TWO
Cultura and Medicina
Animi: An Early
Modern Tradition
The physician of the soul
The preoccupation with the powers and frailties of the human mind and with regimens for attaining its health and virtues was at the center of a body of literature that permeated the cultural space of early modern Europe. Rooted in various and at times diverging philosophical and theological doctrines, the anatomies of the soul, the treatises of the passions of the mind, the tracts of consolation or of wisdom, the works of pastoral care, the rhetorical treatises, and sometimes the logics of the time concur in signaling the urgency of the enterprise of diagnosing and curing the mind in the proper way. The claim to urgency was no doubt largely a response to the sense of crisis that traversed a Europe unsettled by religious and political strife, as well as by the multiplying challenges to theological and philosophical authority. Robert Burton’s preface to his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is a compendium of the folly that seemed to have seized all human endeavors, from learning to politics and religion, besides the human frame and the natural world themselves: “all the World,” Burton announces in the guise of “Democritus Junior,” “is melancholy or mad.”1 Thomas Wright in his treatise The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601, 1604) alludes to the Augustinian picture of a similar universal overturning in The City of God XXII.xxii: man and world are subject to an all-pervasive array of “miseries and ills,” from vices to ignorance, from evil deeds to natural disasters, which are all attributable, in Saint Augustine’s theological scheme, to the sin of the first man.2
The core concern of such texts is nevertheless not a diagnosis of the world per se but a diagnosis of man. Rather than social policy, they are after a policy of the internal commonwealth of the human mind. The implication is that questions of social order are partly at least to be analyzed as questions of the ordering of the soul. But the investigation of the perturbed soul coupled with a search for remedies is seen as an endeavor in its own right, with a distinct standing, and following its own rationale. That rationale takes the form of anthropological-therapeutic questions, be they philosophical or theological, which are seen as informing, or as being informed by, questions of social order, without nevertheless being reducible to them.
Burton’s theme is the melancholic condition of both soul and body, and his project is to offer assistance in what he announces is man’s primary task: self-knowledge and self-reformation.3 Such assistance is the domain, he says, of the “Physitian” who manages to minister to both the bodily and the spiritual condition of man,4 a practice relevant to medical physicians as well as to “Orators, Philosophers, Divines, and fathers of the Church.”5 Wright, whose treatise Burton includes among his numberless references,6 also dwells at some length on the disciplinary position of his anthropological endeavor. In his prefatory chapter, he explains that the investigation of the faculties and passions of the soul is profitable in more than one way and serves the purposes of more than one discipline. It is a part of theoretical divinity (which analyzes the passions as special causes of sin, with its various distinctions) and of theoretical natural philosophy (which anatomizes the operations of the sensitive soul, in the manner of a de anima treatise). It is also the domain of medicine (where the passions and humors of the body are investigated as causes of diseases). But medicine is primarily a practical discipline, in the custody of the “Physitian of the Body.” Similarly, there is a medicine of the soul, which is the business of the “Physitian of the Soul.” Wright includes in this latter category a number of disciplines with a marked practical orientation: sacred and civil rhetoric (the field of Christian orators and of civil orators, e.g., ambassadors, lawyers); practical divinity (which assists the good Christian, “whose life is a warrefare upon earth”); practical moral philosophy (which improves manners); and civil prudence (which teaches “gracious carriage” and “grateful conversation”).7
We have here a particularly comprehensive and explicit description of the territory of an early modern field of knowledge that is jointly theoretical and practical and that transgresses the institutional and disciplinary boundaries of the time. The physician of the soul stands at the crossroads of practical divinity, medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric and uses the analytical tools of theology and natural philosophy. His object is the human embodied mind, and his aim is the cure of its perturbations and the cultivation of its health or virtue, in the service of human beings, whether considered in their capacity as Christians, gentlemen, or scholars. There are, to be sure, variations in the analyses, diagnoses, and prescriptions of such early modern “physicians,” due especially to their theological allegiances. But the project is a common one, and I would like to suggest that the body of writings governed by it forms a relevant context for the program of the English experimental natural philosophy in the seventeenth century. Bacon, I have argued, writes just like such a physician of the soul whose purposes can be served by (reformed) logic, rhetoric, or moral philosophy. It will be the proposal of the next chapters that the Royal Society virtuosi in the second half of the century draw on both Bacon and the literature on the cure and cultivation of the soul in framing their understanding of experimental philosophy. In this chapter, after a brief survey of the main traditions of thought feeding this early modern field of knowledge, I will look at some of the important genres and themes and their development through the seventeenth century.
Sources
The early modern vocabulary of a “cure” or a “cultivation” of the soul is indebted to two main historical sources, which can be called the Socratic and the patristic traditions. The former is the promoter of the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life, while the latter claims for Christianity the title of the true philosophy, in the sense of the true guide to life.
The Socratic discipline of self-knowledge understood as an examination of one’s opinions is present in a number of early Platonic dialogues, as is the idea that the care of the soul is the proper business of a philosophical life.8 The cultivation or education of the soul, the later dialogues agree, is the lifetime employment of the “lover of learning” and the score on which after-life judgment is to be passed: “The soul goes to the underworld possessing nothing but its education and upbringing.”9 The “care of the soul” is most properly described as a “filling up with true belief, knowledge, understanding, and, in sum, with all of virtue.”10 It is also a healing, and virtue (which is eminently the “virtue of reason,” or wisdom) may indeed be described as a “kind of health, fine condition, and well-being of the soul.”11
The philosophical care of the soul was also at the core of the Hellenistic and Roman schools of philosophy and informed the writings of Seneca, Cicero, and Plutarch, who drew variously on the Platonic, Academic, Stoic, and Epicurean trends of thought and whose philosophical syncretism was received with approval by the early modern European humanists.12 A particularly eloquent account of the ancient schools’ idea of the care of the soul is in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, a work indebted to both Plato and the Stoics. It came to be particularly popular in the Renaissance, featured in the humanist school curriculum, and was a frequent reference in discussions of the passions. It was also the conduit for the popularization of two ancient descriptions of philosophy as cultura animi and as animi medicina.
Philosophy in its true sense as the ancient schools understood it, Cicero tells us, is a “cultivation of the soul,” a cultura animi. Cicero develops the agricultural metaphor along two lines: both a good-natured soul (a fertile field) and a good education (the tillage of philosophical learning) are needed in order to acquire wisdom and virtue. The proper work of philosophy is to weed out vices, till the soil of the soul, sow the good seeds of virtue, and grow the harvest of wisdom.13 Cicero varies the metaphor and also speaks, in medical terms, of the “cure” of philosophy (animi medicina), by analogy with the art (ars) of curing bodies.14 If we were capable of discerning nature as she is, and following her in guiding our lives, there would be no need of a method of instruction. We do have some small sparkles of insight and innate seeds of virtues, but they are easily quenched under the corrupting influence of beliefs and manners. Instead, we should allow them to ripen with the help of philosophy.15 The passions are “diseases” (morbi) or rather “distempers” (perturbationes) of the soul, being “Commotions of the mind rebelling against Reason,” while the state of the mind thus affected is aptly described as “madness” (insania).16 Conversely, a mind free of perturbations is a sane mind, whose “Temper” is characterized by “calmness and constancy,” and this is what we call wisdom (“the soundness of the Mind”) or virtue (“a Quality of the mind constant and uniform”).17 Although to apply itself to itself is difficult for a distempered soul, such self-cure is possible, and it lies in the right application of reason, called a “kind of Socratick medicine,”18 which fortifies the mind and is thus itself the very instrument of philosophy. This is possible due to a specific understanding of the passions: they are basically corrupt judgments (or include such judgments) that are voluntary. The remedy for the passions lies thus primarily in a remedy for the mechanism of voluntary judgment.19
Recent scholarly work has unearthed the extent to which ancient philosophy was devoted to the cultivation of the soul. Pierre Hadot in particular has offered a resonant recuperation of the Hellenistic and Roman notion of philosophy as an art of living. Thus understood, philosophy is equivalent to “a concrete attitude and determinate life-style, which engages the whole of existence” and presupposes “a conversion of the life of the person.”20 The Stoics, for instance, distinguished between the parts of philosophical discourse (physics, ethics, and logic) and philosophy itself, which was “the philosophical way of life,” a “unitary act, which consists in living logic, physics and ethics.”21 Juliusz Doman´ski has also argued that the definitions of philosophy in the Neoplatonic and Stoic sources of the first centuries CE included both theoretical and practical elements (the former referring to the object, the latter to the aim of philosophy, often identified as wisdom). The sense of “practical” here, Doman´ski writes, is that of neither a “science of mores” nor an “ethics of norms and exhortations,” but rather that of an ethics incarnate in the life of the philosopher (“une éthique réalisée”). As such, the “practical” side of philosophy is the “fourth element” added to the usual tripartite model of theoretical philosophy (logic, ethics, and physics).22 According to John Sellars, on this ancient conception, the logos of theoretical understanding is translated into pra ctical ability by means of the training of askēsis, and the “care of the soul” names this very process of translation. Philosophy is thus an art “directed toward the transformation of the state of one’s soul into a good estate (euexia), developing its excellence (aretē) just as medicine transforms the state of the body into one of health.”23
Philosophy as an art of living, then, is to be understood as a particular orientation of all the branches of philosophy, so that their study bears on the transformation, which includes both a cure and a training, of the psychic life of the individual. It is called an “art” (technē, ars), but it can also be called a “discipline.” Cicero says that Diogenes and Carneades are illustrious examples of “the noblest of Arts, the Doctrine [discipline] of well living.”24 This art or discipline is not moral philosophy but philosophy with all its disciplines turned to an ethical purpose, in the sense that it incorporates knowledge within the character (ēthos) of the person.
