, Charles’ greatest problem was financing his court and military campaigns, in a period of high inflation. In presenting his case for a national tax at Westminster, the king argued that if he imposed on his subjects, it was only because he wished to spend the money on their improvement. Taxes, he declared, were like ‘vapours rising out of the earth, gathered into a cloud’; the cloud, in turn, raining down ‘sweet refreshing showers on the same fields from which they had been first exhaled.’ Charles’ use of this Harveian–Aristotelian metaphor suggests that he may indeed have followed Harvey’s advice to read De motu cordis ‘at the same time contemplat[ing] the Principle of Man’s Body, and the Image of your Kingly power’.

The 1640 Parliament was unresponsive. They would not further the King’s cause until Charles renounced his claim to be ‘a sovereign power … above the laws and statutes of this kingdom’; the Protestant faith was also to be confirmed as the ‘birthright and inheritance’ of the English people. The autocratic Charles, whom many suspected of Catholic tendencies, was widely regarded as a threat to the inalienable political and religious rights of all Englishmen.

An uneasy stalemate followed, but conflict erupted again in 1642, this time in the form of full-scale civil war. The parliamentary forces, known as the Roundheads, marched against the monarch under Oliver Cromwell’s banner, while the Royalist Cavaliers rallied around their king. Harvey had no doubt where his allegiance lay, describing the Roundheads as a pack of ‘Anabaptists, fanatics, robbers, and murderers.’

Harvey proved his steadfastness by staying close to his king, even on the field of battle. During the bloody skirmish at Edgehill in 1642, the king’s two sons were committed to Harvey’s care. Harvey told a friend that he ‘withdrew with them under a hedge, and tooke out of his pocket a booke and read; but he had not read very long before a Bullet of a great Gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station’. We may recall here the popular belief that the kings of England, and other royal persons, were always ‘wont to remain among’ their yeomen during battles, ‘the Prince showing by this where his chief strength did consist’.

Yet even the loyalty of men such as Harvey could not save the king against the tenacity of his enemies. After six years of war, the Royalists were finally defeated, and the republican Commonwealth was founded. In 1649, Charles was beheaded in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the English thereby becoming the first modern people to cut off the head of their king on a constitutional principle.

De motu cordis was a species of Royalist anatomy. Yet despite Harvey’s overt political aims, his book unwittingly encouraged radical ideas with regard to the body politic, just as it did in the world of natural philosophy. In entering the culture and the language Harvey’s circulation theory generated waves of change over which he had no control. In arguing that the same blood nourished every part of the body (against Galen’s idea of two distinct blood types) Harvey appeared to some to undermine the hierarchy of both the blood and the organs. It was appalling, conservative critics argued, to imagine that the nobler organs, such as the lungs, could be sustained by the same blood as the inferior organs – why, it would be like offering the king the same dish as a country bumpkin, a contradiction of the laws of nature, which were the laws of God.

Harvey’s suggestion that the heart worked like a set of water bellows or a pump proved to be even more dangerous, especially after Descartes adopted the idea. If the heart was indeed a pump then the most appropriate parallel for the organ would no longer be a king, but a sort of steward who performed his office diligently, consistently and mechanically, without thinking. Better still, Cromwell’s supporters reckoned, the heart might be compared to Parliament.

The political theorist James Harrington dexterously turned Harvey’s ideas to radical ends, fashioning from them a variety of republican political-anatomy. Parliament, he claimed, in a book dedicated to Cromwell, was the true ‘heart’ of the body politic. ‘Consisting of two ventricles [i.e. the Commons and the Lords], the one greater and replenished with a grosser store, the other less and full of a purer’, the heart ‘sucketh in and gusheth forth the life blood’ of the Commonwealth, so sustaining it in ‘a perpetual circulation’. Historical events bore Harrington out, for how could the heart be the king, or the king the heart, when the body politic survived Charles’ execution in 1649?

As the Cartesian dispensation extended its hegemony across Europe, the concept of the body politic gradually lost relevance. The heart was now regarded as an engine or a pump at the centre of a microcosmic machine; a machine was an artificial device, which could not possibly be organized according to an organic hierarchy. This idea was eloquently set forth in Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes’ masterpiece of political philosophy.