The ancient philosophical conception of a school of training the soul fed the religious thought of the early Church Fathers. For Clement of Alexandria, Christianity was now the true philosophy: its aim was still paideia, an education of souls, but it could provide the true framework of the endeavor, since it possessed the revelation of the Logos.25 Other Greek Fathers, e.g., Philo of Alexandria, Origen, the Origenists, and the Cappadocian Fathers, also conceived of the Christian life in terms of an askēsis that involved, much as did the philosophical life, the government and purification of thoughts and passions, the acceptance of the divine will, and a reorientation of mind and heart.26
Saint Augustine also called the Christian religion the “true philosophy,” which was to be distinguished from the pagan: Cicero and the ancients, Augustine says, believed that philosophy was a gift from the gods, greater than any other gift, apt to assist man’s fight with his own misery, but bestowed only on a few. There is some measure of truth in this belief, Augustine allows, but what the philosophers did not know is that the true name of the gift is the grace of the Christian God, which alone leads to the acquisition of the true philosophy. That it is accorded only to a few men is also true, which is a consequence of the fact that “humankind has been condemned to endure those miseries as a penalty” for the first man’s transgression.27 Original sin is for Augustine the crucial historical event that completely determines man’s fate in the saeculum. Man’s fall was due to his “first evil act of will” bred by pride: it turned man away from God and onto himself.28 Man lives now in the city of the love of self and away from the heavenly city of the love of God.29 Augustine’s polemics with the ancient philosophy, in particular with the Platonic doctrine that once guided his own theology, leads him to give a radical interpretation of Saint Paul’s indictment of the “works of the flesh” in Galatians 5:19–21: the carnal life of fallen man is not simply attributable to the sinful “weight” of the body, but is a result of the corruption of the soul itself. The passions that trouble the soul, therefore, are not simply the result of the body’s action, but are the inner stirrings of a sinful soul.30 In keeping with his analysis of original sin as a breach of rightful love and as a corruption of the will, Augustine’s account of the relevant mental life of a Christian is also couched in terms of loves and volitions. The will is itself to be understood as a species of love, as are all the emotions. Living according to God requires a right will, which is a good love; conversely, the wrong will of rebellious man is a bad love, and all the emotions fall into the wrong or the right side of the divide according to the evil or the good love that animates them.31
The life of a Christian, therefore, consists in a long journey whose aim is the reorientation of the will in the right direction, away from the self and toward God. Sin is nevertheless so ponderous that the only remedy for its misery is the upward movement of grace. Augustine’s story of his own Christian journey in the Confessions is the story of a penitent struggle with his “heaviness” in the expectation of divine grace. It is also the story of a cure: Augustine calls God “my most private Physician” who is alone apt to “cure all my infirmities.”32 The mode of the confession is for Augustine the true mode of self-knowledge, since it opens the heart for the hoped-for action of the divine. Confession as penitent practice activates the right movements of the soul, which are of the order of strong, godly emotions: Augustine fights his own “heaviness” by praising and praying, by love and lament, by thanksgiving and bewailing.33
The two main ancient sources I have sketched above informed the early modern picture of the physician of the soul in various combinations. Despite the tensions between the philosophical (Socratic) and the theological (Augustinian) anthropologies,34 the common core preoccupation with remedies for a disturbed soul—a primarily practical preoccupation, aimed at reorienting and reconfiguring the operations of the human psuche¯—made it possible for the early modern physicians of the soul to avail themselves of the instruments of both philosophy and religion, to conceive alliances between reason and grace, or reason and the emotions, and to imagine curative exercises that involved both Socratic and spiritual “medicine,” even if the varying proportions in which they did so certainly reflected diverse theological allegiances.
Genres
The genres of the early modern cultura and medicina animi can be seen as specialized expressions of the common, fundamental practical doctrine that Thomas Wright assigned in general to the physician of the soul and that Francis Bacon recognized in his reflections on the need for an art of tempering the mind. A survey of these genres as they were fashioned through the seventeenth century, together with an investigation of a series of central themes, will show how they translate the two traditions sketched above into early modern vocabulary and how, in so doing, they develop the self-styled and noncompartmentalized art of the cure and culture of souls. The interest of this survey is twofold: On the one hand, it indicates the existence of an early modern culture of regimens that develops with its own resources a cluster of themes and concepts that represent a specific approach to the problem of knowledge in its own right. On the other, this culture can be meaningfully seen as a nourishing intellectual pool for the thought of the English experimental philosophers, in two ways: first, the philosophers are known to have been familiar with a number of authors and texts in this early modern cultura animi tradition (so the emphasis here will be on these); second, the philosophers work not only with the conceptual frameworks and vocabulary but also with the generic conventions developed in these texts.
Father Thomas Wright was a Catholic who, in the words of Theodore Stroud, represented a “test case for toleration” in Protestant England. With the support of the Earl of Essex and of the Bacon brothers (Anthony and Francis), he sought personal toleration before he could champion the Catholic cause, yet had to spend eight years in various English prisons. During his confinement he wrote several tracts, among which was The Passions of the Minde in Generall (written by 1598, first edition 1601, second revised edition 1604), a work that, unlike his other writings, did not take a stance on matters of religious doctrinal conflict. In a letter to Anthony Bacon, his protector, he explained the reconciliatory nature of his tract, acknowledged by the Bishop of London’s censor. The Passions proved a popular text, which went through five new editions and issues by 1630.35
Wright’s text is a good clue to the array of the relevant medicina-cultura animi genres. Not only does Wright itemize the branches of the practice of the physician of the soul, as we have seen, but his treatise is itself a compendium of the relevant genres and a good illustration of the mixed influence of the two traditions. Its six books deal in turn with a psychological, de anima-style analysis of the faculties of the soul,36 an explication of the physiological mechanism of the passions, and a theological account of the distempered soul as a consequence of the Fall (book I); a survey of the effects of the passions on the embodied mind (moral and cognitive perturbations, physiological distempers, spiritual troubles of the soul) (book II); a prescription of remedies (by means of self-knowledge and a series of philosophical and religious exercises, including the examination of opinions, the examination of conscience, and prayer) (book III); a physiognomic and behavioral investigation of the outward signs of the passions (book IV); a rhetorical minitreatise on how to move the passions (book V); and an exploration of the “defects and imperfections” of the understanding as ultimate causes of the passions (book VI). The latter topic is a curious addition to a treatise of the passions, and one especially relevant to the approach to the question of knowledge in the natural philosophical texts, to which I will return.
Another treatise of the passions written later in the century is an equally multigenre and cross-disciplinary compound: Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640). An Anglican priest, Reynolds was in turn a member of the Westminster Assembly of divines (1643), Dean of Christ Church in Oxford (1648–50 and 1659), and Bishop of Norwich (1661–76). As Dean of Christ Church, he was John Locke’s superior during the latter’s tutorship, and his treatise, which was to be taught at Oxford until the end of the century, is mentioned in Locke’s notes before 1660.37 The manuscript of this treatise was requested by, and dedicated to, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who also prompted Descartes to write on the topic of the passions.38
Reynolds’s treatise mirrors Wright’s in the range of its disciplinary breadth: it includes a natural philosophical (“psychological”) and a theological analysis of the soul (faculties, interdependence between soul and body, postlapsarian corruptions), although unlike Wright’s it does not include a medical analysis. It proceeds to a brief investigation of memory and fancy and an extensive one of the passions themselves, not so much in the manner of a “scientific” de anima treatise, but rather in tune with his professed faith in the “Culture of the Minde.”39 Reynolds investigates both the “offices” and the “corruptions” of these faculties and examines the ways in which they can be put again to good use. Such “culture” is the prerogative of moral philosophy, practical divinity, and rhetoric, and it builds on the “dignities” of the soul after the Fall, which form the subject matter of an entire section of the treatise. Reynolds also devotes several chapters to the “dignities” and the “corruptions” of the understanding itself, which mirrors Wright’s book VI; both these developments of the genre of the treatise of the passions deserve special attention, and I will come back to them below.
The physician of the soul, as these treatises of the passions suggest, could use the combined resources of a Socratic philosophical culture and of a Christian pastoral care of souls. While the general purpose is the same (the recuperation of the health of the soul), the sorts of remedies singled out in various texts range across what could be called a spectrum of Augustinianisms. The core idea of a debilitating Fall is always in the background of these analyses of human nature, but the range of solutions highlight degrees of weight given to the work of reason, of the emotions, of religious exercises, and of divine grace. For instance, a number of “anatomies of the soul” written by theologians and poets associated with the Sidney-Essex circles, to which the Bacon brothers were close, are shaped as Christian adventures of fall and restoration. The latter is understood in terms of a “cure” provided by a combination of Ciceronian rational virtues and Christian faith and grace, with various authors emphasizing the one or the other element of the combination.40
A particular species of Augustinianism also informs another early modern genre that purported to offer medicine for the soul: the rhetorical treatise. The orator and the preacher, as both Wright and Reynolds acknowledged, laid claims to a capacity of administering true “physick” that were similar to those of the moral philosopher and the medical physician. Both Jesuit and Protestant rhetoricians understood the power of the eloquent word to work the required transformation in the soul that could reorient its loves and desires and thus also its noetic activity toward their proper object, God. Deborah Shuger has explained that in such works, e.g., Nicolas Caussin’s De Eloquentia Sacra et Humana (1619) or J. H. Alsted’s Orator (1612), the framing of rhetoric relied on the humanist Ciceronian ideal of eloquent wisdom grafted on an Augustinian psychology of the emotions: rhetoric was able, in Augustinian parlance, to “restore the true order of love.”41
Various degrees of Augustinianism also feature in the distinct genre of the Protestant consolation treatise, where the examination of conscience could combine with the examination of opinions, the help of reason with the help from above. Such works of pastoral care in early seventeenth-century England looked to the alleviation of “spiritual afflictions” through the administration of “spiritual physick.” Recent scholarship has shown that they were one important medium for the conceptualization of the nature and proper treatment of melancholy, and thus shared the task of the cure of this malady of soul-and-body with the medical works of the time.42 Philosophical therapies such as reflection, counsel, or conversation with a wise friend could variously combine with theological argument, religious meditation, and prayer, with the cultivation of penitent sorrow and the invocation of grace, and sometimes with medical prescriptions such as diet and physical exercise.
At the high end of the Augustinian spectrum in such works are the Puritan consolation tracts that valorize the salvific effects of repentance, suffering, tears, and godly sorrow, in line with the struggler of the Confessions. A slightly lower degree of Augustinianism allows some room to the work of reason by the side of the work of grace, e.g., in Joseph Hall’s Heaven upon Earth, or, Of true peace, and tranquillitie of mind (1606), or John Abernethy’s A Christian and Heavenly Treatise, Containing Physicke for the Soule (1622).43 An even lower degree marks the consolations associated with the Anglican moderate religious trends in the seventeenth century. The rational work on the faculties is granted here a significant role in the care of souls, by the side of repentance and the invocation of grace. The moral life, which involves a training of the whole range of the human mind’s capacities, becomes important for justification. It is thus possible for Restoration divines such as Edward Fowler or Samuel Parker, in contrast with hard-line Nonconformists, to reinterpret divine assistance through grace as the very healthy or virtuous temper of the mind.44 For Simon Patrick, in his consolatory tract The Hearts Ease, or, A Remedy against all Troubles (1671), the cure of the soul is to be the work of the cooperation of reason and grace, and proceeds by the exercise of the rational capacity in understanding the nature and value of things and by following the rules of patience, humility, and a holy life.45 Patrick’s sources combine the Socratic and the patristic traditions: he cites Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Fathers of the Church, as well as scriptural doctrine.
As Jeremy Schmidt has shown, although there are marked theological differences between the Anglican tracts of consolation and the earlier Puritan works on the affliction of conscience, the therapeutic concerns are equally strong in both categories of works, and this line of practical divinity remains vital to the very end of the century. According to John Spurr, the pastoral approach of Restoration Anglican theology, represented by Fowler, Parker, and Patrick, as well as by John Tillotson, Isaac Barrow, Gilbert Burnet, and Richard Allestree (the probable author of the immensely popular The Whole Duty of Man, 1658), continued the legacy of Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and the Great Tew Circle, themselves indebted to the earlier English Church perspective of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. In keeping with their core practical ethos, their concern was with the proper Christian life rather than with speculative doctrines, and they insisted on the cooperation of works and faith, of reason and grace, of human righteousness and Christ’s righteousness as a way to salvation. Their religion was an ascetic course of life, aimed at a government of the soul undertaken as the prime Christian duty (the imitation of Christ), as spelled out by the covenant of grace. Their pastoral works (consolations, devotional works, and casuistical tracts) testify to this approach.46 The influence of the early English churchmen and of the later “Latitudinarians” on the experimental philosophers’ methodological and anthropological assumptions has been highlighted in important studies.47 I would like to suggest that there is an equally relevant influence as far as their views on the “husbandry” of human nature is concerned.
The cure and the culture of the soul of man, and the government of both its affections and its opinions, were also the avowed purpose of one variant of the early modern consolation tract—represented by the widely popular Neostoic writings of Guillaume du Vair, Justus Lipsius, or Pierre Charron—which featured by the side of the pastoral consolations, the rhetorical treatises, the medical-moral writings, the anatomies of the soul, and the treatises of the passions among the generic expressions of the practice of the early modern physician of the soul. Both Boyle and Locke, let us note, were familiar with these sources, as was Bacon.48 In refashioning the ancient cultura animi—often in its Platonizing Stoic form—for a Christian world, the Neostoics recombined elements of the traditional sources of thought about the soul and its care in a remarkably influential way.49 The Socratic and the patristic traditions are both present in their thought, although they resist the high Augustinian stress on culpability, repentance, and grace. For Guillaume du Vair in his La philosophie morale des stoïques (c. 1585), a work indebted to a Christianized Epictetus,50 the cure of souls is an office that philosophy shares with religion: both are labeled in Du Vair’s text our “physitians.”51 Lipsius and Charron rehearse the Ciceronian vocabulary: philosophy performs an animi cultum that makes the soul great,52 and human wisdom proceeds by a “diligent culture” of the self.53 The Neostoics also rehearse the ancient idea that the purging of the mind’s diseases—its passions, errors, and self-love—through self-discipline is an act of piety and service to God. In his De la sagesse (1601), Charron writes, quoting Seneca, Lactantius, and Hermes Trismegistus: “A wise man is a true sacrifice of the great God, his spirit is his temple, his soule is his image, his affections are his offerings, his greatest and most solemne sacrifice, is to imitate him, to serve and implore him.” The sentence appears almost verbatim in Du Vair’s tract, which was one of the more immediate sources of Charron’s. Lipsius also speaks of the “Temple of a Good Mind” in his Christian version of a Senecan consolation, De Constantia (1584).54
A Neostoic approach also features in an Anglican consolation later in the century, which can be seen as a mixture of the Stoic letter of advice and the Christian tract of pastoral care: Peter du Moulin’s Peace and Contentment of Minde (1657). Du Moulin was a royalist Anglican divine and known religious controversialist. In the 1650s he spent some time in Ireland and acted as tutor in the Boyle family. Boyle was thus personally acquainted with Du Moulin, and he may also have been familiar with his consolation tract.55 At the Restoration Du Moulin was made chaplain to Charles II, and he also became a supporter of the early Royal Society.56 His consolatory tract is divided into two main parts, devoted first to man’s “peace with God” and next to his “peace with himself”—both coming as a response to the postlapsarian disorder of the human faculties. The former, which is the matter of the first book, can be acquired through the exercise of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, through religious meditation, repentance, and prayer, as well as through the study of Scripture and nature. The next three books are devoted to man’s “peace with himself” in a manner openly indebted to Epictetus and Charron. The rectification of opinions and the government of the passions belong to this more earthly and, in Du Moulin’s hands, more voluminous regimen.
A good number of the texts of the medicina-cultura animi genres I have surveyed here (in particular the treatises of the passions, the consolations, and the works of wisdom indebted to a mitigated Augustinian position, which can be identified in the works of the Anglican divines, of a Catholic like Wright, and of the Neostoics) construe their anthropologies in such a way as to make the theological and the philosophical traditions compatible with each other, and forge several conceptions related to the discipline and virtue of the mind accordingly. An analysis of the relevant themes in this respect will be the concern of the remainder of this chapter.
Utility: practical versus speculative knowledge
The medicina-cultura animi is above all a practical discipline. In emphasizing the point, the various physicians of the soul forge a vocabulary of “utility” associated with the prime task of their office, the shaping of souls, and operate a key distinction between types of knowledge in conformity with that task: knowledge that is “practical” can perform the required transformations in the soul, while “speculative” knowledge fails in that endeavor and is thus sterile. The defense of the practical and the critique of the speculative types of knowledge are conducted along several lines in the early modern period, all of which are served by the medicina-cultura animi genres.