An acquaintance of Harvey, Hobbes celebrated the theory of the circulation of the blood in the opening pages of Leviathan. The political philosopher’s understanding of his friend’s theory was, however, filtered through his reading of Descartes. He described the Harveian heart as ‘a great piece of machinery in which one wheel gives motion to another’. Harvey’s discovery had, Hobbes argued, revealed that the body functioned like an artificial device, a truth that could be applied to the body politic. Society might be described as a mechanical body formed by social contract, a machine assembled rationally by man. Hobbes declared monarchy to be the best form of government but only because it was the most perfect artificial state, not because it had been ordained by God, or nature; a monarch, he said, also had a duty to honour the ‘contract’ he had signed with his people. Staunch Royalists such as Harvey were appalled by key aspects of the argument, as well as by the mechanical premise on which it was based.

The body politic was only one of countless correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm that became redundant under the new mechanical dispensation. If the body were a machine, then searching for parallels between it and the world of nature (or the celestial world) was pointless. The various parts of the mechanical body were to be measured and weighed, not linked with other entities in the chain of being; knowledge now focused on quantification rather than on the identification of correspondences – a fanciful and superfluous activity which could be left entirely to the poets. Poets and natural philosophers now ceased to be intellectual brothers – the heirs of John Donne and William Harvey would no longer share a common language.

Descartes’ philosophy left no room for what he called ‘occult forces in stones or plants … amazing and marvellous sympathies’; consequently, it had no place for metaphors either. On this point the Frenchman was at one with Bacon, who wrote that ‘all ornaments of speech … similitudes, treasury of eloquence, and such like emptinesses [should] be utterly dismissed’. If nature was comprised of ‘things singular and unmatched’ why should language and the mind devise ‘for them conjugates and parallels and relatives that do not exist’? Partly in consequence of Bacon and Descartes’ influence, around the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘all deductions from Metaphors, Parables, Allegories’, as the great prose stylist and physician Sir Thomas Browne put it, became bereft of ‘force’; thereafter, only ‘real and rigid interpretations’ had the power to convince.

Thomas Sprat, historian and member of the Royal Society (which would receive its charter in 1662), issued an ex cathedra decree regarding new stylistic standards for works of natural philosophy. Authors were to deliver ‘so many things in an equal number of words’, to render their words as unambiguous as ‘numbers’, using them as transparent tokens that revealed objects as they really are. Only in this way could men avoid confusion and discord, which had been so evident of late in politics as well as natural philosophy. A clear, accurate and impartial description of facts, a perspicuous description of the measurements of a phenomenon, and the laws governing its motion, were now all that was required. The natural philosopher must, he implied, become invisible – a dispassionate observer of natural phenomena – and the reader a virtual witness of his experiments.

Harvey’s comparisons of the heart to a set of water bellows and to a sort of pump were, in a sense, the analogies to end all analogies. Hit upon perhaps in a moment of exuberant fancy, expressed without careful consideration of potential philosophical and political consequences, and certainly not regarded by Harvey as any more significant than the myriad natural metaphors he employed throughout his oeuvre, the parallel heralded the beginning of a new intellectual era. Descartes latched on to it, and made it the cornerstone of his vision of the body, and of a philosophy in which analogies would lose all their capacity to persuade and beguile.

With the arrival of Descartes’ philosophy, the heart also lost much of its fascination. In becoming an insentient pump at the centre of a purely material and mechanical body, it no longer offered a home to thoughts, a nursery to the imagination, or a citadel to the soul. For the Frenchman, the brain was where intellectual action began and developed. Man was distinguished from automaton animals (who were all body) by virtue of the reasoning power of his brain; henceforth man’s identity, as an individual as well as a species, would be forged there – ‘I think,’ Cartesian man declared, ‘therefore I am.’

The brain also became the official residence of the soul, which Descartes located at the organ’s centre in the pineal gland. Mind and soul were rendered virtually synonymous; the intimate ties between both the body and the mind, and between the soul and the body, were cut; the physiological was divorced from the psychological. It became preposterous, in this new mechanical universe, to suppose that the body could think or that a man’s personality might be determined by the four humours.