The rhetorical treatises, for instance, are one prominent medium for the humanist attack on scholastic Aristotelianism, one of whose great failures was seen to lie in its inefficiency in inculcating virtue and thus in its inability to achieve the good life. The flourishing moral and, by extension, political life was a matter of praxis rather than theoria, which could best be achieved through the shaping powers of rhetoric.57 The spiritual guidance of souls, too, could not rest on theoretical theology, but had to avail itself of the moving qualities of the scriptural Word and of the preachers’ sacred oratory. Scripture itself, as Matthias Flacius put it, dealt not with “speculative but with practical knowledge, which God wishes to be, above all else, living, ardent, and active.”58 The vita activa was thus not only a matter of public engagement but also the crux of both humanist and reformed calls for an active life of the soul.
The Puritan works of pastoral care advanced the same vocabulary, which they subsumed in their concern with godly life. John Morgan has pointed out the complex, ambivalent relationship Puritan teachers had with the question of worldly learning, due precisely to their prime concern with “godly utility.”59 Knowledge derived from non-Christian sources could be permitted and even commended on condition it was used in such a way as to conduce to the living of a Christian life, but became dangerous if pursued as an end in itself. In the latter case it was mere “idle speculation,” a vain preoccupation of “sublimated and subtle wits,” which could lead only to confusion, and thus failed the all-important test of “use.”60 The contrast “speculative” versus “practical” also features in the devotional works of the Anglican divines—which is indicative of the fact that, although separated by points of theological doctrine, the Anglicans and the Puritans shared the pastoral concern of the shaping of souls. Jeremy Taylor, for instance, wrote that “theology is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge,” and Edward Reynolds concurred: “theology is not a bare speculative science, which ultimately terminateth in the understanding, but . .. is a doctrine ordained and directed unto practice.”61 John Spurr comments that the “practical ethos” developed by Restoration Anglicanism was understood as a “reaction to the speculative and ‘experiential’ religion of the Interregnum,” that is, to both the doctrinal wars and the Puritan piety of “experience” (searching for the testimony of the spirit within).62 On the other hand, as we have seen, although the Anglicans and the Puritans described their respective brands of piety in opposition to each other, they both stressed the utility (i.e., ethical fruitfulness) of practical knowledge against (sterile) “speculation.”
A perfectly similar defense of practical, ethos-building knowledge against useless speculation features in the Neostoic texts, which echo the ideal of philosophy as an art of living. For Cicero, philosophy was “the Study of Wisdom,” which comprises “the Systems and Circle of all those Arts which relate to direction in the way of well-living.”63 Most people do engage in the theoretical part alone, and thus use the doctrines of philosophy “for Ostentation of Knowledge,” not for a “Rule of Life.” But in doing so, they fail “the proper work of Philosophy.”64 Similarly, for Lipsius, the circle of studies governed by the “nine muses” should be taken only as a “preparation” for virtue. Those who “have their knowledge to no end but to know” are “vaine, speculative, and given to no fruitful or profitable studie.” They use knowledge for “vaine ostentation,” instead of putting it in the service of curing and “beautifying” the mind.65 Charron also thinks that “humane wisdom,” which is the fruit of philosophy, is “the true science of man, for it gives instructions to live and to die well.” As such, it resembles the “divine wisdom” as taught by Christian divines: the latter is “in some sort Practique” (since the knowledge of divine things is incorporated into a “iudgment and rule of human actions”). It is thus to be contrasted with the divine wisdom taught by scholastic metaphysicians, which is “altogether speculative” and may well be “without either honestie, action, or other morall vertue.”66 Charron famously compares science unfavorably with wisdom, but we should note that his indictment of “science” is primarily an attack on a particular method of instruction that relies on memorizing and mechanical reporting of undigested material and that serves for ostentation and mercenary ends. But science or learning may be turned into “wisdom”—which is “a sweet and regular managing of the soule”—when “opinions and knowledges” are “incorporated” and “transubstantiated” into oneself. Natural knowledge, if thus used, may also serve wisdom, by the side of moral philosophy and practical divinity.67 These descriptions of the office of (true) philosophy make the distinction between “speculative” and “useful” along the lines of the ancient division between the “theoretical” and the “practical” sides of philosophy.68 The practical/useful includes the theoretical/speculative (as instrument in the cultivation of a virtuous mind), but not necessarily the other way round: the theoretical/speculative devoid of the practical/useful is bad philosophy, pursued in vanity for the sake of mere knowledge.
The humanist, Puritan, Anglican, and Neostoic lines of defense of the utility of practical against speculative knowledge are indebted to various traditions and agendas, but coalesce around the same rationale. They form a relevant context for Bacon’s twofold notion of “utility” and his critique of “speculation,” as well as for the defense later in the century of the “usefulness” of experimental natural philosophy—a “usefulness” that Robert Boyle, for instance, saw not only in terms of the production of “works” but also explicitly “in reference to the Minde of Man.”69
Self-love and the fallen/uncultured mind
The utility of the medicina-cultura animi practice is a consequence of its anthropological core: it is because the human mind or soul is in a disturbed condition that a regimen for its cure acquires the quality of usefulness. In this section I want to single out a particular anthropological strain—one framed between the Augustinian and the Socratic poles—that I propose is relevant for the English experimental philosophers’ attitude to human nature.
Pierre Charron dedicates the first book of his immensely popular tract De la sagesse (1601)—rendered in English as Of Wisdome in 1606—to the “consideration of man,” or the foundational step of self-knowledge on the way to a Socratic “humane wisdom.” In the “natural” branch of this exploration, Charron anatomizes the faculties and operations of the soul and at the same time lists the “maladies” or “defects” of man’s mind (esprit). The mind is prone to a “perpetuall motion without rest” and pursues its enterprises “rashly, and irregularly, without order, and without measure,” due to a combinations of factors, among which are corporeal changes, the infinity of the objects presented to the mind, and, especially, the inner “agitation” of the soul itself.70 The latter is expressed in the passions of the soul, which are due both to a weak and erroneous judgment performed with the help of the imagination, and to an irregular will. Charron’s references here are both to Epictetus’s description of the passions and to Saint Augustine’s “wicked will,” which we inherited from the Fall.71 “Presumption” (or “pride” or “self-love” or “self-adoration”) is the central descriptor of both the “natural” and the “moral” consideration of man for Charron. It is the chief natural malady of the soul, described in Augustinian terms as “the first and originall fault of all the world” and the principal plague of mankind.72 It is also, by the side of vanity, weakness, inconstancy, and misery, one of the central moral failings of man, whose description Charron supports with two alternative lists of references, biblical (Job, Solomon) and philosophical (Democritus, Plutarch, Seneca). In keeping with the latter references, his moral analysis of presumption is centered not on an Augustinian bad love but on the narrow preoccupation with the self in one’s habits of judgment: credulity (a “facilitie to believe and to entertaine whatsoever is proposed”), obstinacy in maintaining lightly examined opinions, and aggressive dogmatism in imposing the same on others (as can be seen among the “enthusiasts”).73
Charron performs here the same association we have noted in Bacon’s doctrine of the idols of the mind, between the maladies of judgment or assent and self-adoration. Again as in Bacon, the fight against self-love thus analyzed can proceed by reflection and self-examination, by the conjoined cultivation of humility and of virtuous faculties (“a sound judgment” and “a right will”), and by the building of “resolution, and constancie of the mind.”74 In both cases this conception is based on a particular understanding of self-love, which in Charron’s case rests more explicitly on his blend of references. Placing Augustine by the side of Seneca on the question of self-love has two main consequences: one is that the diagnosis of the “uncultured” state of the soul75 is equivalent to that of the fallen soul in severity and complexity; the other is that the remedy is not uniquely the prerogative of divine grace, but can, within human limits, proceed by human “culture.”
In his anatomy of the passions of the mind, Thomas Wright also identifies self-love as their principal root and explains it in terms derived, again, both from Augustine and from the philosophical tradition. Self-love translates as both fallen man’s “infection” and as a resistance to philosophical cure that proceeds from the lack of a true knowledge of the self and of its distempered state. In support of the latter notion of self-love Wright cites Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.76 For Wright, self-love is both the cause and sign of man’s defection from God and a state of the uncultured soul associated with lack of prudent meditation, poor education, resignation to easy and immediate satisfaction, and incapacity to pursue virtue with resolution.77 Consequently, his list of remedies for the perturbations of the soul includes both philosophical and religious exercises, accompanied by a “resolute good will and endeavour” and by seeking “succour from Heaven,” in a “continuall practise of [one’s] owne soule.”78
The double sphere of self-love suggested in the works of the Catholics Charron and Wright is preserved in Peter Du Moulin’s Protestant tract of consolation in midcentury. The first step in the endeavor “to learne the right government” of oneself is to acknowledge that our postlapsarian souls are ruled by discord and confusion, and thus that the nature of man’s spirit is “blind and rash.”79 But to do so is already to prove humble and ready for an education in moderation and wisdom. Du Moulin uses thus the mixed Christian-philosophical therapeutic topos that the cure begins once you become ready for the cure, which is first and foremost to curb your self-love and acknowledge your folly and need of repair. In his framing of self-love, he rehearses the conjunction between self-love and ungoverned judgment: it is “presumption, and a blinde immoderate love of a mans selfe” that is responsible for the “perpetuall unquietness and vacillation” of his mind.80 To curb self-love, man must cultivate humility, which translates, again, as a discipline of judgment against obstinacy and arrogance: under its guidance, man “will labour to heale himselfe of all arrogant opinions and obstinate prejudices, being alwayes ready to receive better information and submit himselfe unto reason.”81 In conformity with this double frame of reference, Du Moulin’s definition of virtue bears unmistakable Christianized Stoic echoes: it is a “calme state of the Soul, firme, equall, magnanimous, meeke, religious and beneficiall to a mans selfe and to others.”82
The analysis of self-love is one element—a central one—of the more general assessment of human nature. The double reference (the Augustinian and the Socratic) operates at this general level, too, and it rests on an account of both the “corruptions” and the “dignities” of the human mind after the Fall. It will be noted that talk of dignities does not necessarily entail a softer account of the corruptions, but can stand side by side with a very harsh, indeed Augustinian, assessment of human nature. One good example in this sense is the work of Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, the French Huguenot who was the friend and favorite theologian of Sir Philip Sidney and his circle, of which Bacon and his brother were also members, and whose De la vérité de la religion Chrestienne (1581) was also known to Boyle and Locke.83 Its plea is for a religion rationally embraced, which presupposes not a submission of faith to reason but rather a submission of reason to faith on reason’s own decision.84 A central point of Mornay’s argument is that human nature is corrupted by the Fall, for which the will carries the main guilt, and which resulted in the disorderly state of the human faculties, its passions and ignorance. In an irenic move, Mornay surmises that this Christian conception (which he supports with the authority of Saint Augustine and the Scriptures) was shared by the ancients: the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists agree with the Christians that man is fallen from an original perfect condition and that he bears the entire responsibility for his fault. They are all equally agreed that religion alone can purge the soul of its corruption and bring it back to God,85 and that it does so by working on the remains of man’s excellence, goodness and light. These lie in the superior part of the soul, which represents what man is most properly speaking.86 Religion includes an inward service to God, whose instruments are man’s superior faculties, the will and the understanding. The “purgation and perfection” of these faculties, or the study of wisdom, is the main route toward becoming reunited with and rendered similar to God—a point on which Mornay thinks, again, that both theologians and philosophers (especially the Platonizing ones) agree.87
Later in the century, Edward Reynolds’s treatise of the passions is similarly organized around the “dignities” and the “corruptions” of the mind after the Fall. We are fallen creatures, and the damages proceeding from that fundamental event are severe indeed. It is also the case, though, that recuperation is possible to some degree, and “our renovation in knowledge is after the image of him that created us” (cf. Colossians 3:10).88 Reynolds recommends the knowledge of a man’s self as the crucial step in that renovation, an enterprise that has the historical support of patristic wisdom.89 In a move similar to Mornay’s, Reynolds invokes the mixed Christian-Stoic topoi of man as bearer of the divine image and as “one of the most perfect Models of created excellencie.”90 The “culture” of man’s nature is thus possible because it builds on the remnants of prelapsarian perfection, which is to say, on the remnants of the divine attributes as they were reflected in man at the first creation. Thus, for instance, God’s wisdom in ordering and preserving his works is partially preserved in the light of nature and the principles of practical prudence that are still in the soul of man (an equivalent of the “sparks” of wisdom and virtue). God’s knowledge in the contemplation of his works is matched by the “vast and impatient desire” of an “active and restless spirit” that needs to search and to perfect itself.91 Knowledge, Reynolds thinks, is the very instrument of that progress, activated by restlessness of spirit and working on the remnants of wisdom in the soul.
This anthropological conception allowed for a variant of Augustinian-ism that remained severe in the diagnosis of corrupt human nature but made room for a notion of cure that could make use of the combined strengths of the philosophical and the religious traditions, as well as for an irenic theological policy. On this view, which is distinct from both Deist rational religion and from the strict Augustinianism of early modern radical Protestantism or Jansenism, man is corrupt, but he is not completely depraved and not totally inscrutable. The belief in man’s corruption carries the load of both Christian transgression and Socratic lack of nurture, and imposes a severe task on the individual, unlike the “facile optimism about human nature” of later strands of rational religion.92 But this conception is equally distinct from bleak Augustinian pessimism about human nature: the overcoming of corruption is conceptualized neither as a mysterious conversion by grace nor as an incomprehensible justification before God, and human agency is neither denied nor reduced to Luther’s conformity under coercion or to Pascal’s habituation of the “machine.” The stress is rather on a “husbandry” of the soul performed by the conjoined action of human effort and divine assistance.93 It is a similarly mitigated Augustinian or Augustinian-Socratic anthropology, poised between blunt optimism and rigid pessimism, and oriented toward the husbandry of the soul, that I want to claim is the ground of the English experimental philosophers’ program for the reformation of knowledge and of knowers.
The office of reason
Descriptions of the office of reason in an early modern cultura animi context are often indebted to a Stoic line of thought, and several key themes in this respect are developed in the Neostoic texts. In the first place, they take a high view of reason and perform a distinction between “(right) reason” and “opinion.” Lipsius writes that right reason is “a true sense and iudgement of thinges humane and divine (so farre as the same appertaineth to us),” and is to be contrasted with opinion, which is “a false and frivolous coniecture of those thinges.”94 Charron agrees: opinion is “a vaine, light, crude and imperfect iudgement of things drawen from the outward senses, and common report, setling and holding it selfe to be good in the imagination, and never arriving to the understanding,” and as such is the spring of “all passions” and “all troubles.” In contrast, reason is “a true, perfect and solide iudgement of things,” which is attained if opinions are “examined, sifted, and laboured.”95 As true and solid judgment of things, right reason is made to cover both the sense of correct ratiocination in conformity with the truth of things and the sense of a perfecting action of the mind. As Lipsius puts it, reason “is an excellent power or faculty of understanding and iudgement, which is the perfection of the soule, even as the soule is of man.”96 As such, it also has a religious office: not only is reason of divine origin but, as a means to the perfecting of the soul of man, the cultivation of reason is indeed a cultum dei and a sequela dei.97
The Neostoic definition of the virtue of the mind, alternately called health or wisdom, is in conformity with the idea that it is reason’s office to “perfect” the mind. For Charron, wisdom is a “constant health of our mind,” and Du Vair defines virtue as “healthfull reason” voluntarily directed toward the good.98 This view is again an echo of the Tusculan Disputations. For Cicero, virtue is equal to right reason and can be described as “a Quality of the mind constant and uniform.”99 Constancy (constantia) is indeed the name of the healthy “temper” of the soul and is the “fruit of knowledge,”100 while the queen of virtues, which helps preserve the constancy of the soul, is called “temperance.”101 In Lipsius’s definition, constancy as a “right and immoveable strength of the minde” is also a guard against the vicious state of the mind, which, for Lipsius as for Charron, Bacon, Wright, or Du Moulin, is doubly characterized by pride and by obstinate judgment. “Strength,” he says, should be associated with the solidity of right reason, not with the obstinacy of light opinion. The latter is the mark of a “stubberne mind, proceeding from pride or vaine glory.”102 If the chief virtue in the Neostoics’ texts is sometimes called temperance, some other times prudence, it always stands for, in Jacqueline Lagrée’s description of Lipsian constantia, a disposition of the mind characterized by “firmness, order, endurance, equilibrium and permanence.” This disposition is the result of a discipline of judgment, of emotions, and of will that leads to both strength of character and to solid and coherent representations in the soul.103 The discipline involves an attentive examination of opinions and rests on the assumption that both errors of judgment and wrong actions are ultimately due to bad dispositions of the mind in assessing the truth of representations and the value of things.
The key notion underlying the analysis of these bad dispositions is the Stoic notion of assent. Assent is the voluntary operation by which the mind accepts or gives its accord to “representations,” or “impressions,” and thus forms beliefs or judgments.104 It is also a notion that unifies the theoretical and the practical sides of reason.
For Cicero, the main mechanism of the passions is a mechanism of judgment that he couches in the Stoic language of assent. The kind of belief involved in the formation of a passion is, the Stoics think, due to a weak assent (opinationem autem . . . volunt esse imbecillam adsensionem).105 In contrast, a firm, temperate mind is one capable of “self-confidence,” which is “a kind of Science and stedfast opinion of one yielding his assent upon good grounds only” and without rashness (scientia quaedam est et opinio gravis non temere adsentientis).106 Galen, in The Passions and Errors of the Soul, a text indebted to Plato for its theory of the soul and to the Stoics for its conception of judgment formation, also speaks of the “weak” or “hasty” assent involved in the formation of erroneous beliefs either in moral or in scientific judgment. The greatest error in man’s conduct lies in his premature conclusions about good and evil in human life; similarly, errors in scientific judgment come from “hastily accepting as evident things which do not really have this status.”107 Galen adds that the cause of such hastiness in the mind’s assent is actually a distempered desirative state: its insatiability or “desire for more” (pleonexia).108
Thus, “assent” allows an identification of the vicious state of mind that stands behind both errors and passions as the intemperance of an inconstant, precipitate mind: a precipitate or rash or a changeable and weak assent to unclear or false impressions is the behavior of the inconstant “fool.” Conversely, it permits the unification of moral and intellectual virtues around the constancy of a firm and tempered mind: a firm and orderly assent to true impressions is the sign of the wise.109 The regulation of assent, understood as a constant exercise (a discipline) meant to develop a virtuous habit, is thus the core mechanism of the cure of the intemperance of the mind. A disciplined assent counters both errors and passions and makes possible both science and the moral life. Right judgment, as a firm and unchangeable disposition to assent to the truth and right value of things, is the very instrument of the art of self-government, and it is also the conduit to human freedom and happiness.110
The notion of “assent” thus understood is an important theme associated with the cultura animi cluster of concepts, which I claim are relevant to the view of the conduct of the mind in the English experimental philosophical works. We have noted the important role it played in Bacon’s account of knowledge, and we will see it reemerge in the virtuosi’s works later in the century. Here I will note that this originally Stoic term was taken over by some of the cultura animi texts and incorporated into the framework of the idea of the “perfection” of the soul, understood as a combined work of reason and religion. “Assent” is an interesting notion because, in this early modern reworking, it comes to name a complex mental phenomenon that includes epistemic, affective, and volitional motions, in contrast with the early Stoic strictly cognitive assent. Moreover, it indicates the possibility of framing an integrated account of the passions and errors of the mind, as informing both moral action and scientific inquiry. We will look now at how the integration in question is a move self-consciously undertaken in the genre of the treatise of the passions.
Passions, errors, and assent
That passions are, at least partially, errors of judgment is a conception Thomas Wright could have learned from both Cicero and Galen, who are explicitly mentioned among his sources. Together with the imagination, he says, they contribute to the distempered state of the understanding, which can be described both in terms of violent motions and in terms of false belief: a “vehement apprehension and iudgment of the witte” and a “false conceite in the minde,” bred by false representation.111 This is already to emphasize the cognitive component of the moral life and an occasion to insist on the faculty mechanism responsible for the mix of cognition and appetites involved in a distempered mind. But in his book VI Wright makes a further move that extends his epistemological investigations in an even more explicit way. His task is comparable, he says, to those of both the geographer and the medical doctor: he is after a complete geography of the whole soul (not only of the sensitive appetite), and moreover he aims to do for the soul what “good Physitians of the body” do for the corporeal part of man: to investigate both the nature and the causes of the distempers.112 Among the latter are the “defects” of the understanding itself. In elaborating the topic, Wright will touch upon questions of the general pursuit of knowledge and of natural philosophy, placed within the domain of the “Physitian of the soul.”
The defects of the understanding fall into several categories for Wright. A first section of his list includes theological considerations about the fate of man’s postlapsarian mental powers (all men are born in sin and ignorance).113 A second category includes illustrations of the limits and weaknesses of the cognitive capacities of man in matters theological and natural philosophical. Man is ignorant not only about God (hence idolatry), but also about himself (his own soul and body), and actually about the basest of creatures (a very ant is a creature he does not fully understand). Wright sounds thus a powerful skeptical note as to the extent of our knowledge, while, even more spectacularly, performing a miseen-abîme of his own treatise. We are ignorant of most of the things that a theory of the faculties and passions of the soul and of the moral and cognitive powers of man (like Wright’s own) is supposed to build on. Whether Wright’s purpose in listing such points of ignorance (in an impressively long list)114 is to delineate the territory of the unknowable or of the not yet known is not entirely clear. What he does spell out is an otherwise Protestant point about the labor of knowledge—the general “difficultie in understanding” is due to the fact that “truth lies deep” and therefore truth cannot be attained without “sweat and industry”—and the antischism warning that the wrong way of dealing with this situation is to ignore these limitations and give free rein to the “dissenting and contradicting Sects” of philosophers.115 Bacon and later the virtuosi would have agreed completely.
As a complement to the limits of the understanding, the third category in Wright’s list is devoted to its distempers. The first defect here is “curiositie in knowing things not necessarie.”116 Besides the more familiar injunction against prying into “mysteries,” Wright also speaks of curiosity as inquiring into other men’s actions at the expense of self-examination, which he analyzes as a form of self-love, in the manner I have expounded above. The second defect in Wright’s third category rehearses Charron’s and Bacon’s association of self-love with the effects of mismanaged judgment: even “the wisest” are not only in love with themselves, but idolatrously so, and it is this self-admiration that accounts for obstinacy in opinions, or the “paynes many men bestowe, in confirming their preconceived errors.” The third defect is “distraction,” the vice undermining mental concentration and perseverance: in the middle of the most serious meditations, in prayer or in study, men’s minds “wander in forraine countries,” and one is hardly master of one’s own thoughts, but rather at the mercy of the devil, of his passions and imagination, or else of a general bad disposition of an “inconstant mind desirous of varietie and alteration.”117 Wright’s third category includes thus disorders of the intellectual faculties that have to do with the general framework of the pursuit of knowledge: its inception (true knowledge of self and right formation of opinions are blocked by self-love and obstinacy) and its progress (perseverance is thwarted by inconstancy).
Wright’s map of the human mind includes an analysis of the limits and distempers of the understanding faculty, as distinct from the investigation of the psychological and physiological mechanism of the passions, while calling attention to the fact that the two are interrelated. The genre of the treatise of the passions is thus extended to cover epistemological territory, placed under the overarching aim of the investigation, the therapeutic exercise of the “Physitian of the soul.”
A similar move toward an integrated treatment of the distempered mind is in Edward Reynolds’s treatise. In treating of the “corrupt effects of the passions” on the understanding and the will, Reynolds analyzes the way passions mix with the process of judgment formation, which he explains in a full-blown language of “assent.” One such effect he dubs “imposture or seduction”: under the thrall of impatient passion, man “laboureth next to incline and prepare his Mind for assent, and to get Reason on the same side with Passion.” Such impatient assent to false representations is coupled with a series of other passions or inclinations of the mind: we are inclined to give reasons for passions and maintain them because of “love of our Ease.” Men are generally driven by “those two Credulous Qualities, of Ignorance and Feare,” and are thus ready to receive all sorts of doctrines, “not onely willingly, but with greedinesse also,” which may be called a case of “Voluntarie Humilitie.” A second effect is to “alienate” or “withdraw” reason from an impartial examination of the objects of its desires. If generally truth is masked by passions, it is also the case that passion makes one unwilling to search for truth: Reynolds calls this disposition “Voluntarie Ignorance” and adds that it is mixed with fear of being deterred from vice.118
In a further analysis of the “defects of our knowledge,” paralleling Wright’s book VI, Reynolds includes the work of the passions in a more comprehensive analysis of “corruptions.” There are, according to Reynolds, four ways in which knowledge is corrupted. The first is ignorance, both natural and voluntary, and we have seen the role of the passions in voluntary ignorance. The second is curiosity: the problem here is again not with the (forbidden) objects of curiosity but with the inclination to “conjectures” or “speculations” of a spirit neither patient enough nor disciplined enough to rest in solid demonstration. The third is the “uncertainty of opinions.” “Opinion,” for Reynolds, as for the Neostoics, is actually by definition uncertain: it is identified with “the Fluctuation, wavering, and uncertainty of Assents, when the Understanding is left floating, and as it were in Aequilibrio,” and is also associated “with a feare least the contrary of what wee assent unto should be true.” Be it the effect of the disproportion between the understanding and its object, or of skeptical “Subtilty of wit,” opinion is a corruption.119
Reynolds’s fourth type of corrupted knowledge is “errour,” which he defines as “a peremptory and habituall assent, firmly and without wavering fixed upon some falshood under the shew of truth.” While the first cause of error is briefly identified as sin, the “secondary causes” form an analysis of error that looks back to Bacon and onward to similar treatments in Glanvill or Locke. The first cause, the “abuse of principles,” has to do with two inclinations of the mind, one natural, the other vicious: on the one hand, the mind needs to have “something to rest it selfe upon” and build from there, but on the other it tends to use such principles, which are often false, as “a coloured Glasse” for every belief it forms (a species of the Baconian “tincture effect”). The second and third causes are an “Affectation of Singularity” in a vain mind that will form beliefs so as to stand out from the crowd, and “a too credulous prejudice and opinion of Authority.” The fourth is constituted by the passions attached to the object of knowledge. Here Reynolds resumes the discussion of the “corrupt effects of the passions” mentioned above and adds that this is a pervasive miscarriage of our inquiries: “what was at first but a wish, is at last become an Opinion: Quod nimis volumus facile credimus, we easily believe what we will willingly desire.”120
A similarly integrated analysis of passions and errors is in Obadiah Walker’s educational treatise Of Education (1673), a text that Locke knew and used in devising his own thoughts on education.121 Walker includes a minitreatise of the passions in his chapter on the “divers passions, inclinations, and dispositions of Man, and the wayes to rectify and order them,”122 where he also devotes some space to the task of “bettering the Judgment,” which is occupied by a description of the maladies of assent. All causes of error, Walker explains, can be reduced to two heads: too hasty assenting on the basis of light foundations, which results in the mind’s resting in the first appearance, and too long deferring of assent, which results in unwarranted skepticism.123 For Walker, the government of the passions and the regulation of assent are interrelated aims of the education of the child’s mind.
The analysis of error is a noteworthy development in the genre of the treatise of the faculties and passions of the soul. Both Wright and Reynolds use this genre to perform a unification of what Bacon classified as the domains of logic and of practical ethics, and they do so under the common program of the “physician of the soul” (Wright) or of the “culture of the mind” (Reynolds). The unification is not only sanctioned by the endeavor of diagnosing the whole mind, with all its faculties, in order to devise possible regimens, but also reinforced by an analysis of the interrelations between distempered judgment and passions. The latter are sometimes described in terms of the motions of assent, which generate both passions and errors—an analytical model that these authors inherited from the Stoics via the early modern editions of such ancient transmitters as Cicero, Seneca, or Galen. While the technical term “assent” features in late scholastic logical tracts, too,124 the particular richness of the notion as these cultura animi texts develop it—assent as a complex cognitive and affective phenomenon that is morally assessed—is more relevant to the comparable treatment in the natural philosophical texts. We have seen that this is the case for Bacon; the next chapters will argue that the same holds for the later English experimentalists.
The discipline, the virtues, and habituation
Self-knowledge
The cultura animi program starts from the premise that the first critical step in the regimen of the mind is self-knowledge. Depending on the severity of the Augustinianism at play in its variants, to know the self in this context generally meant to acknowledge and understand its diseased state, whether the next step was to turn oneself into a passive recipient of grace or to undertake an active husbandry of one’s own soul. But the difficulties of self-knowledge were also emphasized, in various ways. For a Jansenist, inner life was inscrutable and self-knowledge ultimately impossible; in the eyes of Pierre Nicole, for instance, all that self-examination could achieve was a humiliation of self and a realization of man’s impotence.125 For those who did believe in the possibility of self-knowledge and in human capacity, the stress was on the momentous shift of perspective the act of looking at the self presupposed. The Socratic tradition was sensitive to the problems of asking a “sick” soul to become its own “doctor.”126 The analysis of self-love was a response to this problem, and in the hands of those willing to reconcile the two traditions, philosophical self-love was, at this level, perfectly parallel to Augustinian self-love: on both accounts, self-knowledge might be blocked by, and actually become illusory as a form of, self-love.
The answer could nevertheless resist the step to the inscrutability thesis, and to the consequent conclusions (inner passivity or external coercive regulation). Both self-knowledge and self-reformation became possible with the establishment of a premise and of a condition. The premise was represented by the “dignities” of human nature: the Ciceronian seeds and sparks of virtue and knowledge, and the remnants of the image of God in fallen souls, among which was the divinely sanctioned desire for knowledge (Bacon’s “thirst for knowledge” or Reynolds’s “restlessness” of spirit). The condition had to do with the acceptance on the part of the “patient” of his diseased condition, which was a function not so much of knowledge but rather of a disposition of the will that could be obtained by the combined efforts of the individual and of the community: as Cicero put it, self-cure is possible for those who are willing to be cured (qui se sanari voluerint) and who are ready to obey the instructions of wise men.127 A voluntary engagement on a course of training the soul, undertaken with resolution and diligence,128 is the critical attitude that makes self-knowledge possible and thus enables the gradual escape from the circle of self-love. On the other hand, the figure of the wise man whose instruction the student of the self should obey—the emblematic Socratic figure that permeates both the ancient and the early modern cultura animi129 —functions as the external monitoring position that is involved in this distancing from the (diseased, self-loving) self. It features in Galen’s therapeutic treatise in the guise of the wise “pedagogue” whose role is to place before the student’s eyes the true mirror of his failings, by constant reminders, criticism, exhortation, and encouragement as well as by presenting himself as an actual example of the healthy condition.130 It is also crucial for Thomas Wright, who rehearses the idea of the remedial importance of “wise and discreet” men or friends against self-love.131 The figures of the wise friend and the pedagogue are interchangeable in Lip-sius’s revival of the Middle and Roman Stoic idea of friendship as the conduit to one’s moral transformation.132 A later seventeenth-century echo is the figure of the “tutor” in Walker’s or Locke’s educational treatises, who is both a paragon of virtue and wisdom and a skilled “physician” of the young soul.133 To some extent, it will be seen that the community of natural philosophers takes on this monitoring role in the writings of the Royal Society virtuosi.
The cartographies or anatomies of the distempers of the mind are largely intended to function as a similar externalized scrutinizing tool. They cannot be complete and cannot be systematized into a methodical rulebook (as Bacon says, the doctrine of the idols cannot be digested into an art but can function only as a kind of prudential guideline), because they are the fruit of an ongoing, lifelong process of self-observation during the actual operations of the mind. They are also subject to revision, since they rest on theories of the faculties or of knowledge that, as Wright warns, are themselves insecure owing to the limits of our understanding. Similarly, Bacon drew his chart of the idols of the mind and their causes while the natural histories of the faculties and passions of the soul were still to be written. But drawing these charts and keeping them in mind have a therapeutic function that surpasses their scientific security, precisely because they serve as an external mirror of our own device that breaks the circle of self-love and helps self-reflection even while we are engaged in mental activity. Wright recommends the consideration of the faculty mechanism of the passions even as we are seized by them, or reflection on the idea that they are rooted in self-love, as therapeutic techniques,134 just as Bacon thought that consideration of the idols had remedial virtues by itself.
The discipline of assent
Since, as we have seen, the mechanism of assent, with its blend of cognitive, conative, and affective motions, lies at the core of the cartographies of the mind, the discipline commanded by self-knowledge thus understood will be fundamentally a discipline of assent. Tempering hasty judgment is for Galen a program of a life’s self-training: “from early youth I cultivated the habit of avoiding hasty assents, both in matters apparent to the senses, and in matters apparent to reason; in these cases it is better to take one’s time.”135 Techniques of managing assent are also among Wright’s remedies for the passions: withholding assent when seized by a passion (“restrain, as much as you can thy consent as well as thou canst from yeelding unto it”), or suspension of judgment against the inclination to credulity when swayed by rhetorical discourse.136 Reynolds, too, sketches a counsel for the health of the mind in terms of a discipline of judgment or assent, which proceeds by a “learned cautelousnesse of judgment” that makes the inquirer into his own opinions “so long suspend his Assent, till he had weighed the severall repugnancies of reasons, and by that means found out some truth whereon to settle his conceit.”137 A “due and mature suspension of judgment” was also a core recommendation of Bacon’s program for directing the mind in inquiry.138
Such talk of delaying, withholding, or suspending assent calls for some comment. The requirement featured in both the Stoic and the skeptical accounts of the rightful epistemic attitude, although the outcomes were different. The radical, Pyrrhonian skeptic suspends judgment entirely and thus lives “without opinions,” because he thinks nothing can be truly and securely known. The moderate, Academic skeptic also thinks that secure knowledge is not available, yet believes that some opinions are more probable than others, so that he will withhold assent until he finds the more weighty reasons supporting one over the other opinions. In contrast to both, the Stoic thinks that secure criteria of truth exist but that many of the impressions presented to the mind are unclear, and thus suspension of assent is meant to counter the mind’s precipitate formation of false judgments so long as clear and distinct impressions are not available.139 The early modern cultura animi texts take over a mixture of elements from these ancient sources. They retain the force of the management of assent as crucial in the government of the mind’s inclinations, and thus in the regulation of both its desires and its cognition. The outcome is rarely described in terms of either the Stoic steadfast and secure knowledge or the Pyrrhonian living without opinions, but often in terms of an Academic skeptical (or Socratic) course of ongoing inquiry and revision of judgments. On the other hand, they also retain the description of the virtuous mind in terms of Stoic immovable “constancy,” although what they emphasize is not the absolute certainty of knowledge but rather the strength of the mind countering weakly formed opinions and the whole array of the anatomized mental distempers.
Charron is a good example in this respect: wisdom, which is defined as a “constant health of our mind,” consists in “the consideration, iudgement, examination of all things” without becoming “bound” to any opinion, but instead remaining “readie to entertaine better if it appear.”140 This is, he adds, the practice of the “temperate searcher of the truth” and of those wise men who have made a profession of “ignorance, doubting, enquiring, searching.”141 Similarly, Reynolds’s talk of weighing the various “repugnancies of reason” suggests that what he has in mind is an investigation resulting in the more probable opinion, rather than in absolute certainty; at the same time, he paints the portrait of the wise man in strong Stoic colors: his “severe and unmovable constancie of Mind in Vertue . . . should so compose & consolidate the Mind, and settle it in such stabilitie, that it should not all be bended from the Right, by any sensitive perturbations or impulsions.”142 For Walker, too, the virtue of the faculty of judgment (wisdom or prudence) is acquired by “consideration, weighing or thinking much upon the probabilities on both sides” and by continuous meditation.143
It thus becomes possible for the early moderns to associate Academic inquiry and Stoic constancy in a unitary account. In the hands of the experimental natural philosophers, this association will lead to the alignment of both certain and probable truths on the side of a firm, constant mind, while “opinion” often remains the outcome of a feeble mind, incapable of rightful inquiry.
The virtues
The discipline of the mind counters both self-love and inordinate assent, the combined effects of which are the preoccupation, the credulity, the wavering, or the dogmatism of the mind, themselves infused by the mind’s desires and fears. The virtues that form the horizon of this discipline combine Stoic, skeptical, and Christian values: they are at once virtues of constancy, of inquiry, and of humility. One emblematic example in this sense is Du Moulin’s comprehensive representation of the master virtue of prudence. The prudent state of mind is defined as being “religious, just, constant, and temperate.”144 It is often conquered by our “folly and precipitate rashnesse,”145 but it is the aim of the continually resumed examination of opinions to form such a “golden temper” in our minds, which builds on the two “vertues of Justice,” meekness (or docility, or humility) and magnanimity (or generosity). Magnanimity makes the mind constant, while humility is crucial to the work of the renewed examination of opinions and the defense against obstinacy and arrogance.146
The humble cultivation of inquiry into the grounds of our opinions is framed as the main defense against self-love. Once self-love is partly analyzed, as we have seen, as a distemper of the mind associated with unexamined opinions, credulity, and dogmatism, it becomes possible to grant the discipline of judgment the capacity to transcend the condition of self-love and to act as the conduit toward a healthy condition of mind. This condition is often described not only as “constant” but also as “universal.” Charron speaks indeed of the “universall” spirit acquired through self-denying inquiry, which he contrasts with the vain decision to become “married” to one opinion and become thus a “partaker and a particular.”147 Similarly, Bacon’s “measure of the universe” is the opposite to the self-serving stance of the “measure of the individual.” Walker also talks about the prime task of education, which is to cultivate a “unversall contemplation of the natures of things” and thus to form a free mind, disengaged from its servitudes.148 The “universal” quality of the cultivated mind is therefore one that counters individual corruption, and is at the same time an expression of individual excellence. I will suggest in the next chapter that, in the context of the virtuosi’s account of the virtues of inquiry, “universality” thus understood is the (aretaic) alternative to what was later to be called the objectivity of science.
Habituation
The force of the account of the virtues in a cultura animi context rests on the notion that the mind can be transformed through a process of habituation. The understanding of the virtues as habits was a powerful Aristotelian notion that retained its force in the early modern period. But as far as the process of the acquisition of the virtues was concerned, Aristotle suggested that only the moral were acquired through habituation, while the intellectual were taught through discourse.149 It was instead the alternative Stoic tradition that provided the resources for an interpretation of the training toward the excellences of judgment (both practical and theoretical) in terms of habituation. In fact, the integrated account of the mechanism of the mind in both the moral and the scientific life led to a unification of the account of the moral and the intellectual virtues—a move we have noted in Bacon, too, and that will be seen to hold for the later English experimentalists as well.
Thus, for both Cicero and Galen, the training of the mind’s assent is a matter of habituation: the temperate or prudent disposition of the mind is a habit, one contrary to the habit of the distempered mind. Cicero calls intemperance, the fountainhead of all disorders, a habit opposite to temperance.150 Galen describes the way in which the mind is habituated to error151 and tells us that he resolved to “cultivate the habit of avoiding hasty assents.”152 The purpose of the ancient philosophical exercises was, as John Sellars explains, to achieve a transformation of character (ēthos) and thus of behavior and life (erga, bios), by means of a habituation or accustoming.153 The formation of habits in the mind (habits of examination and of right judgment) is described by means of metaphors that point to a transformation in material, organic terms: the soul is “dyed” by the beliefs it entertains, or else ideas need to be “digested” if they are to be fully understood/lived.154 An equivalent and quite popular image in early modern Europe, which we have already encountered in Bacon and will notice again in Glanvill or Locke, is the image of the “tincture” imprinted onto the mind by habits of judgment. Here is, for instance, Charron in translation, making crucial use of it: an “uncultured” mind is prone to “an obstinate and sworne preiudicate prevention of opinions, wherewith the mind is made drunken, and taketh so strong a tincture [teincture], that it is made unapt and uncapable to see or to finde better whereby to raise and inrich it selfe.” Conversely, the virtue of the mind, which may also be called “true honestie” or “goodness,” can be understood to perform a similar action, although in the opposite direction, which is also the “natural” one: honesty is “the true tincture of the soule, her naturall and ordinary course.”155
The image of the “tincture” recalls the Stoic “dyeing” of the mind but possibly also carries the alchemical connotations of the term—tincture as the “soul” of a substance (usually gold) that could be extracted and then used to “tinge” another substance (usually silver)—which the early moderns would have recognized.156 In any event, the image functions in our texts as an eloquent correlative of the notion of the transformation of the mind through habituation. Plutarch and, echoing him, Walker speak in the same sense of the need to be under “continuall Physick,” since the cure of reason is not of the order of medicines if that means its work would stop with the healing of the malady. It is rather of the order of nourishment, which continues to fortify the “organism” of the mind by preserving the habit of right judgment.157 Thus, the cure of the mind does not stop with the “extirpation” of its passions and errors; it is meant to be a continual, lifetime (and usually never complete) work of building and transforming the self.158 In this sense, the semantic field of “culture” is more adequate as it suggests stages of “cultivation,” as in Cicero’s weeding out, tilling, sowing, and growing images. Similarly, it can be said that the passions and errors are not to be seen as excrescences that may be detached by means of a skillful single act of surgery. They are rather permanent tendencies or frailties of the mind, whose various degrees or forms correspond to the degrees of advancement of the mind on the way to health.159 The program of the cultivation of the mind is thus not of the order of a medical recipe, much less of a set of external mechanical procedures but rather to be understood as a regimen of transformation or rehabituation of the mind.
The English experimental philosophers in the second half of the century drew on and responded to this development in the early modern intellectual life. Experimental philosophy, they argued, is a privileged cultura animi practice. Not everyone accepted the claim, certainly,160 but my task is to understand the specific shapes of this conception, the intellectual resources that made it possible, and the role it played in the development of their philosophy. The argument of this book is that this philosophy was deeply nourished by a cultura animi project, the specific contours of which I surveyed in this chapter. This means, in the first place, that the experimental naturalists construed the problem of knowledge as a problem of the ordering of the knower’s mind, and thus that their epistemological thought was rooted in a view of human beings that was jointly anthropological and therapeutic. In elaborating this view, they used the notions, vocabulary, and generic conventions of the physicians of the soul. They worked with an anthropology of the mitigated Augustinian sort, devised cartographies of the distempered mind, and analyzed the passions and errors of the soul in an integrated manner. They took these cartographies as functional in the regimen itself, which included self-knowledge and the regulation of the mind’s assents, desires, and will. They saw the outcome of the regulation in terms of reformed habits of mind, both of judgment and of emotion, and they claimed that their method of inquiry built the mind’s health and strength, its nobility, generosity, and humility, and its “universality.”
In the second place, this anthropological-therapeutic core of their attitude to the problem of knowledge was the driving force behind several key features of their philosophy. It reshaped such existing epistemological categories as probabilism and mitigated skepticism, and it provided one powerful line for the legitimation of experimental natural investigation. It also helped define a notion of usefulness that referred jointly to works for the public and to the work on the mind, and it generated a type of objectivity that is best seen as a virtue notion. Finally, it provided an argument for the value of the community of natural philosophers and for the relevance of the philosophical regimen to the well-being of the larger polity. An investigation of the anthropological-therapeutic core and of this set of consequences for the shapes of the English experimental philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century will be the task of the next chapters.